Not wanting to dwell on the classics I've seen some turkeys in my time, but none as bad as Tobe Hooper's horrifyingly awful 'The Mangler'.
Released in 1995 I spent a hard earned £4.50 to see this film in the cinema. I wuz robbed.
From start to finish The Mangler is bad.
Based on a Stephen King short story, the film looked promising. After all, Stephen King was the man behind one of the scariest films of all time - Salem's Lot - a film which Hooper himself took from page to screen.
Even the story behind the story was quite interesting. King, as a struggling young father and aspiring author in the 1960s, took a gruelling job in a sweatshop laundry where, to pass the time and exercise his imagination, he fantasized about the hulking machinery there as being an evil entity, waiting to kill. He penned The Mangler, a short story about just that, a possessed washing machine, and made it a minor classic. Now here comes Hollywood in the 1990s, hanging its story lines not on mood and atmosphere but on in-your-face special effects and adolescent gore.
Tobe Hooper destroyed the short story with a naff screenplay which he penned himself and drafted in Freddy Krueger star Robert Englund to play the lead role of the factory owner where the devilish mangler resides.
The film is a flop and 13 years on I still feel robbed of the ill-spent £4.50 and 106 long minutes which I'll never get back again.
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Towen wrote...
Come along Kev old bean, did you really expect a Tobe Hooper film called The Mangler to be anything other than rubbish?
Involve yourself in his 2003 bloodfest Toolbox Murders. Easily the best and sickest film he's produced since Chainshaw Massacre.
Posted by: Towen | June 6, 2008 9:43 AM