The Mangler (1995)
A Killer What?
A steam-ironing machine in an industrial laundry company. From the look of things it was built in 1893 but still being used in what appears to be modern times in the movie so I’m going to assume it’s sometime in the early 90s. The machine gets a taste of virgin’s blood and then eats an old lady who has some antacids laced with nightshade on her and gets possessed with a demon but it’s already possessed with a demon so I don’t know what significance any of that other stuff actually had.
Is It Any Good?
Yes and no. I’m no great fan of the filmography of Tobe Hooper. I naturally loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I’ll defend the Hooper-directed sequel as a genuinely great film until the day I die but after that his films kind of a drop off. Invaders From Mars is a fun kid-friendly horror movie, Lifeforce is dumb fun, Poltergeist is good but not as good as you remember, and there’s a few other gems here and there but largely I find myself largely uninterested in his movies.
Stephen King is a polarizing figure in the horror world, a lot of Americans grew up reading his books well before they should have and he has a special place in their heart. Some literary snobs dismiss King’s popularity as nostalgic but there’s a certain alchemy to King’s writing that makes it work and he’s probably the only author I would say is a master of nightmares. Now what I mean by that is nightmares are often nonsensical, our subconscious doesn’t care about fine details so it just conjures images and laces them with emotions that when brought into the light of day seem patently ridiculous, but in the moment they’re real and terrifying. King is the only author I’ve known to capture that quality outside of the unconscious. There’s nothing scary about a long-ass finger with several hundred knuckles crawling out of the bathroom sink, that’s ridiculous, but King has a story where that very thing happens and it’s terrifying. King’s secret power is that he can sell stupid as scary and that’s the problem with adaptations of King stories, they can’t translate that power.
The Mangler is story in Night Shift, a short story collection that includes the stories that would become Maximum Overdrive, Sometimes They Come Back, two segments in the movie Cat’s Eye, The Lawnmower Man (sort of, not really), Children of the Corn, The Graveyard Shift, and this movie. With the exception of Cat’s Eye, all of these movies are vastly inferior to the stories upon which they’re based.
The Mangler is about a steam-ironing machine that, through a random confluence of events becomes possessed with a demon. A local cop and his brother-in-law figure out what’s going on and perform an exorcism on the machine only to realize too late that the machine’s first victim, an old lady who works for the laundry company, had gel capsules containing belladonna (a.k.a. Deadly Nightshade, I don’t know if this was invented from whole cloth or if antacids used to contain trace amounts of nightshade) which is a powerful ingredient in black magic rituals and means that the demon inside the machine is way above their pay grade and by attempting to exorcise it they’ve only managed to piss it off. The machine literally comes to life and our lead character finishes relating the story as he hears the whir of machinery coming in the distance. It’s a chilling story for a number of reasons, primarily the simplicity with which it is related and the seemingly accidental way in which the monster was created.
The movie throws both of those elements out with the trash. In this version The Mangler has always been possessed by a demon and the powerful people in the county take turns sacrificing their 16-year-old daughters to the machine as part of a contract that also involves them cutting off a finger and signing their initials in blood. So there’s a corrupt town of demon worshipers in the plot that has NOTHING to do with the main plot of the cop vs. the steam iron, the brief intersection of these plots could be cut and lose nothing.
The movie also adds a villain in the form of Bill Gartley (Robert Englund in hilariously bad old-man make-up) who does not fit with the tone of the movie at all. Englund growls in a cartoony rasp somewhere in the register of Yosemite Sam and has a ridiculously opulent tycoon apartment in the office above a New England laundry company. The movie gives him leg braces and a milked over eye just in case you couldn’t figure out that this political cartoon of a rich man from the early 1900s is the bad guy.
Along with Gartley is the damsel shoe-horned into the picture, his niece Sherry who is 16 years old. This is absurd because Vanessa Pike, the actress playing Sherry doesn’t look a day younger than 30.
There’s also a subplot involving a possessed ice box which a creepy anecdote related to the main character in the short story but is here brought into the forefront as part of the a-plot because of bad writing.
When the movie stops fucking around and gets back to the story it’s meant to be telling it’s actually very good. The machine is over-done but suitably menacing, there’s some nice gore effects, even Ted Levine playing the grumpiest police officer in the entire world works well here. But the entire crux of the story, that the machine is possessed because of the accident and they don’t realize how bad the situation is until it’s too late, is stepped all over by the devil worship plot. If the machine was already possessed then what difference did the virgin blood and belladonna make? Did these things cause the demon to get a promotion? They don’t have anything to do with the plot anymore so their inclusion just adds to the over-complication of the story.
The Mangler ruins what made the short story work so well but it is overall a decent film. Unfortunately it tries to be a gothic neo-noir and that doesn’t really jibe with Stephen King’s devilishly simple New England horror story. Even though the story is only about 10 pages I think one could make a no-nonsense and genuinely scary 82 minute movie out of this but Tobe Hooper’s hour and 45 minute movie tries to do and be too many things and is an enjoyable fiasco as a result.
Watch, Toss, or Buy?
Watch it.