The Film: The Mangler
[1995, New Line Cinema; directed by Tobe Hooper; screenplay by Tobe Hooper, Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck]
Rik: Much like with Graveyard Shift, the film version of The Mangler was thoroughly disappointing to me when it was first released to theatres in 1995. We (speaking for my gang of close friends and I) had high hopes, too; the film was to be directed by Tobe Hooper, the man behind bona fide genre classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Salem’s Lot, and Poltergeist, and also cult classics (and faves of mine) such as Lifeforce and the first Leatherface sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. True, he has proven vexing as a director at times in his career. I was profoundly upset over his remake of Invaders from Mars – the original from 1953 was one of the more influential sci-fi films in my youth – and I remember being less than satisfied from the results of seeing The Funhouse and Spontaneous Combustion when they were released. Still, at the time of The Mangler’s release, and even now really, despite some other setbacks, I still try to see anything that has Hooper’s name on it, just as I do with Stephen King.
Besides Hooper and King, there was a third thing about the film adaptation of The Mangler that it supposedly had going for it: Robert Englund. Freddy Krueger himself was set to be the big star of the film, and from reading the story, I assumed that he would be set in the lead role of Officer Hunton. I really couldn’t envision another role within the story that would be suitable for an actor of his then considerable cachet. The only other truly substantive roles were those of Mark Jackson, Hunton’s pal, who seems to have the knowledge of the ages at his fingertips right when it is needed most, and George Stanner, the plant foreman. And Englund did not seem right for either role anyway. How he was to be used was beyond me.
And then the trailer came out, and we discovered the truth. Englund was playing someone never really described at all, or even physically encountered, in the short story. Honestly, seeing the trailer made me wonder if I had actually read the story before, though the diabolical and mangling laundry ironer was most definitely in attendance in the clip, so I knew I was thinking of the right story. But who could Robert Englund possibly be playing? In the trailer, he seemed to be attacking the role in the grotesque style of Lon Chaney (a hero of Englund’s), with over-the-top mannerisms and his legs clad in metal braces so that he staggers back and forth mechanically. The film seemed to have a look bordering on (or downright aping) German Expressionism, and for someone who was obsessed with that particular style of filmmaking, I was willing to give it a go (not that I wasn’t going to see it regardless.)
I will save discussion of my further feelings towards the film and the mystery surrounding Robert Englund’s character and his subsequent portrayal for later. Aaron, I would first like to ask you if you had any connection to or history with this film before now?
Aaron: Back when this film came out on home video in 1995 or 1996, I rented it with some measure of excitement for many of the reasons you mentioned: Stephen King, Tobe Hooper, Robert Englund. But also there was interest in the involvement of Ted Levine, who at that point was known to me only as Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. It seemed like the film couldn’t miss. I didn’t remember the trailer until I just watched it recently, but I certainly recall being thrilled at the announcer saying “Three modern masters of horror…” over footage of the film. In fact, the trailer does a pretty good job of selling the film overall (though of course it looks silly and outdated now), and probably only stoked my interest in the finished product.
I remember renting it with my friend Justin, and getting maybe half an hour into it before we just shut it off in disgust. I rarely ever do that, and I certainly did it less back then when I had nothing but time to spend on films of questionable quality. The Mangler as a film was so disappointing, so tonally confused, that even at 17, I just had no patience for it. At some point I know I finished the film, but I couldn’t even tell you when that was. The only memory I had of the film was turning it off in disappointment. That, and the surprise I felt at learning Ted Levine wasn’t just doing a creepy voice for The Silence of the Lambs; he really talks that way!
From the brief conversations we’ve had surrounding this project, I know we’ve both got a lot to say about this film, so I think it’s best to get right into the movie and we can unpack things as we go along.
The film opens in the Blue Ribbon Laundry, where a few dozen women slave over industrial laundry machines like the titular Mangler. In very short order (practically right after the opening credits end) we’ll see Sherry Ouelette cut her hand on the Mangler (losing a worrying amount of blood over the machine), the beginnings of the haunted icebox from the short story, and the death of poor Mrs. Frawley. In written form, all this business is done with before the story even starts, and the incidents are all meant to be random occurrences that add up to something horrible. In the film they all happen at once, like the final flurry of activity from a Rube Goldberg machine. Two men bump into Sherry, and there’s a weird burst of lightning and a lot of blood as she cuts herself and rubs her bloody hand on the fridge, then in the ensuing confusion, Mrs. Frawley absentmindedly puts her hand into the Mangler (in some of the laziest suspense building I’ve ever seen).
The sudden commotion draws out the owner, Bill Gartley, giving us our first glimpse of Robert Englund and how he’ll be playing the character. To put it briefly, he plays the character like a cartoon. I don’t just mean he goes over the top, but that he acts as if he’d somehow stepped out of a particularly foul-mouthed Popeye short. There’s nothing remotely realistic in this performance, which is not helped by the unconvincing old age makeup or weird medical braces on his legs that cause him to adopt a walk that looks like an exaggerated version of Everett Sloane’s already exaggerated walk in The Lady From Shanghai.
At this early moment, I thought I had an idea of what Tobe Hooper’s ultimate goal was. I thought he was going for the heightened reality of, if not German Expressionism, then at least the lurid Italian horror films of the sixties and seventies. I got a definite Dario Argento vibe from the camera movements, the color palette, and the questionable dubbing of the largely South African cast. I’m not sure if that was what he was aiming for, though, because the film keeps changing in tone from scene to scene, and rambles on from here in fits and starts. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but the best word I can use to describe my reaction to this film is “befuddled”. But then, Hooper has always been the most confounding of the accepted horror greats.
Tobe Hooper became a feature director at the right place and right time, and the film he made his name on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is justifiably remembered as a great piece of art and a defining horror film of its time period. Since then, he’s been very hard to pin down. Not quite as ruthless as Wes Craven in his prime, not quite as elegant as John Carpenter, and not nearly as political as George Romero. It can be hard (at least it is for me) to really pin down what Hooper’s style is. It doesn’t help that he seems to have spent much of the eighties trying to disprove the persistent rumors that Steven Spielberg secretly directed Poltergeist. I imagine this is what led to the ill-advised Invaders From Mars remake, and the alien sex-vampire epic Lifeforce. Lifeforce has long been a personal favorite of mine, but its placement in his filmography gives the impression that he was still trying to prove he could handle big budgets and impressive special effects without Spielberg’s involvement. Since then he’s kept busy with a steady mix of television and low budget film work, and I have to admit I’ve mostly stopped following him since The Mangler. I’ve seen at least one of his films since then, and it did not quite convince me I was missing out on anything.
To get back to my statement about The Mangler’s look, I think it’s actually pretty great, visually. The Blue Ribbon Laundry, where we’ll be spending a lot of time, is vast and cavernous, with lots of great intersecting lines, thudding machinery, and billowing steam. In a lesser film this would have just been confused and under lit, but if anything Hooper and cinematographer Amnon Solomon pour an excess of light into the shots. There are dark spaces in this film, but even during the night scenes, there’s a nice definition to the surroundings. The Mangler in the film itself is an imposing piece of machinery, but also designed in a completely unrealistic way. First off, it appears to have been embedded partially in a huge chunk of obsidian rock, which I can’t imagine any manufacturer actually designing. But also its gears and cables are as oversized as the machinery in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Whatever else we’re going to say about this film, I found it visually interesting and fun to look at.
Rik, I can already practically sense you itching to jump in here with your own take, so I’m going to pass it off to you. How do you feel about the look of The Mangler?
Rik: You had me at Chaplin, so I will jump to your last point first. The film does look great, almost exactly what I like from a horror film, especially one featuring a demonic machine. There are wonderful establishing shots – such as our first glimpse of the Mangler – and the humid atmosphere of the laundry plant itself is impressively dense and oppressive. If one were to base their opinion of the film solely on how sharply Hooper and his crew set up each succeeding scene and the attention given in delivering a visual experience, one might be convinced that this is a film worthy of more attention. I have always said that every film, even the worst film, is a cult film for somebody out there, and in looking around the web in recent days, it appears there are a good amount of people who think this film has been unfairly maligned. I would say, that in a cinematographic sense, they might have a point. I watched a chunk of the film (the first ten minutes) with the sound off and the subtitles on, and imagined The Mangler as a modern take on a silent expressionistic horror epic, and found the results, at the very least, an intriguing concept.
However, in a modern film that was designed to be told by words in a screenplay that are delivered to our ears by paid actors, who speak those words to the best (or worst) of their ability, one cannot merely turn the sound off for the duration of the film. It is fun in jest or in experimentation, but to experience the film as intended, one must hear the dialogue and the score and the sound effects. One must have the complete package, and it is here where The Mangler runs into problems.
Getting back to your point on the design of the machine itself, it is too obviously ominous from the start, and I would rather there had been a slight transmutation when the possessed refrigerator transfers its demonic energy. But following this moment early on in the film, the Mangler still looks exactly the same as it did: overly designed and preposterous in conception. I tried to research older folding machines going back decades, and found some odd designs, but nothing to approximate the look of the ironer in this film.
But, the scenes in the laundry did remind me distinctly of a particular film that arose out of the German Expressionistic period: Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s dystopian masterpiece from 1927. I flashed back on the scenes involving the downtrodden workers of the factories under the city, and the ridiculously huge and ungainly machinery, much of it of purposefully unknown function. There is one scene where one of the main characters is staring at a huge bank of machinery and has a strange hallucination. In the mist and steam of the factory, his vision blurs as he imagines the machinery as nothing more than the gaping mouth of the ancient god Moloch, being fed workers sacrificially. After a short visit to this bygone period of prehistory, his vision clears to the dire present of his reality.
I would not be surprised to hear that Metropolis was indeed watched relentlessly by Hooper’s team before they worked on The Mangler. (You also name-checked Modern Times, which is the other obvious choice for a “man caught in the senseless machinery of the modern age film”.) The difference here is that the demonic machine in The Mangler is supposed to represent the reality of the story from which it springs, not a pipe dream.
And you are correct about Robert Englund. I have had a sometimes hot and most often cold relationship with Mr. Englund since he started becoming a “thing” with the first Elm Street film. Wonderfully cast as Freddy Krueger as he was, Englund has most often appeared to lack the one thing that similar actors such as Chaney and Boris Karloff had in spades: the ability to play it straight when needed. I would feel differently about him if he would sometimes just take straight roles, but he has mainly stuck to genre films since he became a star (or genre films have stuck to him, the more likely vein). The problem here is one of lack of range; he is decidedly one-note in most of his choices, and never seems to turn down an opportunity to play “up”.
Here, he is just too loud, too abrasive, from the very start. We see him in the opening scene, and for me, he is an instant headache. The film immediately becomes a particularly painful visit to the doctor that you know will not be over for 106 excruciatingly mind-numbing minutes. The novocain has been applied, to be sure, but you still feel every cut of the gums and every revolution of the drill bit against your flesh and bone. And it is also clear that he is playing this movie as comedy. When he chimes musically, “Hell’s bells, Adelle!” as Mrs. Frawley is sucked into the Mangler, there is the sense that his character has said this line many times before to Mrs. Frawley, but never in such dire circumstances. However, as Englund gives us the line, it is clear he doesn’t care if he sucks the air out of the film. And just a few minutes into it, he sucks away my interest as well.
His character also has a penchant for saying the strangest combinations of phrases in rapid fire succession such as “Go draw a bath. Skedaddle. Shoo, fly, shoo.” Englund’s tongue in cheek delivery, in which it is quite clear that none of these words really have anything behind them, doesn’t help matters. There is another moment, clearly meant to be funny, where he is taunting his niece and yells out, “I’ll do a little dance for you, Sherry! A little jig!” There is just too much Freddy Krueger in his voice here, and then his exaggerated movements as he attempts that little jig wearing his leg braces shreds apart whatever other atmosphere the film had going for it that that moment.
I want to ask you, Aaron, about the character of Bill Gartley. This is the character to which I referred earlier in this article, as one who does not appear bodily in the text of the original short story, and is only mentioned five times within the text, but never with real consequence to the story. Here, he has been made – outside of the machine, of course – into the main villain of the piece. I imagine it was necessary for them to create such a character in order to attract a horror icon the size of Englund to the project, but I feel the story really doesn’t need the interference. Your thoughts?
Aaron: I’m not quite sure how to answer that. If you are asking me if the short story – or a short film version of – The Mangler needs the Gartley character, I would say most definitely not. The story Stephen King provided could have been expanded in a manner in which Gartley appeared and was an actual character, but there are many ways this could have been done other than what we got. Some of them would probably be better; some of them would probably be worse. If you are asking me if this film that Tobe Hooper has given us needs the Gartley character, all I can say is that he does exist in this film, and I cannot imagine this version of the story being told without him. I will also say that Robert Englund’s portrayal of the character does lessen the impact of the film overall, and perhaps a different actor with much the same script would have improved our impression of the movie.
I don’t want to be too harsh on Englund, but you are correct; the man is only capable of chewing scenery, or at least that’s the mode he’s chosen to operate in since the Nightmare films took off. But, as a counterpoint, I just finished watching Angel Heart, in which Robert De Niro plays a character of significant evil, and yet he chooses the opposite route; he underplays everything. He’s quiet and controlled and even friendly at times, and yet he’s still able to come across as menacing, or at least capable of great menace. It was an odd juxtaposition to this film, because my thoughts went immediately to how The Mangler would have worked had they gone in that direction with the character. I think Englund’s hamminess detracts from the already outsized mode the film is working in. He takes what was probably intended to be a blackly comic film of elevated reality and attempts to turn it into a wacky cartoon. I’m not sure how much of that blame to lay on him though, as he’s only doing what the director has asked of him. Or the director was incapable of reining him in. Either way it’s a mess.
But Robert Englund isn’t the only one playing a character created entirely for the screen; he’s just the loudest. This is a feature-length adaptation of a story that is only 29 pages long, and so of course characters need to be invented, while the existing ones need to be expanded. Gotta eat up that time somehow! The character that actually bothered me the most was the police photographer, known only as Pictureman in the film and in the credits. He’s a youngish actor, wearing more unconvincing old age makeup, and he pops up throughout the film during significant moments. Hunton is initially antagonistic towards him, but the relationship develops through the film and there are hints that they have a pretty long shared history. I do not understand what this character’s deal is. He seems surprised by the demonic activity he witnesses when Hunton destroys the icebox, but he also seems to know more than he says about the weird stuff going on in this town. Near the end of the film it turns out he does know quite a bit, as he dies of cancer and leaves Officer Hunton a big book of evidence, as well as a creepy collage of newspaper stories on his wall, including one about the car-crash death of Hunton’s wife.
Clearly this character is meant to be a sort of cryptic guide for our characters, but it never develops in a satisfying way, and, like most of the film, ends up more mystifying than anything else. There’s a scene in the film where Hunton visits the morgue after a child is found dead in that icebox we keep talking about. He has a brief interaction with the mortician about the quality of the mortician’s work putting Mrs. Frawley back together, before Hunton is left alone to brood some more. This morgue is ridiculously far underground, as Hunton descends several large staircases to get there, and what’s weirder is that when the mortician leaves the morgue, we can see him in the far left of the frame punching the ‘down’ button on the elevator. A few minutes later, Hunton is caught off guard by Pictureman, who then snaps a candid shot of Hunton brooding between the two dead bodies. They have some more cryptic conversations before Hunton leaves again. And here’s what bothers me: the mortician and Pictureman are both played by the same actor for no reason that I can discern. I kept expecting that to mean something, and when I saw that in the credits, I re-watched those scenes (I actually watched the entire film twice, for some reason) trying to pick out any hidden meanings, but there are none. The mortician conversation is pretty mundane, and the Pictureman stuff is just more of the same. It’s one of many things in this film that feel like they were supposed to add up to something, and the fact that they don’t just confuses me.
How about you, Rik? What were your thoughts on this bizarre character, or Lin Sue, the other character invented for the film?
Rik: Oh, I loved Angel Heart so much when it first came out to theatres. Saw it four times and kept dragging people to it. None of them liked it half as much as me, however.
Pictureman the, uh, picture man is a ridiculous character to encounter right after just being introduced to Gartley mere minutes before, in too short a time to have really recovered from the first bout of subpar makeup and acting. Honestly, when I first saw this film, everyone in my group thought Pictureman – J.J.J. Pictureman, to be precise, as he stresses in the film – was just Robert Englund in another disguise. We couldn’t even grapple with the thought there might be another actor in the film playing dual roles besides him, and a very young, non-established actor at that. This is where I really wish there a commentary track to go along with the film, because I would really like to find out why they went this route. Was Englund supposed to play the character but then either he refused, they were running out of time or budget, or they thought the character was too close in looks or age to Englund’s Gartley, and so wanted someone a bit different? Or was he a young buck trying to establish himself in the same mold as Englund – perhaps a pal of his – and was granted the chance to prove his range in The Mangler? The actor, Jeremy Crutchley, has been around ever since, with a lot of minor roles in a lot of minor (and some OK) projects (and a voice in a Game of Thrones video game). But given that he is an English actor who has a Spanish Wikipedia page but not an English one, I would say he has never really broken through. And that name… Pictureman? It’s just too on the nose for a cameraman’s moniker. (I’m surprised we didn’t meet the local plumber, John Poopflusher, as well…)
I really had not given the Lin Sue character any thought at all, not even in my notes, so that’s how much she impacted my viewing of The Mangler. I know she is primarily there to make Gartley’s niece Sherry jealous that she is stealing Sherry’s uncle’s attentions, but apart from using Lin Sue to show how empowering it is to become a “part of the machine,” thereby gaining power and a bad post-‘80s haircut, she really didn’t affect me.
No, the character I would really like to discuss is Officer Hunton, played by Ted Levine. I know that one of Stephen King’s biggest gripes about the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, apart from the fact that Kubrick snubbed his nose at King’s own screenplay, is that he believes that Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance is way off where he would like it. He thinks that Nicholson starts out the film as crazy, and so he has no arc in his performance, because he is just crazy non-stop throughout the film. I don’t really want to argue this here – let’s save that for further down the road when we tackle that book – but King does have a solid point, even if I don’t fully agree with it.
I have not read King’s opinion of the filmed version of The Mangler, but if he is upset at Nicholson in The Shining, he has to be equally so with Levine in this film. Levine’s Hunton starts out sick and nauseous and screaming every line, and ends up sick and nauseous and screaming every line. The Hunton character shares the same traits with the film version – near addiction to antacids because of a queasy possibly ulcerous stomach and a penchant for throwing up at crime scenes – but the character in the story at least starts out at a reduced level of histrionics when matched up against the film Hunton.
A big problem for me is that there is not a bit of subtlety in this film, which does not allow one to have a base from which to explore the story. I don’t always need one – I am a fan of true surrealism – but this film is presented, despite the pushy camera angles and design touches and bizarre acting choices of its biggest name actor, as a straightforward horror picture. For this, you need a solid character in the lead that, if you can’t trust, at least gives you the impression that you can trust them for a while. Levine does have some quieter moments, but only when paired with Daniel Matmor, who plays the most sensible character in the film, Mark Jackson, even though he is the one obsessed with black magic and demons. But for the most part, at any possible moment, Levine is bellowing at the top of his lungs or crying in disbelief or throwing up on the ground or screaming at people. He is a trainwreck at the beginning of the picture and never lets up from that impression. If he hadn’t gone on to play Captain Stottlemeyer on Monk with such consistent charm and humor over many years (in addition to other small roles), it is possible I would have written him off as an actor wholesale following The Mangler.
Aaron, you had intimated that Ted Levine’s Officer Hunton pretty much sounds like his Jame Gumb to you. Admittedly, Levine does not have a lot of vocal diversity in his performances over the years. He is largely marble-mouthed, so you have to figure that factor in when you hire him. But how did you feel about Levine’s overall performance here and its effect on Hunton as a character? Did you find it as strident and unnecessary as I did?
Aaron: One of the few things I remembered distinctly about this film was, strangely enough, the tone of Ted Levine’s performance. I remembered very clearly how tightly wound and bitter he was, and yet how quickly he’d fly into overacted rages. I’m not sure why that stayed with me, but I did go into this movie with a favorable impression of Ted Levine. The Silence of the Lambs aside, I now mostly remember him from Monk, as you said, and more paternal roles like the one he played on the FX series The Bridge. That gave me a certain perspective here, and I believe that in this film he is a good actor completely out to sea on the material. He actually has a few really good moments in this film that I think he played quite nicely, like this moment late in the film with Pictureman, who says that he doesn’t think Hunton likes him anymore, to which Hunton says “No, it’s my job I can’t stand.” At times like this he captures the right balance of bitterness and humanity, but I just don’t think he quite understood the tone of the film, or how to play some of the more exaggerated moments. That’s understandable; I’ve seen this movie twice in as many days and I still don’t understand the tone they were going for. I can only imagine how confusing it must have been in its unfinished form.
As to how I felt this performance informed the character, I think you hit the nail on the head in regards to how it removes anything close to a character arc. I do not get the impression that Hunton in the film is any good at his job, or that anyone particularly likes him, outside of Mark Jackson. He seems too emotional, too embittered, too… angry. Keep in mind this is a small town cop, whose main duties are probably speeding tickets and drunken brawls, not a jaded homicide detective from the big city. Of course, a lot of his bad attitude seems to stem from the death of his wife an undetermined amount of time before this film begins.
This brings up another facet of this film I’m still trying to wrap my head around; the odd doubling or intertwining of certain story elements that should, logically, be unrelated. Hunton’s wife has died in a car crash, and Hunton’s demeanor stems from his guilt at being the driver of the vehicle at the time. In the film, Mark Jackson isn’t just Hunton’s friend, he’s his brother-in-law, and yet during the frequent discussions about Hunton’s dead wife this never comes up; it’s only mentioned once in a single line of dialogue that I missed on my first viewing of the film. In fact, Mark never seems to be upset at all that he’s also lost his sister, he only seems intent on getting Hunton to move on. He describes the accident that killed his sister as “People make mistakes, and then they move on.” But Mrs. Hunton isn’t the only person who died in a car crash: there are also Sherry’s parents.
Sherry’s parents were killed in a car crash, leaving Bill Gartley, her uncle, as her legal guardian. For some reason the film makes sure we know the exact date this happened, but once again that knowledge never amounts to anything. Then there’s Gartley’s daughter who was killed by the Mangler when she was sixteen. Clearly this daughter wasn’t Sherry’s mother, but it seems odd that two of the main characters in this film have, as primary character origins, the deaths of loved ones in car accidents, and the film never comments on it. Were they in the same accident? It seems doubtful, because Hunton’s wife’s death seems more recent than the death of Sherry’s parents, but they’re both so oddly emphasized that they have to mean something. That’s my biggest problem with this film; so much of it seems important, meaningful, and yet it never adds up to anything. To the extent that it can be hard to focus on what the actual story is.
And as for that story: in the written version of this tale, the Mangler is possessed after Sherry bleeds onto it. That seems to be the case for much of the film version as well, until it’s revealed that the machine has always been possessed, that in fact, the town leaders have been sacrificing body parts and children to it for decades. As ways to expand a brief story about a demonically possessed piece of machinery, that’s certainly an understandable direction to go in. I have no problem with this development in theory, but it’s oddly handled in the film. If the Mangler was always possessed, why did it only start killing people after Sherry cut her hand on it? Why is it such a big deal that Sherry bled on the machine if that had nothing to do with the demonic activity? And if our heroes know that people have been sacrificing their children in the Mangler for decades, why do they still attempt the exorcism under the impression that it was Sherry’s blood that caused it? The film even pulls the same reveal about the antacids and hand of glory, but we already know that doesn’t mean anything, because the machine has been possessed for decades. And yet the film still acts as if this changes things, and the Mangler suddenly springs to life with enhanced demonic energy.
At this point I’m just nitpicking a film we’ve already decided is not very good. As much fun as nitpicking can be, I feel like it would be belaboring the point if I were to continue. I’ll throw it back to you, then. Were you as confused as I about the details that kept popping up in this film? Is there anything that really stuck out for you as head-scratchingly bizarre?
Rik: I, too, found the piling up of confusing details about the Mangler’s purpose and victims utterly bewildering. With each succeeding revelation of how deep this conspiracy of evil is embedded in the town’s history, where a series of top brass officials and businessmen have all mysteriously lost daughters at the age of sixteen, I would quite literally shake my head in exasperation, much in the way my cat does when we surprise her with something when we play. (It’s this odd thing she does that we find immensely endearing. Our cat does double takes.) Trying to piece together whether the fridge scene at the beginning, where it supposedly sparks the Mangler to demonic life, is even necessary at all once we find out about the history of the machine can lead one to exhaustion.
I have a few things that bother me about this film and I want to get them out of my system, so I apologize for keeping this going a bit longer. There is a line later in the film after a “kid” gets locked in the refrigeration unit and dies (the kid in the morgue looks like he is played by a 43-year-old actor, I swear), where a character says, in proving their point about what has occurred with the Mangler, “It’s transference of evil.” I don’t know what their definition of “transfer” is, but it generally means to move or shift something from one place or thing to another. This is more “sharing of evil,” because that goddamned fridge is still evil, if it is still killing birds and kids and snapping its door shut on people’s arms after it has supposedly “transferred” its demonic force over to the Mangler. When you transfer from one bus to the other, you don’t stay on the same bus in which you arrived. You move to the other bus. (Or ironing machine, as it were…)
Speaking of inappropriately aged actors, the actress that plays Sherry, Vanessa Pike, does not look sixteen at all. She might be playing it small-voiced and innocent, but she is not sixteen for even a second. My first thought when I heard that the character of Sherry was supposed to be sixteen was “I’ll bet she’s really 26,” because, in the role she is playing, she looks at least 26 or even older. While there is no birthdate for her on IMDb, its biographical section does say she earned a university degree in 1991, four years before this film. So unless she was a child prodigy, she was probably pretty much around 26 when this was filmed. I’m not trying to age-shame here, and I am very used to actors deep into their twenties playing much younger in film after film after film (and especially in television). It’s just hard to buy into a detail that is supposedly so damn important to the story (when it ultimately isn’t anyway) – that Sherry is Gartley’s sixteen-year-old niece, thus making her necessary to sacrifice to the machine – when it is so abundantly clear she is not that particular age.
Now, the purpose of all this evil lurking in the machines and killing of sixteen-year-old daughters and nieces and businessmen and women have weird hairstyles is supposed to be so that town – Riker’s Valley – can continue having what is called at one point a “perfect” existence. The problem is that there has been nothing shown to us to give us that impression. The film starts and stays in darkness. Where is this ideal community? We never get to meet anyone that isn’t screaming, crying, puking, bleeding, getting folded, turning evil, already evil, or about to die. We see brief outsides of houses or office buildings in some shots, but they are all tied to scenes leading to violence or the aftermath of violence. I mentioned much earlier that the filmmakers do a good job with establishing camera shots for scenes, but what they never do is establish this picture perfect little town around which the entire plot is based. Graveyard Shift did a much better job in establishing its small New England town setting on film than this one did, and it really didn’t matter to the story as much there.
Aaron: I had the same thought about Sherry, when I learned she was just celebrating her 16th birthday. I actually looked a little bit further into it than you did, as I was convinced this woman was in her thirties, and her childish demeanor was meant to be a result of living with Gartley, which would certainly leave its mark on anybody. You may be pleased to know how close you were in your estimation of her age; from what I could find on a South African theatre page, she was 25 during filming.
But to your point about the narrow focus of the film, I had the exact same thought. We never get a sense of what the town is like, and when Gartley kept saying the machine helped keep the town perfect, I wished that we had been given a glimpse of that perfection, because it seems like a pretty shitty place, all told. This feeds into my final observation; The Mangler, amazingly, takes place over the course of one night. I almost didn’t believe this fact when I thought back to the movie, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to watch it a second time. I had to confirm this information. And yes, from the opening scene to the final exorcism, less than 24 hours has passed. And yet so much happens, there is so much driving across town and revisiting locations for long discussions that at first I thought it must have been a week or two.
The Wrap-Up
Aaron: Back when this film came out on home video in 1995 or 1996, I rented it with some measure of excitement for many of the reasons you mentioned: Stephen King, Tobe Hooper, Robert Englund. But also there was interest in the involvement of Ted Levine, who at that point was known to me only as Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. It seemed like the film couldn’t miss. I didn’t remember the trailer until I just watched it recently, but I certainly recall being thrilled at the announcer saying “Three modern masters of horror…” over footage of the film. In fact, the trailer does a pretty good job of selling the film overall (though of course it looks silly and outdated now), and probably only stoked my interest in the finished product.
I remember renting it with my friend Justin, and getting maybe half an hour into it before we just shut it off in disgust. I rarely ever do that, and I certainly did it less back then when I had nothing but time to spend on films of questionable quality. The Mangler as a film was so disappointing, so tonally confused, that even at 17, I just had no patience for it. At some point I know I finished the film, but I couldn’t even tell you when that was. The only memory I had of the film was turning it off in disappointment. That, and the surprise I felt at learning Ted Levine wasn’t just doing a creepy voice for The Silence of the Lambs; he really talks that way!
From the brief conversations we’ve had surrounding this project, I know we’ve both got a lot to say about this film, so I think it’s best to get right into the movie and we can unpack things as we go along.
The film opens in the Blue Ribbon Laundry, where a few dozen women slave over industrial laundry machines like the titular Mangler. In very short order (practically right after the opening credits end) we’ll see Sherry Ouelette cut her hand on the Mangler (losing a worrying amount of blood over the machine), the beginnings of the haunted icebox from the short story, and the death of poor Mrs. Frawley. In written form, all this business is done with before the story even starts, and the incidents are all meant to be random occurrences that add up to something horrible. In the film they all happen at once, like the final flurry of activity from a Rube Goldberg machine. Two men bump into Sherry, and there’s a weird burst of lightning and a lot of blood as she cuts herself and rubs her bloody hand on the fridge, then in the ensuing confusion, Mrs. Frawley absentmindedly puts her hand into the Mangler (in some of the laziest suspense building I’ve ever seen).The sudden commotion draws out the owner, Bill Gartley, giving us our first glimpse of Robert Englund and how he’ll be playing the character. To put it briefly, he plays the character like a cartoon. I don’t just mean he goes over the top, but that he acts as if he’d somehow stepped out of a particularly foul-mouthed Popeye short. There’s nothing remotely realistic in this performance, which is not helped by the unconvincing old age makeup or weird medical braces on his legs that cause him to adopt a walk that looks like an exaggerated version of Everett Sloane’s already exaggerated walk in The Lady From Shanghai.
At this early moment, I thought I had an idea of what Tobe Hooper’s ultimate goal was. I thought he was going for the heightened reality of, if not German Expressionism, then at least the lurid Italian horror films of the sixties and seventies. I got a definite Dario Argento vibe from the camera movements, the color palette, and the questionable dubbing of the largely South African cast. I’m not sure if that was what he was aiming for, though, because the film keeps changing in tone from scene to scene, and rambles on from here in fits and starts. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but the best word I can use to describe my reaction to this film is “befuddled”. But then, Hooper has always been the most confounding of the accepted horror greats.
Tobe Hooper became a feature director at the right place and right time, and the film he made his name on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is justifiably remembered as a great piece of art and a defining horror film of its time period. Since then, he’s been very hard to pin down. Not quite as ruthless as Wes Craven in his prime, not quite as elegant as John Carpenter, and not nearly as political as George Romero. It can be hard (at least it is for me) to really pin down what Hooper’s style is. It doesn’t help that he seems to have spent much of the eighties trying to disprove the persistent rumors that Steven Spielberg secretly directed Poltergeist. I imagine this is what led to the ill-advised Invaders From Mars remake, and the alien sex-vampire epic Lifeforce. Lifeforce has long been a personal favorite of mine, but its placement in his filmography gives the impression that he was still trying to prove he could handle big budgets and impressive special effects without Spielberg’s involvement. Since then he’s kept busy with a steady mix of television and low budget film work, and I have to admit I’ve mostly stopped following him since The Mangler. I’ve seen at least one of his films since then, and it did not quite convince me I was missing out on anything.
To get back to my statement about The Mangler’s look, I think it’s actually pretty great, visually. The Blue Ribbon Laundry, where we’ll be spending a lot of time, is vast and cavernous, with lots of great intersecting lines, thudding machinery, and billowing steam. In a lesser film this would have just been confused and under lit, but if anything Hooper and cinematographer Amnon Solomon pour an excess of light into the shots. There are dark spaces in this film, but even during the night scenes, there’s a nice definition to the surroundings. The Mangler in the film itself is an imposing piece of machinery, but also designed in a completely unrealistic way. First off, it appears to have been embedded partially in a huge chunk of obsidian rock, which I can’t imagine any manufacturer actually designing. But also its gears and cables are as oversized as the machinery in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Whatever else we’re going to say about this film, I found it visually interesting and fun to look at.
Rik, I can already practically sense you itching to jump in here with your own take, so I’m going to pass it off to you. How do you feel about the look of The Mangler?
Rik: You had me at Chaplin, so I will jump to your last point first. The film does look great, almost exactly what I like from a horror film, especially one featuring a demonic machine. There are wonderful establishing shots – such as our first glimpse of the Mangler – and the humid atmosphere of the laundry plant itself is impressively dense and oppressive. If one were to base their opinion of the film solely on how sharply Hooper and his crew set up each succeeding scene and the attention given in delivering a visual experience, one might be convinced that this is a film worthy of more attention. I have always said that every film, even the worst film, is a cult film for somebody out there, and in looking around the web in recent days, it appears there are a good amount of people who think this film has been unfairly maligned. I would say, that in a cinematographic sense, they might have a point. I watched a chunk of the film (the first ten minutes) with the sound off and the subtitles on, and imagined The Mangler as a modern take on a silent expressionistic horror epic, and found the results, at the very least, an intriguing concept.However, in a modern film that was designed to be told by words in a screenplay that are delivered to our ears by paid actors, who speak those words to the best (or worst) of their ability, one cannot merely turn the sound off for the duration of the film. It is fun in jest or in experimentation, but to experience the film as intended, one must hear the dialogue and the score and the sound effects. One must have the complete package, and it is here where The Mangler runs into problems.
Getting back to your point on the design of the machine itself, it is too obviously ominous from the start, and I would rather there had been a slight transmutation when the possessed refrigerator transfers its demonic energy. But following this moment early on in the film, the Mangler still looks exactly the same as it did: overly designed and preposterous in conception. I tried to research older folding machines going back decades, and found some odd designs, but nothing to approximate the look of the ironer in this film.
But, the scenes in the laundry did remind me distinctly of a particular film that arose out of the German Expressionistic period: Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s dystopian masterpiece from 1927. I flashed back on the scenes involving the downtrodden workers of the factories under the city, and the ridiculously huge and ungainly machinery, much of it of purposefully unknown function. There is one scene where one of the main characters is staring at a huge bank of machinery and has a strange hallucination. In the mist and steam of the factory, his vision blurs as he imagines the machinery as nothing more than the gaping mouth of the ancient god Moloch, being fed workers sacrificially. After a short visit to this bygone period of prehistory, his vision clears to the dire present of his reality.
I would not be surprised to hear that Metropolis was indeed watched relentlessly by Hooper’s team before they worked on The Mangler. (You also name-checked Modern Times, which is the other obvious choice for a “man caught in the senseless machinery of the modern age film”.) The difference here is that the demonic machine in The Mangler is supposed to represent the reality of the story from which it springs, not a pipe dream.
And you are correct about Robert Englund. I have had a sometimes hot and most often cold relationship with Mr. Englund since he started becoming a “thing” with the first Elm Street film. Wonderfully cast as Freddy Krueger as he was, Englund has most often appeared to lack the one thing that similar actors such as Chaney and Boris Karloff had in spades: the ability to play it straight when needed. I would feel differently about him if he would sometimes just take straight roles, but he has mainly stuck to genre films since he became a star (or genre films have stuck to him, the more likely vein). The problem here is one of lack of range; he is decidedly one-note in most of his choices, and never seems to turn down an opportunity to play “up”.
Here, he is just too loud, too abrasive, from the very start. We see him in the opening scene, and for me, he is an instant headache. The film immediately becomes a particularly painful visit to the doctor that you know will not be over for 106 excruciatingly mind-numbing minutes. The novocain has been applied, to be sure, but you still feel every cut of the gums and every revolution of the drill bit against your flesh and bone. And it is also clear that he is playing this movie as comedy. When he chimes musically, “Hell’s bells, Adelle!” as Mrs. Frawley is sucked into the Mangler, there is the sense that his character has said this line many times before to Mrs. Frawley, but never in such dire circumstances. However, as Englund gives us the line, it is clear he doesn’t care if he sucks the air out of the film. And just a few minutes into it, he sucks away my interest as well.
His character also has a penchant for saying the strangest combinations of phrases in rapid fire succession such as “Go draw a bath. Skedaddle. Shoo, fly, shoo.” Englund’s tongue in cheek delivery, in which it is quite clear that none of these words really have anything behind them, doesn’t help matters. There is another moment, clearly meant to be funny, where he is taunting his niece and yells out, “I’ll do a little dance for you, Sherry! A little jig!” There is just too much Freddy Krueger in his voice here, and then his exaggerated movements as he attempts that little jig wearing his leg braces shreds apart whatever other atmosphere the film had going for it that that moment.
I want to ask you, Aaron, about the character of Bill Gartley. This is the character to which I referred earlier in this article, as one who does not appear bodily in the text of the original short story, and is only mentioned five times within the text, but never with real consequence to the story. Here, he has been made – outside of the machine, of course – into the main villain of the piece. I imagine it was necessary for them to create such a character in order to attract a horror icon the size of Englund to the project, but I feel the story really doesn’t need the interference. Your thoughts?
Aaron: I’m not quite sure how to answer that. If you are asking me if the short story – or a short film version of – The Mangler needs the Gartley character, I would say most definitely not. The story Stephen King provided could have been expanded in a manner in which Gartley appeared and was an actual character, but there are many ways this could have been done other than what we got. Some of them would probably be better; some of them would probably be worse. If you are asking me if this film that Tobe Hooper has given us needs the Gartley character, all I can say is that he does exist in this film, and I cannot imagine this version of the story being told without him. I will also say that Robert Englund’s portrayal of the character does lessen the impact of the film overall, and perhaps a different actor with much the same script would have improved our impression of the movie.I don’t want to be too harsh on Englund, but you are correct; the man is only capable of chewing scenery, or at least that’s the mode he’s chosen to operate in since the Nightmare films took off. But, as a counterpoint, I just finished watching Angel Heart, in which Robert De Niro plays a character of significant evil, and yet he chooses the opposite route; he underplays everything. He’s quiet and controlled and even friendly at times, and yet he’s still able to come across as menacing, or at least capable of great menace. It was an odd juxtaposition to this film, because my thoughts went immediately to how The Mangler would have worked had they gone in that direction with the character. I think Englund’s hamminess detracts from the already outsized mode the film is working in. He takes what was probably intended to be a blackly comic film of elevated reality and attempts to turn it into a wacky cartoon. I’m not sure how much of that blame to lay on him though, as he’s only doing what the director has asked of him. Or the director was incapable of reining him in. Either way it’s a mess.
But Robert Englund isn’t the only one playing a character created entirely for the screen; he’s just the loudest. This is a feature-length adaptation of a story that is only 29 pages long, and so of course characters need to be invented, while the existing ones need to be expanded. Gotta eat up that time somehow! The character that actually bothered me the most was the police photographer, known only as Pictureman in the film and in the credits. He’s a youngish actor, wearing more unconvincing old age makeup, and he pops up throughout the film during significant moments. Hunton is initially antagonistic towards him, but the relationship develops through the film and there are hints that they have a pretty long shared history. I do not understand what this character’s deal is. He seems surprised by the demonic activity he witnesses when Hunton destroys the icebox, but he also seems to know more than he says about the weird stuff going on in this town. Near the end of the film it turns out he does know quite a bit, as he dies of cancer and leaves Officer Hunton a big book of evidence, as well as a creepy collage of newspaper stories on his wall, including one about the car-crash death of Hunton’s wife.
Clearly this character is meant to be a sort of cryptic guide for our characters, but it never develops in a satisfying way, and, like most of the film, ends up more mystifying than anything else. There’s a scene in the film where Hunton visits the morgue after a child is found dead in that icebox we keep talking about. He has a brief interaction with the mortician about the quality of the mortician’s work putting Mrs. Frawley back together, before Hunton is left alone to brood some more. This morgue is ridiculously far underground, as Hunton descends several large staircases to get there, and what’s weirder is that when the mortician leaves the morgue, we can see him in the far left of the frame punching the ‘down’ button on the elevator. A few minutes later, Hunton is caught off guard by Pictureman, who then snaps a candid shot of Hunton brooding between the two dead bodies. They have some more cryptic conversations before Hunton leaves again. And here’s what bothers me: the mortician and Pictureman are both played by the same actor for no reason that I can discern. I kept expecting that to mean something, and when I saw that in the credits, I re-watched those scenes (I actually watched the entire film twice, for some reason) trying to pick out any hidden meanings, but there are none. The mortician conversation is pretty mundane, and the Pictureman stuff is just more of the same. It’s one of many things in this film that feel like they were supposed to add up to something, and the fact that they don’t just confuses me.
How about you, Rik? What were your thoughts on this bizarre character, or Lin Sue, the other character invented for the film?
Rik: Oh, I loved Angel Heart so much when it first came out to theatres. Saw it four times and kept dragging people to it. None of them liked it half as much as me, however.Pictureman the, uh, picture man is a ridiculous character to encounter right after just being introduced to Gartley mere minutes before, in too short a time to have really recovered from the first bout of subpar makeup and acting. Honestly, when I first saw this film, everyone in my group thought Pictureman – J.J.J. Pictureman, to be precise, as he stresses in the film – was just Robert Englund in another disguise. We couldn’t even grapple with the thought there might be another actor in the film playing dual roles besides him, and a very young, non-established actor at that. This is where I really wish there a commentary track to go along with the film, because I would really like to find out why they went this route. Was Englund supposed to play the character but then either he refused, they were running out of time or budget, or they thought the character was too close in looks or age to Englund’s Gartley, and so wanted someone a bit different? Or was he a young buck trying to establish himself in the same mold as Englund – perhaps a pal of his – and was granted the chance to prove his range in The Mangler? The actor, Jeremy Crutchley, has been around ever since, with a lot of minor roles in a lot of minor (and some OK) projects (and a voice in a Game of Thrones video game). But given that he is an English actor who has a Spanish Wikipedia page but not an English one, I would say he has never really broken through. And that name… Pictureman? It’s just too on the nose for a cameraman’s moniker. (I’m surprised we didn’t meet the local plumber, John Poopflusher, as well…)
I really had not given the Lin Sue character any thought at all, not even in my notes, so that’s how much she impacted my viewing of The Mangler. I know she is primarily there to make Gartley’s niece Sherry jealous that she is stealing Sherry’s uncle’s attentions, but apart from using Lin Sue to show how empowering it is to become a “part of the machine,” thereby gaining power and a bad post-‘80s haircut, she really didn’t affect me.
No, the character I would really like to discuss is Officer Hunton, played by Ted Levine. I know that one of Stephen King’s biggest gripes about the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, apart from the fact that Kubrick snubbed his nose at King’s own screenplay, is that he believes that Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance is way off where he would like it. He thinks that Nicholson starts out the film as crazy, and so he has no arc in his performance, because he is just crazy non-stop throughout the film. I don’t really want to argue this here – let’s save that for further down the road when we tackle that book – but King does have a solid point, even if I don’t fully agree with it.
I have not read King’s opinion of the filmed version of The Mangler, but if he is upset at Nicholson in The Shining, he has to be equally so with Levine in this film. Levine’s Hunton starts out sick and nauseous and screaming every line, and ends up sick and nauseous and screaming every line. The Hunton character shares the same traits with the film version – near addiction to antacids because of a queasy possibly ulcerous stomach and a penchant for throwing up at crime scenes – but the character in the story at least starts out at a reduced level of histrionics when matched up against the film Hunton.
A big problem for me is that there is not a bit of subtlety in this film, which does not allow one to have a base from which to explore the story. I don’t always need one – I am a fan of true surrealism – but this film is presented, despite the pushy camera angles and design touches and bizarre acting choices of its biggest name actor, as a straightforward horror picture. For this, you need a solid character in the lead that, if you can’t trust, at least gives you the impression that you can trust them for a while. Levine does have some quieter moments, but only when paired with Daniel Matmor, who plays the most sensible character in the film, Mark Jackson, even though he is the one obsessed with black magic and demons. But for the most part, at any possible moment, Levine is bellowing at the top of his lungs or crying in disbelief or throwing up on the ground or screaming at people. He is a trainwreck at the beginning of the picture and never lets up from that impression. If he hadn’t gone on to play Captain Stottlemeyer on Monk with such consistent charm and humor over many years (in addition to other small roles), it is possible I would have written him off as an actor wholesale following The Mangler.
Aaron, you had intimated that Ted Levine’s Officer Hunton pretty much sounds like his Jame Gumb to you. Admittedly, Levine does not have a lot of vocal diversity in his performances over the years. He is largely marble-mouthed, so you have to figure that factor in when you hire him. But how did you feel about Levine’s overall performance here and its effect on Hunton as a character? Did you find it as strident and unnecessary as I did?
Aaron: One of the few things I remembered distinctly about this film was, strangely enough, the tone of Ted Levine’s performance. I remembered very clearly how tightly wound and bitter he was, and yet how quickly he’d fly into overacted rages. I’m not sure why that stayed with me, but I did go into this movie with a favorable impression of Ted Levine. The Silence of the Lambs aside, I now mostly remember him from Monk, as you said, and more paternal roles like the one he played on the FX series The Bridge. That gave me a certain perspective here, and I believe that in this film he is a good actor completely out to sea on the material. He actually has a few really good moments in this film that I think he played quite nicely, like this moment late in the film with Pictureman, who says that he doesn’t think Hunton likes him anymore, to which Hunton says “No, it’s my job I can’t stand.” At times like this he captures the right balance of bitterness and humanity, but I just don’t think he quite understood the tone of the film, or how to play some of the more exaggerated moments. That’s understandable; I’ve seen this movie twice in as many days and I still don’t understand the tone they were going for. I can only imagine how confusing it must have been in its unfinished form.As to how I felt this performance informed the character, I think you hit the nail on the head in regards to how it removes anything close to a character arc. I do not get the impression that Hunton in the film is any good at his job, or that anyone particularly likes him, outside of Mark Jackson. He seems too emotional, too embittered, too… angry. Keep in mind this is a small town cop, whose main duties are probably speeding tickets and drunken brawls, not a jaded homicide detective from the big city. Of course, a lot of his bad attitude seems to stem from the death of his wife an undetermined amount of time before this film begins.
This brings up another facet of this film I’m still trying to wrap my head around; the odd doubling or intertwining of certain story elements that should, logically, be unrelated. Hunton’s wife has died in a car crash, and Hunton’s demeanor stems from his guilt at being the driver of the vehicle at the time. In the film, Mark Jackson isn’t just Hunton’s friend, he’s his brother-in-law, and yet during the frequent discussions about Hunton’s dead wife this never comes up; it’s only mentioned once in a single line of dialogue that I missed on my first viewing of the film. In fact, Mark never seems to be upset at all that he’s also lost his sister, he only seems intent on getting Hunton to move on. He describes the accident that killed his sister as “People make mistakes, and then they move on.” But Mrs. Hunton isn’t the only person who died in a car crash: there are also Sherry’s parents.
Sherry’s parents were killed in a car crash, leaving Bill Gartley, her uncle, as her legal guardian. For some reason the film makes sure we know the exact date this happened, but once again that knowledge never amounts to anything. Then there’s Gartley’s daughter who was killed by the Mangler when she was sixteen. Clearly this daughter wasn’t Sherry’s mother, but it seems odd that two of the main characters in this film have, as primary character origins, the deaths of loved ones in car accidents, and the film never comments on it. Were they in the same accident? It seems doubtful, because Hunton’s wife’s death seems more recent than the death of Sherry’s parents, but they’re both so oddly emphasized that they have to mean something. That’s my biggest problem with this film; so much of it seems important, meaningful, and yet it never adds up to anything. To the extent that it can be hard to focus on what the actual story is.
And as for that story: in the written version of this tale, the Mangler is possessed after Sherry bleeds onto it. That seems to be the case for much of the film version as well, until it’s revealed that the machine has always been possessed, that in fact, the town leaders have been sacrificing body parts and children to it for decades. As ways to expand a brief story about a demonically possessed piece of machinery, that’s certainly an understandable direction to go in. I have no problem with this development in theory, but it’s oddly handled in the film. If the Mangler was always possessed, why did it only start killing people after Sherry cut her hand on it? Why is it such a big deal that Sherry bled on the machine if that had nothing to do with the demonic activity? And if our heroes know that people have been sacrificing their children in the Mangler for decades, why do they still attempt the exorcism under the impression that it was Sherry’s blood that caused it? The film even pulls the same reveal about the antacids and hand of glory, but we already know that doesn’t mean anything, because the machine has been possessed for decades. And yet the film still acts as if this changes things, and the Mangler suddenly springs to life with enhanced demonic energy.
At this point I’m just nitpicking a film we’ve already decided is not very good. As much fun as nitpicking can be, I feel like it would be belaboring the point if I were to continue. I’ll throw it back to you, then. Were you as confused as I about the details that kept popping up in this film? Is there anything that really stuck out for you as head-scratchingly bizarre?
Rik: I, too, found the piling up of confusing details about the Mangler’s purpose and victims utterly bewildering. With each succeeding revelation of how deep this conspiracy of evil is embedded in the town’s history, where a series of top brass officials and businessmen have all mysteriously lost daughters at the age of sixteen, I would quite literally shake my head in exasperation, much in the way my cat does when we surprise her with something when we play. (It’s this odd thing she does that we find immensely endearing. Our cat does double takes.) Trying to piece together whether the fridge scene at the beginning, where it supposedly sparks the Mangler to demonic life, is even necessary at all once we find out about the history of the machine can lead one to exhaustion.
I have a few things that bother me about this film and I want to get them out of my system, so I apologize for keeping this going a bit longer. There is a line later in the film after a “kid” gets locked in the refrigeration unit and dies (the kid in the morgue looks like he is played by a 43-year-old actor, I swear), where a character says, in proving their point about what has occurred with the Mangler, “It’s transference of evil.” I don’t know what their definition of “transfer” is, but it generally means to move or shift something from one place or thing to another. This is more “sharing of evil,” because that goddamned fridge is still evil, if it is still killing birds and kids and snapping its door shut on people’s arms after it has supposedly “transferred” its demonic force over to the Mangler. When you transfer from one bus to the other, you don’t stay on the same bus in which you arrived. You move to the other bus. (Or ironing machine, as it were…)
Speaking of inappropriately aged actors, the actress that plays Sherry, Vanessa Pike, does not look sixteen at all. She might be playing it small-voiced and innocent, but she is not sixteen for even a second. My first thought when I heard that the character of Sherry was supposed to be sixteen was “I’ll bet she’s really 26,” because, in the role she is playing, she looks at least 26 or even older. While there is no birthdate for her on IMDb, its biographical section does say she earned a university degree in 1991, four years before this film. So unless she was a child prodigy, she was probably pretty much around 26 when this was filmed. I’m not trying to age-shame here, and I am very used to actors deep into their twenties playing much younger in film after film after film (and especially in television). It’s just hard to buy into a detail that is supposedly so damn important to the story (when it ultimately isn’t anyway) – that Sherry is Gartley’s sixteen-year-old niece, thus making her necessary to sacrifice to the machine – when it is so abundantly clear she is not that particular age.Now, the purpose of all this evil lurking in the machines and killing of sixteen-year-old daughters and nieces and businessmen and women have weird hairstyles is supposed to be so that town – Riker’s Valley – can continue having what is called at one point a “perfect” existence. The problem is that there has been nothing shown to us to give us that impression. The film starts and stays in darkness. Where is this ideal community? We never get to meet anyone that isn’t screaming, crying, puking, bleeding, getting folded, turning evil, already evil, or about to die. We see brief outsides of houses or office buildings in some shots, but they are all tied to scenes leading to violence or the aftermath of violence. I mentioned much earlier that the filmmakers do a good job with establishing camera shots for scenes, but what they never do is establish this picture perfect little town around which the entire plot is based. Graveyard Shift did a much better job in establishing its small New England town setting on film than this one did, and it really didn’t matter to the story as much there.
Aaron: I had the same thought about Sherry, when I learned she was just celebrating her 16th birthday. I actually looked a little bit further into it than you did, as I was convinced this woman was in her thirties, and her childish demeanor was meant to be a result of living with Gartley, which would certainly leave its mark on anybody. You may be pleased to know how close you were in your estimation of her age; from what I could find on a South African theatre page, she was 25 during filming.
But to your point about the narrow focus of the film, I had the exact same thought. We never get a sense of what the town is like, and when Gartley kept saying the machine helped keep the town perfect, I wished that we had been given a glimpse of that perfection, because it seems like a pretty shitty place, all told. This feeds into my final observation; The Mangler, amazingly, takes place over the course of one night. I almost didn’t believe this fact when I thought back to the movie, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to watch it a second time. I had to confirm this information. And yes, from the opening scene to the final exorcism, less than 24 hours has passed. And yet so much happens, there is so much driving across town and revisiting locations for long discussions that at first I thought it must have been a week or two.
The Wrap-Up
Aaron: I’m ready to call this one: The Mangler is itself a mangled mess. The movie is almost punishingly awful at times, and bewilderingly peculiar at others. I will admit that when I watched it for the second time I found it a slightly improved experience, albeit one that left me exhausted and in desperate need of a three-hour midday nap. But on second viewing, I actually appreciated the film’s loopiness a bit more, and allowed the often excellent visuals to win me over. Seriously, every time Tobe Hooper uses a crane shot to move through the laundry, or move between its upper and lower levels, it reminded me why he had such a great reputation to begin with. Stephen King was bang on with this film when he said:
Rik: As you are aware, I had a similar experience in watching this film for the first time since 1995. Having successfully avoided it for 21 years, the re-watch was instantly annoying to me. I wanted to turn it off mere minutes into the film, and once Englund kicked into high gear (which, as we know, is his only gear), I realized that the only way I was going to get through it was in small chunks. It took me over half the day because of how disheartening the experience was to me. (A second viewing the next morning, once the disappointment mostly wore off, was accomplished in one non-stop sitting.)
Despite this struggle, I managed to recognize and still enjoy the few elements I appreciated when the film came out: the effects, the set design, and above all the camerawork. Make that “most” of the camerawork; I hate the scene in Gartley’s office where we get a little too intimate with the ceiling above Robert Englund’s head as he moves around in a swinging POV haze. It is an extended shot which is intentionally showy but its nauseating actuality only works in favor of my opinion that this film is composed of mostly awful directorial and screenwriting choices.
And yet, the film always feels like it is of a piece with the rest of the work of Tobe Hooper (including Poltergeist, which some idiotic people don't). While I wish the outcome here were more positive, any discussion of his career is going to have to come to grips with the rather frequent downturns within it. I am hoping that someday we get the full story of what happened behind the scenes on this film, because it will probably be far more interesting and suspenseful than The Mangler. Until such a time that said details comes to light, I will be content to throw The Mangler in with the other washouts in the great laundry pile of failed King adaptations.
Next time: We tackle another story in Night Shift, this time with an ominous sounding title that I can really get into for a very, very personal reason: The Boogeyman. What is this reason? We will discuss that in the next edition of We Who Watch Behind the Rows. I'd say "we will see you then," but of course we will, because we are always watching... behind the rows!
“Tobe Hooper, who directed it, is something of a genius...The Texas Chain Saw Massacre proves that beyond doubt. But when genius goes wrong, brother, watch out.”I am now safely done with The Mangler. But as cinematic failures go, it does have glimmers of actual artistry beneath the obscuring layers of crap. If someone wants to make the case that The Mangler is an overlooked gem, a movie considered bad only because people don’t understand it, I’m certainly not going to argue the point, because I think they would be correct. I think this movie is bad, and I don’t understand it.
Rik: As you are aware, I had a similar experience in watching this film for the first time since 1995. Having successfully avoided it for 21 years, the re-watch was instantly annoying to me. I wanted to turn it off mere minutes into the film, and once Englund kicked into high gear (which, as we know, is his only gear), I realized that the only way I was going to get through it was in small chunks. It took me over half the day because of how disheartening the experience was to me. (A second viewing the next morning, once the disappointment mostly wore off, was accomplished in one non-stop sitting.)
Despite this struggle, I managed to recognize and still enjoy the few elements I appreciated when the film came out: the effects, the set design, and above all the camerawork. Make that “most” of the camerawork; I hate the scene in Gartley’s office where we get a little too intimate with the ceiling above Robert Englund’s head as he moves around in a swinging POV haze. It is an extended shot which is intentionally showy but its nauseating actuality only works in favor of my opinion that this film is composed of mostly awful directorial and screenwriting choices.
And yet, the film always feels like it is of a piece with the rest of the work of Tobe Hooper (including Poltergeist, which some idiotic people don't). While I wish the outcome here were more positive, any discussion of his career is going to have to come to grips with the rather frequent downturns within it. I am hoping that someday we get the full story of what happened behind the scenes on this film, because it will probably be far more interesting and suspenseful than The Mangler. Until such a time that said details comes to light, I will be content to throw The Mangler in with the other washouts in the great laundry pile of failed King adaptations.
Next time: We tackle another story in Night Shift, this time with an ominous sounding title that I can really get into for a very, very personal reason: The Boogeyman. What is this reason? We will discuss that in the next edition of We Who Watch Behind the Rows. I'd say "we will see you then," but of course we will, because we are always watching... behind the rows!
