I think it’s an established fact that Stephen King and AI doesn’t mix. It’s not that the author couldn’t write it, it’s just that every now and then, a movie comes along and wraps a crappy technopobia ot around an unrelated short story of his and simply just hopes for the best. With this in mind, you’d think that filmmakers would have learnt the costly lesson taught by The Lawnmower Man debacle; an infamous case of a movie burying King’s tale of a possessed lawnmower within a sci-fi thriller about virtual reality and trying to sell the resulting flick off the back of his name. Needless to say, the film not only wasn’t particularly good, but King himself unleashed his lawyers in order to get his name removed from the product.
Fast forward to a decade later, and another bunch of scrappy filmmakers are at it again with The Mangler 2, an insanely unnecessary sequel that swaps out a possessed mangler for a demonic computer virus that lays waste to a high school. There may be no mangler involved, but that won’t mean you still can’t be crushed by disappointment.
We all wanted attention from our disapproving folks when we were growing up, but aspiring hacker Joanne Newton takes it to the next level when she decks herself in black sweats and a balaclava and breaks into her father’s computer company. However, after getting caught she buys herself a one way ticket to an upper class boarding school that prides itself on its technical prowess. You see, despite being fairly creepy, the Dean of the school, Headmaster Bradeen takes security incredibly seriously and is in the midst of installing a new, bleeding edge, security system in place while the majority of his students leave for a holiday during spring break.
Due to an accusatory letter written as a prank, Bradeen punishes the usual suspects by stopping them from going on the trip, but in an effort to make the best of their situation, Dan, Will, Emily, Corey and Jo all try to make the best of a bad situation. However, annoyed at being accused of the prank, Jo uses her technical knowhow to get a little payback that goes horribly wrong, but rather than putting thumbtacks on Bradeen’s chair or egging his car, she instead hacks into that new security system and infects it with a new super virus ominously named “Mangler 2.0” – which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, right?
Before you know it, Mangler 2.0 has turned malevolent and is picking off the remaining faculty by weaponizing cables and household appliances, which immediately leads us to believe that this is no ordinary virus. Soon it turns its attentions to the five remaining students and Jo realises that she may have been somewhat hasty, especially when Mangler 2.0 uses Bradeen’s body as a meat puppet mouthpiece.
The original Mangler may not admittedly be a stone cold classic, but director Tobe Hooper managed to deliver a memorably bizarre and strange entry into the Stephen King cannon that had a maniacal performance by Robert Englund and a demonically possessed mangler flattening people left and right. Basically what I’m trying to say that even though Hooper turned in a lesser adaptation, at least it was memorable even though the concept of a killer piece of laundry equipment was nothing less than preposterous – which is a damn sight more than what we get with the impressively rotten sequel. To be fair, much like the majority of Stephen King sequels, I’m actually fucking stunned that of all the adaptations to the author that exist, someone not only thought that the Mangler was a bankable title, but actually then went on to include absolutely nothing from the original flick.
There’s no explanation for why a movie about a possessed mangler has somehow produced an entirely unrelated sequel concerning an evil computer virus, but to question something as erratic as the horror genre was in the 2000s is nothing short of a futile act – so it’s probably best we just plough into it and get this done. A Canadian production made on obviously limited means, Mangler 2 proves to be something of a threadbare affair that comes with all the weak performances and terrible production values that you’d expect. However, offering a slight glimmer of hope is the fact that fan favorite character actor Lance Henriksen is in hand which hopefully suggest that the legendary character actor may offer some deranged scenery chewing worthy of Robert Englund’s role in the original.
Alas, it pains me to tell you that this is not the case and if Henriksen had phoned in his performance any more, it might have affected the schools modem and inadvertently saved the day by crashing the demonic virus. Why the actor agreed to be in this bargin basement bilge is beyond me; did he owe money to the Candadian mob? Did he lose a bet? Whatever the reason, he shows up looking truly bewildered at his own presence and proceeds to give a performance that suggests that not only had he’d never seen a script, but that he had to read his lines of an autocue in only a single take.
Still, say what you will about Henriksen, he still manages to act everyone else off the screen, even when he has wires hanging out of his face and is dangling from the ceiling like big, slumming spider. The rest of the cast wander around the poorly lit school with all the survival instincts of navel lint as they wait for their inevitable, absurd death. Yes, I understand that the computer virus is demonic in nature, but scenes of it superheating the water in the sprinkler system to boil a victim alive in a scalding shower, or getting choked to death by cables lack any tension and just feel the wrong kind of silly. It also doesn’t help that the majority of film is set to awful techno music that inspires more annoyance than threatening ambience and there’s many instances of the filmmakers displaying some amusing displays of incompetence, such as one of the Mangler’s POV cams inexplicably being located on the floor or a french chef being used as some baffling (and unfunny) comic relief.
I’m assuming that The Mangler 2 somehow managed to dodge any legal ramifications because it’s sequel status gives it some sort of firewall against any litigious attempts; but I don’t know, after watching this ill-judged sequel, maybe some films need to be sued. Don’t be fooled by any connection to Stephen King, Lance Henriksen’s filmography, or even the original movie, the Mangler 2 only succeeds in mangling what little credibility the first film had and needs to be deleted post haste.
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