#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER TWENTY EIGHT 💀
💀 ONE TOBE HOOPER FILM 💀

"The Mangler" (1995)
* dir: Tobe Hooper
* Horror / Science Fiction / OSHA Violations: The Movie
[ ★★★★½ / ★★★★★ ]

I don't even know how to begin to properly convey in words just how insanely compelling this legitimately unhinged motion picture truly is.

From the way that Hooper makes the camera feel so remarkably alive at all times (those swooping crane shots inside the warehouse!), to the collection of excellent character actors completely understanding the heightened tone of the film they're in (featuring one of the most delightfully mismatched screen friendships of a live-wire, no-bullshit Maine police detective and his crunchy demonologist brother-in-law), to the screenplay that is far more interesting than any story about a murderous laundry press has any right to be (if I told you what happens in the final fifteen minutes without you seeing the film for yourself, you'd think I was making it up)...this thing just fucking WORKS, damn near every element singing in harmony with the other until you got yourself a nice little bugnuts melody going on.

I didn't even mention the predictably grotesque gore and body horror business (you WILL see a man literally get folded like laundry, and it WILL be as gnarly as you'd imagine) or the excellent set design work (the titular laundry press is truly a sight to see, like something H.R. Giger dreamed up in an industrial fever dream while slowly dying from heat exhaustion). What might have otherwise come off as silly lands with an almost operatic lunacy here, especially in the home stretch.

And the cast! Robert Englund in perfectly revolting old age makeup as a comically evil factory owner referring to his late daughter's death certificate as her "passport to hell"...that's just good stuff, I don't care who you are. And it will never stop being remarkable to me that Ted Levine just SOUNDS like that. It's like somebody doing an impression of one of the adults in the "Peanuts" cartoons while being strangled underwater. What a goddamn presence that man has (and he can wear the hell out of a rumpled trenchcoat).

Plus: it's a movie about the machinery of capitalism being LITERALLY oiled with the blood of the workers. Which means it isn't the most subtle film in the whole universe, but hey. Subtlety is for the birds and Henry James ghost stories. This is Stephen King, baby! MASH. IT. UP.

I absolutely did NOT go into Hooptober this year thinking that "The Mangler" of all goddamn things would end up being an easy highlight of my entire watchlist...but that's just one of the many reasons I love this event so very much. Who doesn't love a pleasant surprise?