
The Mangler is a not-so-great movie from two greats.
RIP Tobe Hooper.
This year has been a big blow for horror fans already. We lost George A. Romero back in July, one of the true legends of horror. He not only made great horror movies, but he invented a whole genre that is still massively popular to this day.
And now, Tobe Hooper at the not-too-old age of 74. Hooper is responsible for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, another one of the most influential horror films of all time. During my teens that was absolutely my movie. I owned two different versions on DVD then bought it on Blu-Ray, watched the director’s commentaries, watched every special feature, and basically upset my family with the constant screaming and chainsaw sounds coming from the living room.
Apart from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper had… ups and downs. Another big up with Poltergeist, which became another pop culture icon. And I’d consider Lifeforce another high point, though it’s a bit to weird to become iconic.
He also collaborated with Stephen King a couple of times. On Salem’s Lot, and on 1995’s The Mangler, based on a short story from King’s Night Shift anthology.
The Mangler begins similarly to Christine. In an industrial laundry warehouse, a worker ( Vanessa Pike) gets her hand mangled in the steam press, spraying blood all through the machine. Later, an old lady worker loses her pills in the machine, reaches in to retrieve them, and gets mangled. In an accident which frankly seems more like her fault than the Mangler’s.
Officer John Hunton (Ted Levine) investigates the injuries and deaths. Mark, his brother-in-law who looks and sounds just like Edgar Wright, has a theory. He’s a demonologist, and he thinks that the machine is possessed by a demon.
The pair have to exorcise the demon, before old man Gartley sacrifices his daughter to it for wealth and power.

While Salem’s Lot is a great book elevated to a great movie (well, mini-series), The Mangler is an average short story and turned into a fairly bad film. This is from the period where King was trying to turn anything he could into a scary story, including a completely stationary piece of factory equipment.
As a bad B-movie it’s bad, though it crosses over into entertainingly bad at times. The kills are so over-the-top that they’re just about worth the price of admission. When people stick their hands directly in the Mangler and get sucked in, spraying blood all over the place, it’s great.
Robert Englund is so strange, so obviously doing his own thing with no regard for the movie around him. His character comes with around 74 different bad guy tics and flaws, everything except a thin moustache to twirl.
Really the biggest problem with the movie is that Tobe Hooper made it. If it were a young horror filmmaker’s first film, maybe The Mangler would be more fondly remembered as a silly, fun bad movie. But attach it to a great — a true legend — and it’s sadly just a disappointment.
One thing you can say about Hooper is that he wasn’t afraid to get nuts, and The Mangler is one of the nuttiest.

