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Mangler 2, The
Artisan // R // February 19, 2002
List Price: $24.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Why?
That three-letter question immediately popped into my mind when I first learned that The Mangler 2 was in production. Another in a long line of adaptations from Stephen King's Night Shift, Tobe Hooper's The Mangler was universally panned upon its release in 1995, grossing a paltry $1.7 million theatrically. For those unfamiliar with its plot, The Mangler is about a possessed laundry folding machine that eats people. Though I haven't seen the original, and God willing, that won't change anytime soon, it was played pretty straight and failed in every conceivable respect. Not exactly a top contender for a sequel.
Flash forward six years. Screenwriter Michael Hamilton-Wright (one of the men behind Retroactive, a film I rather liked) and producer Glen Tedham had the itch to adapt a Stephen King story. Not surprisingly, they discovered that the sequel rights to The Mangler were available (and dirt cheap, I'd imagine). A script was quickly banged out, a to-be-refurbished military base outside Vancouver was secured, and after a twenty-day shooting schedule, The Mangler 2 was in the can.
Chelse Swain stars as Jo Newton, the troubled daughter of a billionaire who made his fortune in the security sector. Someone hacked into the website of the ritzy private school Jo attends, leaving a rather unflattering image of Headmaster Badian (Lance Henriksen). Jo, after a bizarre sequence where she breaks into her father's hi-tech corporate offices, is among just five students left behind at the school to determine who is responsible, with the Sword of Damocles dangling perilously over prom night if the group of stereotypes is unsuccessful in their search. Putting her script kiddie hax0r skills to good use, Jo lashes out yet again and infects the military-grade computer system that runs the school with the Mangler 2.0 virus. (Get it? Mangler 2.0 in the movie The Mangler 2? Brilliant!) The computer, as is often the case, decides to kill everyone. This leaves Jo and her band of clichés -- which includes the spunky sexpot (Daniella Evangelista), the "funny" black guy (Dexter Bell), the stoner (Miles Meadows), Jo's clean-cut love interest (Will Sanderson), and ze Franch-Canadian chef (Philippe Bergeron) -- fighting for their lives against the omnipresent menace.
As you may have noticed from the plot summary above, The Mangler 2 is a sequel in name only. There are no returning characters, nor is there any mention of the events that occurred in the first film. A death-by-laundry kill scene is intended to loosely interconnect the two, along with the general theme of a force controlling inanimate objects. Still, change the name of the computer virus and The Mangler 2 could just as easily be a sequel to, say, 1993's Ghost In The Machine, which used a similar basic plot and actually managed to be moderately entertaining. Writer/director Michael Hamilton-Wright boasted several times in the behind-the-scenes featurette and in the commentary track that The Mangler 2 was written in just eight days. Though he seems proud of this achievement, the scant amount of time devoted to the screenplay is painfully evident. The dialogue is excruciatingly bad, and one character, to my complete and total astonishment, actually says, "Take a picture. It'll last longer." Philippe Bergeron's performance as the school chef gets my nod as the single worst of 2001. Though his character is obviously intended to be foreign, I couldn't figure out what accent he was trying to use. Imagine Father Guido Sarducci after spending a couple of years in France and you'll be somewhere in the ballpark. Though a Parisian inflection comes and goes, I was astonished to discover in the disc's supplemental material that this is really how Bergeron sounds. Yikes.
It's worth noting, though, that I am a devout slasher fan, and I don't really need clever dialogue or skilled acting to be entertained. The Mangler 2 follows the disappointing trend of fully-clothed, bloodless teen slashers that have gobbled up so much space on rental shelves over the past five years. After trimming out a couple of four-letter words, this movie wouldn't require any cuts or alterations of its content to be ready for a long life on TBS. The kill scenes are unbelievably unimaginative, often involving a wire lurching slowly across the frame. I wish I were kidding, but two of the deaths in a movie with an already low body count involve wires picking up sharp objects and decapitating people. If you can resist laughing as a comically oversized pair of hedge clippers held by a thick mess of wires follows a guy around a corridor, you're a stronger man than I can claim to be. The deaths all occur off-screen, and it's impossible to maintain any real sense of dread as these scenes are over within a matter of seconds after they've begun. Pacing is often clunky as a result, as quite a bit of time tends to pass between kills without any real payoff.
There's absolutely no gore whatsoever, and aside from a light smattering in the laundry scene and fleeting glimpses of a couple of corpses, the Mangler virus' reign of terror doesn't even leave any blood or assorted fluids behind. The requisite t&a is limited to the admittedly very cute Daniella Evangelista bouncing about in a bikini for the duration of the film, but apparently the producers wouldn't pony up enough cash to convince anyone but the guys to take off their tops. Sex scenes? Forget about it. That might all sound sexist on my part, but nudity and sex are tenets of the teen slasher subgenre. Trying to pass off a movie like The Mangler 2 without those elements would be like releasing a drama where no one falls in/out of love and no one dies. It's incomplete.
While I'm on the subject of "incomplete', near the end of The Mangler 2, the character of Cory Banks disappears. He doesn't die, as far as I can tell, and no references are made to Cory for what little time remains of the movie. He's following the remaining survivors and, a quick cut later, simply disappears. This is the sort of anti-logic that's so pervasive throughout The Mangler 2. How can a computer control the movement of random strips of wires? What kind of software for downloading a virus fills the entire screen and uses skull images to indicate the progress? Why couldn't a school partially funded by a billionaire have a website coded by someone other than an eighth-grader in 1994? I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but with little else to draw my interest, these annoying details seemed far more prominent than they may have if incorporated into a more entertaining movie.
Though The Mangler 2 is unquestionably among my least favorite movies from 2001, and this is from someone who owns Glitter. Regardless of how I may feel about the movie, there's no denying that Artisan Entertainment has pulled out all the stops for its release on DVD. It's a shame they couldn't do they same with Ginger Snaps or Sleepless, but that's a rant for another time...
Video: The Mangler 2 is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Whatever stock was used gives the film a dated look, and I'd have no trouble believing that The Mangler 2 was shot at some unspecified point at the early '90s if the extras on the DVD didn't directly specify otherwise. The palette isn't exactly bursting with vibrancy, and the largely dull colors rarely exhibit much warmth or life. Though no shots in the film were ever soft to the point of, say, seeming out of focus, sharpness didn't seem to be all quite there, with some moments seeming less crisp than most others. The image as a whole is not particularly detailed, though the source material used is in fine shape. Speckling never appeared to any appreciable degree, and I didn't spot any print damage or nasty compression artifacts. The Mangler 2 is not a stunningly beautiful movie, but the presentation is acceptable and reflective of its budget.
Audio: The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is flat and lifeless, lacking the sort of crispness and clarity I've come to expect from DVDs. There's nothing terribly flawed about the soundtrack, but it sounds like I'm watching cable with matrixed surrounds and slightly heavier subwoofer activity. Given The Mangler 2's relatively low budget, this may be about as much as can be expected. I didn't perform an A/B comparison with the 2.0 stereo surround track, but I wouldn't expect there to be a world of difference between the two. Dialogue is easily discernable, and the techno-lite soundtrack and contributions from Vancouver-based SunLikeStar sound respectable but shouldn't provide much of a workout for most systems. Strictly average for this sort of movie. Also included are English and Spanish subtitles, along with English closed captioning.
Supplements: Writer/director Michael Hamilton-Wright, producer Glen Tedham, and actor Philippe Bergeron contribute a feature-length commentary track that's more interesting than the movie itself, not that that's saying much. Quite a bit of time is spent talking about the location used for the movie and how the script was adapted accordingly. There's also a fair amount of discussion about how certain shots and effects came together, the low number of takes, what it's like being a first-time director, both the cast and the casting process...nothing beyond the usual. I tend to enjoy commentaries with more than one participant because it keeps discussion more active and lively, and there are only a couple of fairly lengthy pauses here. The original film is only briefly mentioned, more as an aside than anything else, and they didn't seem to notice Cory's abrupt disappearance. All three men seem to be very fond of the movie, though their comments didn't do much to change my opinion of The Mangler 2.
The outtakes reel (in anamorphic widescreen) runs a couple of minutes long and mostly consists of actors flubbing lines and difficulty interacting with parts of the sets. There is also an EPK-style 'behind the scenes' featurette, which will be of little interest to anyone who's watched the movie and listened to the commentary. As is far too often the case with these sorts of featurettes, far too much time is spent rehashing the plot and actors describing their characters. There are also two music videos by SunLikeStar, "50/50" and "Day Survive", off of their debut album "Inverse". The songs are radio-friendly hard-rock, incorporating some electronic elements, and the videos are nicely polished, though some of the CGI in the "Day Survive" video is embarassing. Rounding out the supplements are a letterboxed theatrical trailer (though the title at the end is so aliased and video-ish that I couldn't imagine seeing it on the big screen) and cast/crew bios.
Conclusion: It shouldn't come as too much of a shock that The Mangler 2, a sequel to one of the more reviled studio horror movies of the '90s, isn't that great. I'm hard-pressed to find much to say about the movie that could remotely be construed as positive. Its treatment on DVD is fairly impressive, though, but I can't imagine too many people would be interested enough in The Mangler 2 to delve deeply into its supplemental material. I can't recommend this disc as a purchase, but it may make for a fun rental for MST3K fans revved up for a little DIY riffing. Rent It.
That three-letter question immediately popped into my mind when I first learned that The Mangler 2 was in production. Another in a long line of adaptations from Stephen King's Night Shift, Tobe Hooper's The Mangler was universally panned upon its release in 1995, grossing a paltry $1.7 million theatrically. For those unfamiliar with its plot, The Mangler is about a possessed laundry folding machine that eats people. Though I haven't seen the original, and God willing, that won't change anytime soon, it was played pretty straight and failed in every conceivable respect. Not exactly a top contender for a sequel.
Flash forward six years. Screenwriter Michael Hamilton-Wright (one of the men behind Retroactive, a film I rather liked) and producer Glen Tedham had the itch to adapt a Stephen King story. Not surprisingly, they discovered that the sequel rights to The Mangler were available (and dirt cheap, I'd imagine). A script was quickly banged out, a to-be-refurbished military base outside Vancouver was secured, and after a twenty-day shooting schedule, The Mangler 2 was in the can.
Chelse Swain stars as Jo Newton, the troubled daughter of a billionaire who made his fortune in the security sector. Someone hacked into the website of the ritzy private school Jo attends, leaving a rather unflattering image of Headmaster Badian (Lance Henriksen). Jo, after a bizarre sequence where she breaks into her father's hi-tech corporate offices, is among just five students left behind at the school to determine who is responsible, with the Sword of Damocles dangling perilously over prom night if the group of stereotypes is unsuccessful in their search. Putting her script kiddie hax0r skills to good use, Jo lashes out yet again and infects the military-grade computer system that runs the school with the Mangler 2.0 virus. (Get it? Mangler 2.0 in the movie The Mangler 2? Brilliant!) The computer, as is often the case, decides to kill everyone. This leaves Jo and her band of clichés -- which includes the spunky sexpot (Daniella Evangelista), the "funny" black guy (Dexter Bell), the stoner (Miles Meadows), Jo's clean-cut love interest (Will Sanderson), and ze Franch-Canadian chef (Philippe Bergeron) -- fighting for their lives against the omnipresent menace.
As you may have noticed from the plot summary above, The Mangler 2 is a sequel in name only. There are no returning characters, nor is there any mention of the events that occurred in the first film. A death-by-laundry kill scene is intended to loosely interconnect the two, along with the general theme of a force controlling inanimate objects. Still, change the name of the computer virus and The Mangler 2 could just as easily be a sequel to, say, 1993's Ghost In The Machine, which used a similar basic plot and actually managed to be moderately entertaining. Writer/director Michael Hamilton-Wright boasted several times in the behind-the-scenes featurette and in the commentary track that The Mangler 2 was written in just eight days. Though he seems proud of this achievement, the scant amount of time devoted to the screenplay is painfully evident. The dialogue is excruciatingly bad, and one character, to my complete and total astonishment, actually says, "Take a picture. It'll last longer." Philippe Bergeron's performance as the school chef gets my nod as the single worst of 2001. Though his character is obviously intended to be foreign, I couldn't figure out what accent he was trying to use. Imagine Father Guido Sarducci after spending a couple of years in France and you'll be somewhere in the ballpark. Though a Parisian inflection comes and goes, I was astonished to discover in the disc's supplemental material that this is really how Bergeron sounds. Yikes.
It's worth noting, though, that I am a devout slasher fan, and I don't really need clever dialogue or skilled acting to be entertained. The Mangler 2 follows the disappointing trend of fully-clothed, bloodless teen slashers that have gobbled up so much space on rental shelves over the past five years. After trimming out a couple of four-letter words, this movie wouldn't require any cuts or alterations of its content to be ready for a long life on TBS. The kill scenes are unbelievably unimaginative, often involving a wire lurching slowly across the frame. I wish I were kidding, but two of the deaths in a movie with an already low body count involve wires picking up sharp objects and decapitating people. If you can resist laughing as a comically oversized pair of hedge clippers held by a thick mess of wires follows a guy around a corridor, you're a stronger man than I can claim to be. The deaths all occur off-screen, and it's impossible to maintain any real sense of dread as these scenes are over within a matter of seconds after they've begun. Pacing is often clunky as a result, as quite a bit of time tends to pass between kills without any real payoff.
There's absolutely no gore whatsoever, and aside from a light smattering in the laundry scene and fleeting glimpses of a couple of corpses, the Mangler virus' reign of terror doesn't even leave any blood or assorted fluids behind. The requisite t&a is limited to the admittedly very cute Daniella Evangelista bouncing about in a bikini for the duration of the film, but apparently the producers wouldn't pony up enough cash to convince anyone but the guys to take off their tops. Sex scenes? Forget about it. That might all sound sexist on my part, but nudity and sex are tenets of the teen slasher subgenre. Trying to pass off a movie like The Mangler 2 without those elements would be like releasing a drama where no one falls in/out of love and no one dies. It's incomplete.
While I'm on the subject of "incomplete', near the end of The Mangler 2, the character of Cory Banks disappears. He doesn't die, as far as I can tell, and no references are made to Cory for what little time remains of the movie. He's following the remaining survivors and, a quick cut later, simply disappears. This is the sort of anti-logic that's so pervasive throughout The Mangler 2. How can a computer control the movement of random strips of wires? What kind of software for downloading a virus fills the entire screen and uses skull images to indicate the progress? Why couldn't a school partially funded by a billionaire have a website coded by someone other than an eighth-grader in 1994? I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but with little else to draw my interest, these annoying details seemed far more prominent than they may have if incorporated into a more entertaining movie.
Though The Mangler 2 is unquestionably among my least favorite movies from 2001, and this is from someone who owns Glitter. Regardless of how I may feel about the movie, there's no denying that Artisan Entertainment has pulled out all the stops for its release on DVD. It's a shame they couldn't do they same with Ginger Snaps or Sleepless, but that's a rant for another time...
Video: The Mangler 2 is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Whatever stock was used gives the film a dated look, and I'd have no trouble believing that The Mangler 2 was shot at some unspecified point at the early '90s if the extras on the DVD didn't directly specify otherwise. The palette isn't exactly bursting with vibrancy, and the largely dull colors rarely exhibit much warmth or life. Though no shots in the film were ever soft to the point of, say, seeming out of focus, sharpness didn't seem to be all quite there, with some moments seeming less crisp than most others. The image as a whole is not particularly detailed, though the source material used is in fine shape. Speckling never appeared to any appreciable degree, and I didn't spot any print damage or nasty compression artifacts. The Mangler 2 is not a stunningly beautiful movie, but the presentation is acceptable and reflective of its budget.
Audio: The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is flat and lifeless, lacking the sort of crispness and clarity I've come to expect from DVDs. There's nothing terribly flawed about the soundtrack, but it sounds like I'm watching cable with matrixed surrounds and slightly heavier subwoofer activity. Given The Mangler 2's relatively low budget, this may be about as much as can be expected. I didn't perform an A/B comparison with the 2.0 stereo surround track, but I wouldn't expect there to be a world of difference between the two. Dialogue is easily discernable, and the techno-lite soundtrack and contributions from Vancouver-based SunLikeStar sound respectable but shouldn't provide much of a workout for most systems. Strictly average for this sort of movie. Also included are English and Spanish subtitles, along with English closed captioning.
Supplements: Writer/director Michael Hamilton-Wright, producer Glen Tedham, and actor Philippe Bergeron contribute a feature-length commentary track that's more interesting than the movie itself, not that that's saying much. Quite a bit of time is spent talking about the location used for the movie and how the script was adapted accordingly. There's also a fair amount of discussion about how certain shots and effects came together, the low number of takes, what it's like being a first-time director, both the cast and the casting process...nothing beyond the usual. I tend to enjoy commentaries with more than one participant because it keeps discussion more active and lively, and there are only a couple of fairly lengthy pauses here. The original film is only briefly mentioned, more as an aside than anything else, and they didn't seem to notice Cory's abrupt disappearance. All three men seem to be very fond of the movie, though their comments didn't do much to change my opinion of The Mangler 2.
The outtakes reel (in anamorphic widescreen) runs a couple of minutes long and mostly consists of actors flubbing lines and difficulty interacting with parts of the sets. There is also an EPK-style 'behind the scenes' featurette, which will be of little interest to anyone who's watched the movie and listened to the commentary. As is far too often the case with these sorts of featurettes, far too much time is spent rehashing the plot and actors describing their characters. There are also two music videos by SunLikeStar, "50/50" and "Day Survive", off of their debut album "Inverse". The songs are radio-friendly hard-rock, incorporating some electronic elements, and the videos are nicely polished, though some of the CGI in the "Day Survive" video is embarassing. Rounding out the supplements are a letterboxed theatrical trailer (though the title at the end is so aliased and video-ish that I couldn't imagine seeing it on the big screen) and cast/crew bios.
Conclusion: It shouldn't come as too much of a shock that The Mangler 2, a sequel to one of the more reviled studio horror movies of the '90s, isn't that great. I'm hard-pressed to find much to say about the movie that could remotely be construed as positive. Its treatment on DVD is fairly impressive, though, but I can't imagine too many people would be interested enough in The Mangler 2 to delve deeply into its supplemental material. I can't recommend this disc as a purchase, but it may make for a fun rental for MST3K fans revved up for a little DIY riffing. Rent It.
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