Mangler 2, The (2001)

Posted on Jul 17, 2002 under Horror, Sci-fi |

Written and directed by Michael Hamilton-Wright
Starring
- Lance Henriksen
- Chelsea Swain
- Will Sanderson
- Philippe Bergeron
- Miles Meadows
- Dexter Bell
- Daniella Evangelista

In a simply stunning example of counterintuitive and counterintelligent film production, we have here a sequel that is in no way a sequel. Not only is there no continuity of characters, talent, or crew from the original Mangler to this one, there’s not even the dubious connection of similar theme or plot device (such as what’s kept the Howling “franchise” running). The original movie was about a world-weary detective investigating a possessed industrial steam engine; this one deals with a bunch of teens trapped by a self-aware computer virus. They only just barely belong in the same film genre (thanks to the catch-all nature of “horror”), much less the same franchise. Granted, the first movie forcefully failed to win friends and influence people, so a direct sequel was out of the question — but why would you want to make a sequel to so ill-received a movie anyway?

Obviously, I wouldn’t be grousing if The Mangler 2 were in any way a good movie. But be honest. Do you think that the people who would try to connect this direct-to-video shelf-filler to a low-budget bomb that failed to appear on anyone’s radar (not even garnering a minimum of cult interest) would then turn around and give us an otherwise worthwhile piece of cinema?

Apparently the Voice of the New Generation is one of whiny entitlement.

The first thing we see is a black-clad and -masked girl sneaking into a secure building at night, thanks to an electronic ID card. At least we’re not given a dishonest advertisement of competence in the opening minutes; no, it’s pretty much dead-on for the caliber of the rest of the movie that, though this girl sneaks all around on her silent toes, she has to pass through three card-unlocked doors, all of which emit a loud buzz as they admit her. Might as well stop bothering to tiptoe, dontcha think?

Her mission turns out to be the introduction of a virus into the building’s high-tech computer system, and she gets caught. There will be no police, though, because she turns out to be Jo (Chelse Swain), a vaguely petulant pseudo-goth who’s also the daughter of the company’s owner, Mr. Newton (Ken Comroux). And why’s she doing this? Eh, she’s bored on her spring break, and she’s got issues with Dad. You know, the normal non-motivations for whiny teenage idiocy. Oh, and by the way, this is our heroine. (Have maladaptive adolescents become such a lucrative demographic that there need to be so damned many movies appealing directly to their vapid mindset?)

Her punishment is to be sent back to her private school — specifically, Royal Collegiate College (which, despite the name, is a high school-level academy). Mr. Newton has donated large quantities to the school, and in exchange is having one of his latest products beta-tested there: a military-level computerized security system, the N2K. (Make up your own funny on what that could stand for.) This sits extremely well with the hard-assed control-freak headmaster, Mr. Badian (Lance Henriksen, looking incredibly old and worn — apparently the effect of having read the script after the contracts were signed). So much so that, over the two-week spring break, he’s had the entire campus wired into the computer (which, we see, is about the size of your average Gateway setup). I mean, EVERYTHING. There are security cameras mounted in all public areas, the system controls everything from the kitchen ovens to the auto-unfolding bleachers in the gym, and the computer speaks to Badian in a voice that sounds like a sultrier Majel Barrett. And, as Badian explains to an assembly of students, there’s also an electrified fence surrounding the campus with enough charge to knock out a 300-lb gorilla. (I’m guessing that it would just make a mature 500-lb male mountain gorilla extremely pissed, then.)

Boy, a career in education sure does age you fast.

Wow! An entire auditorium full of students! That’s kind of an expansive scope isn’t it? Not to worry — in standard low-budget style, we’ll promptly whittle our potential victims down to a manageable handful. It seems that there’s still a little bit of work to be done on the N2K system (really? In that case, wouldn’t it have been a good idea to wait and turn on the electrified fence after everything checks out?), so the geography fieldtrip scheduled for next week will be moved up, and all the students — just barely returned from break, you recall — will leave again. (It’s at least an overnight fieldtrip, too, which certainly seems outside the definition of “fieldtrip” in my own educational experience.)

All the students, that is, except the five prefects of the student houses. Seems that someone defaced the school’s webpage (with an animated GIF of Badian kissing a dog, no less), and if one of these five isn’t the culprit, then at least they have the wherewithal to find out who did it while the others are gone. (Don’t bother asking how they could possibly investigate when there’s no one there to ask. One of them did, and Badian’s answer was positively Presidential in its lack of meaningful content.) The five, who just happen to constitute a circle of friends anyway, are:

Jo — a pretty counterintuitive precept, as she’s also a known troublemaker and lousabout.
Dan (Will Sanderson), a handsome jock who gets all wobble-kneed whenever Jo’s around. He’s also the most obviously non-teenaged teenager here.
Cory (Miles Meadows), whiteboy geek who’s defining characteristic is that he’s trying to get into the pants of…
Emily (Daniella Evangelista), pneumatic prom queen who’s putting up only a half-hearted defense.
Will (Dexter Bell), who’s Black. That may seem like a short character description, but remember, he’s Movie Black, which means that along with the baseline ethnicity comes the characteristic laidback demeanor coupled with jivey banter at hummingbird speed.

“Exploitative? Nah, we’re just trying to keep the costume budget down.”

So that makes five students, plus Badian, the solitary handyman (Jeff Doucette), two teachers (the porn-obsessed cripple (Shawn Reis) and the sauced sexpot (Brenda Campbell)), and the chef (Philippe Bergeron). A word or two are necessary about the chef: from his very first line it’s made obvious that he’s supposed to be a Frenchman, as he berates the N2K as a “useless piece of American garbage”; he also has fleurs de lis all over his kitchen equipment and his cooking smocks. Despite this, and despite the fact that Bergeron is a Quebecois who’s appeared in many French language films, he delivers what may well be the least credible French accent in cinematic history. (Might be because, though the language spoken in Quebec is technically French, the Quebecois accent bears as much resemblance to that of France as a backwoods Kentucky accent bears to the lilt of a BBC announcer.)

So. We’ve got our limited cast, we’ve got our closed location, now all we need is a menace, right? So after Badian gives the five prefects an ultimatum in his office, the five go off for a session of worse-than-average pointless bickering (sponsored by the Pepsi Cola Co., as evidenced by the truckloads of product placement), the upshot of which is that Jo is the common choice for culprit. In a snit, she runs back to her room, powers up her laptop, accesses her favorite hacker’s site, and downloads a new virus: The Mangler, v2.0. I’m guessing, then, that not only is this itty-bitty N2K CPU controlling every possible electrical operation on campus, but it’s also functioning as the school’s single server, thus allowing Jo to infect it? And let’s skip over the whole idea that a security system being beta-tested for military applications has absolutely no virus protection measures whatsoever.

That being done, Jo heads back to the others for more time-wasting bickering, while the virus runs through the system. And apparently, this is one mean sucker, because not only does it immediately infect a military-level system, but it starts killing people. Non-essential characters first, obviously; the handyman’s the first to go, victim of a pair of gardening shears being clutched in animated electrical cables and wires. Yup, apparently this virus can turn all electrical wiring into its own prehensile limbs. Which might make a smidgen of sense if this were supposed to be some electro-supernatural thingie, but since the only sidelong reference to any supernatural possibilities is, well, the title of the movie…

Meanwhile, our fivesome have an impromptu midnight pool party, Dan hits on Jo repeatedly, and Cory and Emily get stoned. (I can only assume that the purpose of the pool party is to make sure that the five spend the rest of the movie in varying states of undress.) All in front of the very obvious security cameras, mind you. In fact, it takes most of the movie before anyone thinks that, hey, we ought not to be doing expellable things and making incriminating statements right in front of the eyes and ears of the security cams. It’s also in front of these cameras that Jo reveals to her peers that she’s unleashed a virus on the system. This prompts one of the few moments of rational thought in the entire film, as everyone points out that, with only the five of them on campus, they consistute the entire pool of suspects for unleashing the virus. Duh.

Insert your own Bill Gates joke here.

So they go on a quest to get into Badian’s office and forge an e-mail to look like he accidentally received the virus — a quest which takes them hither and yon all over the school. Why? Well, mostly to give us time to kill off other minor characters, namely the two teachers. Given that we’re dealing with a malicious AI-like virus running the entire school system, you’d think we could come up with more creative deaths than further lengths of malicious cable, wouldn’t you? But apparently you and I are operating on a higher plane of creativity than our esteemed writer/director.

It’s only after these designated meat characters are disposed of that our feckless fivesome finally runs into some indication that the N2K has tunred malicious. We’re now, by the way, a full hour into our running time, and our protagonists have finally found out that they’re in danger? Gosh, does this mean the movie’s finally about to start getting good?

Oh, come now. If there were any good nickels to be spent here, I’m sure at least one of them would have been dropped by now. With the help of the chef (trapped in the deep freeze by the computer, but rescued by stoned students looking to appease their munchies), they run all over back and forth across campus, looking for turn-off switches or escape routes or one damned thing or another. Along the way, infected computers have a tendency to display the supposed-to-be-menacing phrase “YOU’VE BEEN MANGLED” (why do I have an image of Groucho Marx knocking the ash off his cigar every time that comes up?).

Our denouement comes as Jo thinks to upload a unsolvable fractal geometry program into the N2K, tying up all of its processor power. (Yeah, that idea was old by the time Spock used it on the Enterprise computer when it was possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper.) Oh, and her final confrontation involved Badian as a marionetted extension of the computer, calling to mind Robert Vaughn’s sister in Superman 3. (This is the second movie I can think of in which Henriksen ends up playing a low-rent Borg; I don’t know if I’m going to have the stamina to sit through Knights as part of this binge, though.) And there’s also an intimation that the Mangler will escape the school’s system via the internet a la The Lawnmower Man, which means we’ve got more overlapping ripoffs in the climax than any movie since Titan A.E.

Ew boy, another over-the-hill educator trying to be all edge and hip.

As you may have surmised from my scanty descriptions of the actions of each character, none of them qualify as “characters” in the accepted sense. I believe the correct term would be “script puppets,” doing basically whatever the movie needs them to do to move us in the vague direction of the closing credits. Which would be bad enough if the script had other defensible elements, but it doesn’t. To much is left unexplained, unexplored, and unexploited to make this even worthwhile trash cinema. Is the Mangler virus an actual AI, or is that simply an aftereffect of the N2K, which was apparently modelled on Mr. Newton’s own brainwaves (a fact mentioned once, then forgotten)? If so, wouldn’t it have more of a goal to teach Jo a lesson specifically? And how does any of this lead up to the obligatory “I love you, Daddy” hugfest in the winddown? I mean, how does Jo’s escape from a crazed computer give a cathartic end to her issues with her father? And who thought it a good idea to pepper the movie with pop-cultural references of the most quickly dateable kind? (When the Borged-out Badian tells Jo, “So tell me what you want, what you really really want,” I seriously considered turning off the movie with only four minutes left to go.)

I don’t know who thought that this movie was in any way a Good Idea, or who they thought it would appeal to. Too slow for attention-deficit horror fans, too techno-innacurate for computer geeks, too proudly unoriginal for cinema buffs… I can only assume that the driving force behind its production was to make the original Mangler look good by comparison.