Stop the presses!
The Mangler mines the kind of horror you might experience if your tumble dryer was haunted and the washing machine’s spin cycle knew your sins. Tobe Hooper, fresh off having to remind everyone he once made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, took one look at Stephen King’s short story about a demon-possessed industrial laundry press and decided it needed Robert Englund, a biblical amount of steam, and the tonal consistency of an in-house late-shift safety briefing video.
The film’s finds its premise and its punchline in a hulking great machine that crushes laundry and, occasionally, people between its rollers. A woefully miscast Ted Levine, whose moustache alone should have been given second billing, plays a small-town detective while Robert Englund dons so much metalwork and prosthetics he looks like a rejected Cenobite who lost a fight with a boiler. Somewhere between the satanic ritual involving virgin blood and all the industrial plumbing, Hooper seems to lose track of whether he’s making satire or sincere industrial horror, and films both simultaneously. It’s funny, occasionally deliberately so, and gory as hell but also goofy, hammy and unbelievably camp.
As an adaptation, The Mangler takes King’s sardonic little morality tale about capitalism chewing up the working class and turns it into literal blue-collar grindhouse. Subtlety is fed into the rollers early on and comes out the other side as a fine crimson smoosh as the original story’s undercurrent of labour exploitation becomes a carnival of overacting, camera tilts, and pipes that hiss with the enthusiasm of snakes on cocaine.
The cinematography, achieved by bolting the camera to a possessed shopping trolley and pushing it through banks of smoke machines and shouting “faster!” gives The Mangler a queasily chaotic energy, as it wheezes, cranks and grinds its way through the story’s gears under the constant threat of the whole thing simply falling apart at any second. Every surface is slick with sweat, grease or blood – including the cast. Every light flickers. The set design could be described as ‘metallic regret’, but you have to respect the scale of the physical prop work, if not the craftsmanship. Even the score seems unsure whether it’s scoring horror or a particularly gothic episode of Prisoner: Cell Block H. Yet, despite everything, or perhaps because of everything, the film achieves a sort of deranged appeal, a grisly glory to its lunacy. No one here is phoning it in; they’re all screaming it into a tin can attached to a piece of string.
Levine’s detective delivers every line as if he’s just had dental surgery – elective dental surgery at that, while Englund chews so much scenery it’s a miracle the set didn’t collapse in on itself. But the undisputed star of The Mangler is, well, the Mangler and when the eponymous machine starts moving under its own steam, clanking across the factory floor like a metal kraken with union grievances, you can’t help but salute its ambition. Few films dare to commit so completely to absurdity without the safety rails of irony but The Mangler believes in its monster, a belief so pure it’s almost touching.
The Mangler isn’t horror in the conventional sense; it’s a macabre pantomime told by a madman with access to dry ice and a disdain for OSHA compliance. Hooper may be a director still trying to capture the grind core lightning of his youth but he brings a vision to The Mangler. A messy, mechanised, madcap vision, but a vision nonetheless.
