The Mangler
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“The Mangler,” by Stephen King
Detective Mark Hunton has seen some bad ones in his time, but this has to be about the worst: a worker at the Blue Ribbon Laundry has been sucked into the jaws of the steam press (or Mangler, as the laundry workers call it) and ironed into oblivion. Inexplicably, when the state inspectors go over the machine, they find nothing obviously wrong with it. Accidents, however, keep happening- and if Hunton’s friend Mark Jackson is right, they are not accidents at all…
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The Mangler, directed by Tobe Hooper
The Blue Ribbon Laundry is not a nice place to work, and that’s just the way Bill Gartley (Robert Englund) likes it. Accidents, it seems, are a way of life here, and when Gartley’s niece nearly falls into the laundry’s steam press, Gartley hardly bats an eye; when an older woman does fall in, he is even less affected. Detective Mark Hunton (Ted Levine) suspects foul play and corruption, and his suspicions are apparently confirmed when the town inspectors spend less than five minutes “checking” the safety precautions on the steam press. The brother of his late wife, para-pscyhologist Mark Jackson (Daniel Matmor), is not so certain- and when accidents continue to happen on the machine, he becomes convinced that the Mangler is no longer just old ironworks…
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The sign might say “Rikers Valley,” Maine, but Tobe Hooper’s vision of The Mangler is pure Southern Gothic, right down to the depths of its black little heart. Or better yet, Southern Gothic on crack; for while it never quite reaches the absurdist heights of some of Hooper’s earlier work, there’s enough goofy, whacked out imagery and over-the-top acting on display here to keep your mouth open from start to finish.
Usually, this sort of effort earns at least a few points from me. Better too much energy then too little, right? Maybe not. Because while I wasn’t bored by this movie, my strongest reaction was irritation- and a return to the conviction that, past triumphs aside, Hooper is just not a very good director.
But we’ve got some serious cart-before-horsing going on here. King’s original story is one of my favorites, mainly because it always manages to get a shiver out of me no matter many times I read it. It’s bleak and unpleasant, and, for a story about a demon-possessed steam iron, remarkably straight-faced. I’ve talked elsewhere about the grimness of King’s short fiction, and this is a quintessential example : there is no hope on display, despite the likable characters and familiar surroundings. Nobody wins. And even though some of the good guys survive, you get the distinct impression that they won’t be around for long.
With a talented screenwriter and smart director, it would be possible to make a decent movie around the main idea. It wouldn’t break any records, and if you did have a talented screenwriter and director on hand, you’d probably be better off giving ‘em free rein instead of forcing them to make a twenty page story last an hour and a half. But you could avoid embarrassment, and really, isn’t that what commercial art is all about?
I don’t know what the hell Hooper was thinking, though. Cause man, this is one messed up piece of celluloid. I’ve seen worse movies, I’ve seen more unpleasant movies; I’m hard pressed to find some sort of superlative here that I could apply to The Mangler without risking overstatement. It’s just a movie with a lot of energy that goes in all the wrong direction, a bunch of actors working on the wrong impulses, and a script that comes within hollering distance of making sense, but never quite makes it. It’s not as breathtakingly awful as something like Exorcist II, but it does operate under the same principles- essentially, we are seeing the combined effort of a number of different people funneled through one man’s specific vision, an audacious and original vision that manages to fail on just about every level.
The plot follows the line of its source, while adding some major and minor twists in an attempt to flesh things out. The biggest edition comes in the form of Robert Englund, here dressed in a suit, leg braces, and face make-up designed to make him look as much like a human-rooster as realistically possible. Englund crows and caws his way through the part of one Bill Gartley, thoroughly disreputable octogenarian and owner of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, home to the infamous steam press which causes so much nastiness over the course of the picture.
Wait a minute, I know you’re thinking. Bad Guy character, demon-possessed machinery, cackling one-liners- why, we must be in “Pact with the devil” land! And you’re right. Whereas in the source material, the machine’s demonification is brought about through a series of more-or-less reasonable accidents, in the movie, there’s a conspiracy behind the thing. Or rather, a Conspiracy; and if the cast list didn’t clue you in, don’t worry. Englund’s endless repetition of the line, “We all have to make sacrifices,” should give you a hint, and if even that doesn’t work, his leg braces and other catch-phrase, “There’s a little bit of me in that machine, and a little bit of it in me” will clear things up.
The two major characters in the short story, Hunton and Jackson, appear in the forms of Ted Levine and Daniel Matmor, respectively. Levine, you’ll probably remember from his excellent work in Silence of the Lambs as the serial killer Jane Gumb; he was also the uber-creepy voice of Rusty Nail in Joy Ride. It’s unusual to see him in the role of a hero, and while he throws everything into it, the effort never quite coheres into anything solid. He’s apparently torn up and bitter after the death of his wife, an event we don’t hear about till an hour into the picture; making it difficult to sympathize with a character who approaches every situation like a mean drunk three sheets to the wind. Matmor also fails to make much of an impression, appearing more as a stoned college kid than an expert in parapsychology.
In fact, all the actors here come of skewed, a problem which can be laid in no small part at the feet of the director. Looking at the set design, lighting, and camera angles, it becomes clear that Hooper was trying for something unified: the sets are all improbable, either too long or too dirty or too cramped, the lighting is unnatural, and the majority of shots would not be out of place on the old “Batman” television series. Everything is overheated, like a pulp novel which tries to out-pulp itself. As such, the acting styles on display make a great deal more sense. It’s a rare movie that can make Robert Englund appear understated, but this one makes the attempt.
Story-wise, we don’t fair much better. The concept of an entire town being willing not only to give up body parts but their own children to a demon in exchange for some sort of prosperity is nastily believable, and not out of place in King’s oeuvre. (Tommyknockers, IT, “Rainy Season”) Unfortunately, nothing much is done with the idea. We get no sense of the town outside the laundry and the surreal, only-on-a-movie-set suburbia that Hunton and Jackson live in. One has no real concept of what all the bad guys were making sacrifices for. Englund lives in a huge mansion, and pretty much runs the town; but if I was going to sell my soul to Satan, I’d have higher aspirations than owning a laundry and ruling twenty miles worth of poor housewives and hick politicians.
The only other character we meet for any length of time is the police photographer, an old man dying of cancer who serves as Hunton’s conscience and sort of mentor. The fact that he might also be on the Evil One’s mailing list is never clearly explained. The actor who plays the photographer is done up in make-up, and near the end of the movie, we see him without the make-up, as a doctor who may or may not be the photographer returned to life. I think. It’s a bit confusing, honestly, which is something I’ve come to expect from Hooper.
Most of the original story makes it into the movie between the add ins. We get the same deaths, some of the same dialogue and character names, and most puzzlingly, the same supposed explanation for the demon’s appearance. I say “supposed” because, as noted earlier, in the short story, the possession of the Mangler is due to a number of accidents. In the movie, even if the possession was initially accidentally, the townspeople have been maintaining it for a number of years- and yet we still get the same series of unfortunate events at the opening of the movie that were so important to the original story.
Which means what, exactly? Does it have an upgraded demon inside now? Did virgin blood make it more powerful? This becomes a big problem near the climax of the picture, when the heroes try to exorcise the machine and make the mistake of underestimating it by missing one of the ingredients in the possession. In the story, it’s a nasty little twist the gives rise to a most unpleasant ending; in the movie, it makes no sense. After all, if the demon has been there for years for years, why the hell does it matter what some old woman dropped inside yesterday?
What we have here is a script that tries to be faithful to its source material while adding its own spin- a laudable goal that falls apart due to a lack of internal consistency. If the filmmakers wanted to go in the direction of a conspiracy, then they needed to get rid of the elements of the original story that that direction contradicted. They didn’t, and the movie suffers accordingly.
The positive? Well, the special effects are decent. The Mangler itself looks sufficiently nasty to be a plausible threat, even for something that spends most of the running time stuck in one place. (It’s fairly amusing just how willing folks are to approach it, even after they know it’s a dangerous, possibly supernatural piece of equipment.) When it morphs into something- else- near the end, the CGI work is cool, if not entirely seamless. The set designs, while wildly improbable, are at least interesting to look at, and successfully enhance the overall mood of the picture (even if that mood works against the movie as a whole), and the deaths are gory as hell, as they should be.
Most times, a surfeit of gore and a cool-looking monster are enough to satisfy me, even if the stuff surrounding them isn’t so hot. But this time, it just wasn’t enough. The big problem, I think, is that the source material deserved better. I can’t help being frustrated watching a movie where choice after choice is made so vividly wrong. After all, the creepiness from King’s tale came mostly from the precision of the narrative. The idea of laundry equipment-as-devil’s-bitch could easily have come across as goofy; that King manages to make it entirely believable without ever once approaching the land of camp makes Hooper’s immediate and permanent descent into that land an irritation that, for this viewer, was impossible to get past.
The only thing worse than a bad movie based on bad source material is a mediocre movie based on excellent source material; and while The Mangler isn’t a complete waste of time, it’s failure to live up to its origins marks it as a minor disappointment.
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Rule of thumb: when the scariest scene in your horror movie is Robert Englund gettin’ it on, it’s time to reevauluate your artistic choices.