Mangler, The (1995)

Posted on Jun 19, 2002 under Horror |

Directed by Tobe Hooper
Written by Stephen David Brooks, Tobe Hooper, and Harry Alan Towers, based on the short story by Stephen King
Starring
- Robert Englund
- Ted Levine
- Daniel Matmor
- Jeremy Crutchley
- Vanessa Pike

Somebody once said (and if no one can remember who originally said it, I’ll just go ahead and take credit for it) that there have been more cinematic atrocities committed in Stephen King’s name than in anyone else’s. I suppose it’s the price you pay for fame — Stevie sells more books than anybody, so everyone’s lined up to buy the film rights to all his short stories (since the novels are already spoken for by the big studios) and turn them into a movie that they can proudly slap his name on, while the King cringes and doesn’t dare go near a multiplex in his hometown.

In fact, this movie shows all the earmarks of being conceived entirely by the marketing department. “Just think of the voiceover for the coming attraction, Leo — ‘From master of horror Stephen King and director Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, starring Robert Englund of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and Ted Levine of Silence of the Lambs — a new kind of horror!’ Now all we need is a script, and we’re in business!”

So they came up with a script, and that’s where the carefully-constructed house of cards came crashing down.

“My secret, m’boy? It’s easy — latex doesn’t sweat!”

If you’ve read the original short story, from the Night Shift collection, then you already know it’s about a demon-possessed industrial laundry iron. (Why? Because King did a stint in an industrial laundry back in his starving writer days, and a lot of his work is based on his personal experiences. Which explains why so many of his recent novels have full-time novelists as their protagonists.) Those things are big, scary-ass machines, so it’s no wonder that he wrote a horror story about it. But short stories are, well, short. There’s just enough space in there to put forth a concept, to sketch in a scary situation. To make a feature film out of a short story, you either have to flesh out ancillary situations and concerns that are only indicated in passing in the story (the classic King example being Children of the Corn), or you have to add entirely new characters and situations to fill up a two-hour running time (the best example here being The Lawnmower Man, which has exactly two points of similarity to the Stephen King story: the title, and a single line of dialogue). The Mangler tries to do both of these simultaneously. Comparisons to walking and chewing bubblegum are apt.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Frawley had a pressing matter to attend to…”

The most effective moments in the movie, really, come at the very beginning, as we’re introduced to the harried and sweaty women working in the Blue Ribbon Laundry, and the huge steam iron nicknamed “the Mangler.” It’s an imposing piece of machinery, with huge rollers and gargantuan exposed bicycle-style chains with links the size of loaves of bread, hungrily pulling sheets into its castiron maw as fast as the workers can carefully lay them in the opening. All of this is overseen by evil old man Bill Gartley (Robert Englund under layers of latex), a sneering capitalist in leg braces.

Things start going wrong when Gartley’s teenaged niece Sherry (Vanessa Pike), also a peon employee, cuts her hand on a handle of the Mangler just as two doofuses (doofi?) bump into the machine while carrying an old-style icebox. Sparks fly and such. Then a little later, elderly Mrs. Frawley (Vera Blacker) accidentally spills her antacids into the machine, and while trying to pick them off the conveyor belt, she kinda gets pulled in and Mangled. (The machine’s also got the auto-folding attachment, which doesn’t help any.)

The cop called in is world-weary burnout John Hunton (Ted Levine). Naturally, he’s tortured by the death of his wife in an auto accident, because all police detectives have to be battered and traumatized by life, right? But before he can do more than puke at the sight of the hospital-cornered Mrs. Frawley, the sheriff and coroner show up, immediately rule it an accidental death, confirm that the safety cutoff bar on the Mangler is in fact working as it should be, and everything’s back to business as normal.

“All those years of acting school, and I have to wear the same damned expression for the whole movie.”

Hunton goes home and uses his next-door neighbor as his shrink. Fortuitously, his neighbor, Mark (Daniel Matmor), also happens to be the brother of Hunton’s deceased wife, as well as a PhD parapsychologist. Boy, I bet those are in demand in semi-rural Riker’s Valley, Maine. Good thing that he’s there, though — because as other accidents start happening around the laundry (a steam hose breaks loose and scalds three women), who else would put together the pieces and start to suspect that the machine is actually possessed, through a freak set of circumstances which randomly turns out to be a summoning spell?

All of which is pretty much an expansion of King’s original story — all except that part about the sheriff and the coroner covering things up as fast as they can. It seems that Gartley’s got some strange power over the high and mighty in town, linked somehow to the Mangler, which has been a fixture in the laundry for generations. According to this storyline, the Mangler’s always been possessed, and there’s a string of unaccounted-for sixteen-year-old girls stretching back for years, girls all coming from the town’s wealthy families; apparently they were sacrifices to the machine, in return for… um… Boy, that part really never came together, since it’s never made clear exactly what a possessed steam iron can grant to its worshippers. April freshness, maybe? And there’s also some falderall about how those who lose body parts to the Mangler somehow become connected to it, and thus infused with its pernicious EE-vil.

And frankly, not only does this subplot not gel with the main one derived from King’s story, it flat-out contradicts it. Why are we worrying about the Mangler just now being possessed, when it’s already supposed to be long-possessed?

Um… freon leak?

Most of this information is revealed by the “Pictureman” (Jeremy Crutchley), the ancient police photographer who has intimate knowledge of the darker goings-on in town. Unlike most of the other characters, who manage to be one-dimensionally annoying, the Pictureman’s got two entirely separate annoying sides to him. First up, the actor’s a young guy — probably in his twenties — done up with some incredibly unconvincing age appliances. One wonders if they did it that way solely for the purpose of making Englund’s makeup job look credible by comparison. Secondly, he’s a walking anachronism, with his pork-pie hat and antiquated single-flash camera. In fact, the whole production seems plagued with a half-hearted attempt to go for a stylized, period look, but never accomplishes more than making you wonder why. (I guess it’s hard to keep the production design consistent when the production’s split between Hollywood, London, and South Africa[!!].)

The movie works hard to distract us from looking askance at the plot, if only by providing intensely silly distractions. For instance, there’s the possessed icebox! That’s right, the coil-topped icebox that the two yayhoos were carrying gets delivered to a suburban house — conveniently, in Hunton’s own neighborhood. No clue is given as to why an obsolete icebox is delivered to a house at random and left sitting in the front yard, but no matter: The point is that the icebox is also EE-vil from its contact with the Mangler, and thus it lures in and suffocates a little boy, as well as a handful of birds — and it almost eats Mark’s arm! Enraged, Hunton takes a sledgehammer to it, and when he knocks the coil off the top, a spray of post-production blue energy shoots out the top. This convinces Mark that the Mangler is indeed EE-vil, and they have to be careful in trying to exorcise it so that they don’t accidentally release the EE-vil. (Which only begs the question, what exactly are you going to do about all that EE-vil blue light that just sprayed out of the top of Lucifer’s beer-cooler?)

What? No freight elevator? OSHA’s gonna hear about this!

If you’ve read the story, then you know exactly how the “surprise” ending works — and even if you didn’t, you can probably figure it out with all of the meaningful shots of Mrs. Frawley’s antacids (which Hunton swipes on the sly — you know, tortured detectives all have ulcers). Or at least, you know one of the endings; given the many disparate plot threads here, it’s only natural that the movie take ten minutes to end all of them — and as long as we’ve got two mutually-exclusive plot threads running in tandem, we might as well throw credibility to the wind and end up with the offhand revelation that the laundry building has a basement foundation which is actually a miles-deep pit, complete with a stone-arched spiral staircase running around the edge like we’re suddenly exploring the catacombs. (In fact, as our heroes are running down, I think I saw Wesley Snipes running up.)

As I mentioned, the movie’s at its best in the opening scenes: The impersonal, grinding power of the Mangler when it’s working as it’s supposed to is the most memorable image to be found here. After that, it’s just a steady decline into storytelling ineptitude, until the only meaningful conflict to be found at the climax is the one between boredom and ridicule.