Do you ever sit down and watch some unasked for sequel to a movie that wasn’t that great to begin with and wonder why the filmmakers signed on in the first place? I mean, I can almost get why a hungry, rookie director would sign on to do a low-budget, crappy Hellraiser sequel during the 2000s because the original is an undisputed banger, and I can almost forgive someone hitching their creative wagon to the seemingly endless Children Of The Corn franchise because it’s a handy and easy back door for attaching yourself to the sizable legacy of Stephen King – but what the hell did the directors of The Mangler Reborn think they were going to bring to the table?
Emerging in the mid-ninties, Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler was an eccentric but flawed entry in the King cannon that not only embraced to lunacy of possessed laundry equipment, but even accentuated it with a completely gonzo performance by Robert Englund, but the woeful, 2002 sequel spectacularly shit the bed by making the villain a demonic computer virus. Think that the Mangler can’t sink any lower – think again, because this one’s so bad, it’ll definitely make you fold…
Ever wonder what happened to the satanic laundry press at the end of The Mangler? No, of course you don’t, why would you – but here’s what happened anyway in case we have some extra masochistic fans in the audience today. It seems that the busted parts were purchased by machinery enthusiast and professional repair man Hadley Watson who decided to rebuild the machine in the relative safety of his upstairs spare room. But before you start to question the safety of building a huge, heavy, folding machine on the second floor of a house, a far more pressing concern than the structural integrity of the house arises when the demonic entity within the contraption starts exerting it’s finding will once more and turns Hadley into its murderous drone. After killing his own wife with a mallet, Hadley now waits for calls to come in for his repair skills and then heads out in his van to beat the brains in of his new victims and them brings them back home to feed them alive to the killer contraption he now calls his master.
Meanwhile, we meet Jamie, who is undergoing a bad day for the ages when she loses her job as an executive and is dumped by her boyfriend in a single day. However, things are about to get spectacularly worse after calling in Hadley to fix a broken shower and suddenly finds herself knocked out in a burlap sack and locked in a room to await her mangler-themed fate.
While you’d think that her only chance of survival is her wits, additional help is at hand in the form of Rick and Mike, a father and son team of petty thieves who find that breaking into Hadley’s house is the last score they may ever shoot for…
By all accounts, The Mangler 2 was an unfeasibly awful sequel that bungled Tobe Hooper’s flawed original to an unfathomable degree. Swapping out every single element of King’s story, the film instead gave us a malevolent computer virus (also called the Mangler), some sub-Maximum Overdrive killer appliances and the sight of an undead Lance Henriksen dangling around on wires, acting like a thrift store Cenobite. Well, in some unthinkable twist of fate, there’s a good chance that The Mangler Reborn is actually worse as it somehow manages to look less polished and professional than a sequel that looks like it was made over a weekend by students. But before we really dig into the rancid meat of this baffling threequel, I suppose I have to point out the (very) rare points that aren’t utterly awful.
For a start, the franchise has always contained a legendary face from the horror genre and joining Englund from the first film and Henriksen from the second, it’s time to give Phantasm’s Reggie Banister his very dubious flowers as he plays a lock picker who turns out to be fairly shit at lock picking with his usual, breezy charm. However, while he strains to make bland conversations about smoking and more aimless house exploration than someone playing Resident Evil blindfolded, he is doomed to fail from a script that does him absolutely no favours. The other thing that I suppose could be classed as a plus point is that at least the filmmakers tried to connect it somewhat to the original – but if this is literally the best I can come up with to big up the film, you know that things are exceedingly grim.
Bannister aside, I found that watching the other performances had me wondering if I was actually watching a bunch of failed audition tapes edited together to try and make a movie and I’ve seen groups of garden gnomes give a more convincing ensemble performance. If Aimee Brooks’ heroine lacked any more colour, she’d be transparent and would probably be able to escape her prison simply by phasing through a wall like a ghost and Scott Speiser’s junior house breaker is given virtually nothing to do but sound worried over the radio and then proceed to make every single wrong decision you could possibly make in a horror movie. Last of all, Weston Blakesley’s lumbering villain has all the presence of a coat rack and you find yourself wondering whether his prominent eyebags are a side-effect of demonic possession or and indication that the actor may want to rethink some lifestyle choices. But while it’s easy to fire off pot shots at the figures blundering around on-screen, the real issues here lay with a miniscule budget and some devastatingly flat direction.
I’m still trying to figure out exactly why anyone would want to sign themselves up for a follow-up to The Mangler 2 because surely the hopes of moving on to bigger and better things are conservatively measured at zero. Yet Erik Gardner and Matt Cunningham have given us quite possibly one of the most lifeless and cheap horror sequels ever made. Even the opening credits are literally typed on strips of paper and filmed with a piss-coloured light in an attempt to shave a few bucks of the production (presumably to pay for Bannister), and the gore mostly is just people screaming while being sprayed with fake blood as the eponymous machine drags them into its blade-lined maw, but at no point does the film tip into the so-bad-it’s-good territory thanks to it chiefly being both as lifeless as a used condom and similarly unappealing to look at too.
Taking more of a Christine approach to the possessed appliance theme of the film as the titular machine steers its tired-looking meat-puppet through some of the most dull horror sequences of all time, The Mangler Reborn feels like something that should have been purged at birth. Still, if I had to come up with something truly good to say about it, it would be this: at least it’ll squash the urge to make a Mangler 4 flatter than an industrially folded bedsheet.
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