Day #23 This boy does NOT love Mandy Lane

The Halloween Horror Challenge continues. We took this in the same day as PONTYPOOL. Quite the polar opposite...



ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (2006)
D. Jonathan Levine
Weinstein Company
2.35

This movie has been sitting on the shelf at the Weinstein Company for almost three years now. It has been released all over the rest of the world without problems, so it isn't a content issue or music rights or some bullshit like that. No one seems to really know why it is just sitting there. Except that the Weinsteins are notorious for picking up films and just squatting on them. But after seeing this one, I can't say it is a huge loss to the movie going community.

There is nothing wrong with a slasher movie that is clever. But there is something seriously wrong with a slasher movie that the filmmakers THINK is clever but it is anything but. I can give this one credit for not trying to be one of those post SCREAM bullshit jobs where everyone quotes other movies, and tries to let the audience in on the joke pretending everyone involved is better than the genre. At least it isn't trying to do that. But that is a small favor in the lager cache of things. Slasher movies have never been the smartest genre, but now that they try to appeal to the same teen crowd that watch the kind of shit that is on teen TV, they have sunk to depths of low that scrape the bottom in ways we have never thought possible. This movie is prime example of that.

Mandy Lane in all her pouty glory. All the boys want her you know!

The movie revolves strictly around the character of Mandy Lane played by (who to me looks like a poor mans Amber HeardScarlett Johanson minus the boobs). The gimmick here is that Mandy Lane is perfect in every single way. All the boys want to fuck her so bad that they are in solidarity about it and work together to create plans to do it. All the teen girls are so in awe of her that they are all her friends and follow her everywhere she goes. But she is no HEATHERS style conceited snob. No way! She is an angelic, perfect, virgin, shot with soft filters, and slow motion, that is too good for this Earth. And that is ALL her characteristics. All we learn about her as a character is that her parents died in a car crash when she was little and she was raised by her Aunt. That's it. Her angelic beauty is supposed to fill in for her lack of any kind of character insight, which would be fine, if there was a twist in the tail that was so important later on. But anyway, because of her perfection everyone thinks she is the bees knees and do crazy things to be near her, even though she doesn't do anything much at all in response. She has a best friend, who is the class outcast. All the other boys in school beat him up and try to drown him at the local parties (you know homicidal horseplay). So in retaliation he talks to biggest dousche of them all into jumping off the roof to impress Mandy in the movie's most impressive scene. No one likes this emo kid after that though. Well except me, cause I thought it was pretty cool.

Don't get excited kids, this doesn't go where it totally should go!

So six months later all the cool kids decide to go to the Jewish kid's local farm to drink and get high and hopefully fuck the shit out of Mandy Lane. Her buddy is now the school pariah, even she is not talking to him. So he is not invited. They all go up there and three montages of all the kids smoking pot later (I am not kidding) they are off and running wild with someone killing them. Here is the dumb thing though. After two of them are killed, the film totally reveals that the killer is the best friend character (who is also such a dork, that it is really hard to believe he could over power a couple of the other guys). So any sense of mystery is out the window. More time is spent with the drunken shenanigans, the girls bitching and making fun of each other and talking about fucking. There is one boob shot but it is very brief. By the climax of the movie it is clear the filmmakers were trying to make a movie about how this teenager has become some sort of spree killer ala Charles Starkweater or something. But by approaching the first half like a BEVERLY HILLS 90210 episode mixed with a slasher movie it just doesn't work. To do a movie exploring how someone becomes a spree killer, you need to try to include some depth of character. This has NONE. Hell even UWE BOLL'S HEART OF AMERICA managed to get that right. And everyone hates that guy (actually I don't, but most everyone else does). Then they trot out the twists, not one but TWO. Each one negating everything you have seen up to the point before it. So they are not clever, in fact the twists are ANTI-CLEVER. They actually kind of make your head hurt as they go on, sort of like you ate a whole bunch of pop rocks at once and maybe a few of them got stuck in your sinus cavity or something. You can feel your brain cells just popping away...POP...POP...POP.

An example of that beautiful cinematography I was talking about.

Which is weird because this thing is beautifully shot. The cinematography is gorgeous. It was shot in Texas and they picked plenty of beautiful landscapes to use and framed it all wonderfully. Some of the shots would make beautiful still photographs. Just on a visual level the movie is well directed and always nice to look at, though the editing is really weird. There are side wipes used often, sort of like an old TV show, which are really out of place. Then when the kill scenes happen it is like Rob Zombie took over editing. The rest of the movie is edited one specific way, then the kill scenes are edited like music videos, with flash cuts, hyper fast editing, shock freeze frames etc. It is over stylization just for the sake of it and is simply just stupid.

But this is a movie that doesn't even have the guts to fulfill the sleaze that it pertains to want to dip into. For a movie that is about how all the characters want to fuck someone, it is about as chaste as it can get. The characters talk a big game, one character gets an off screen hand-job and blow job. As I mentioned earlier one blond bimbo shows her boobs all too quickly. But that is it. There is a moment where Mandy and the other blond look like they are going to make out, it is even set up as the other girl gives Mandy a pill to loosen her up. But then the filmmakers chicken out completely and have the boys interrupt them. This is that kind of movie. Where it is perfectly okay to show a girl get a shotgun rammed down her throat because she just gave a guy a blow job moments before, but wont show two girls kiss. But boy it will try to look edgy and sexy by talking a lot of crap about sex. It will even show -gasp- girls in their bras showing off their navel rings!!! Oh no! How naughty! One girl even trims her pubic hair, but we don't really see that either.

Some movies are shelved for a reason.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #10 is a frat challenge... IN HELL!!!

HAPPY HELL NIGHT (1991)
D. Brian Owens
Anchor Bay
1.85

On Halloween Night in the forties, a priest named Zachary Malius (Charles Craigin) sold his soul. Then in 1961, that same Priest became possessed and viciously murdered seven frat boys who went into a local crypt as part of their initiation games. Malius was put into a protective cell in the local mental institution and forgotten about.

Until 1991, when the party is on baby! Yeah!!!! Whooo!!!!! Those wacky party boys at Phi Delta Kappa know how to celebrate Halloween, or as they call it, Happy Hell Night, like nobody's business! To coincide with their party, they intend to make the new pledges, all one of them(!), do crazy shit to get in. After the suggestion of "fucking him in the ass" doesn't go over so hot, the local tech geek of the frat, Ned Bara (Ted Clark, where did they find this guy?) suggests sending the new pledge to the asylum to get a photo of the crazy, psycho killer inmate! Fun times for all! When the head jock Eric (Nick Gregory) tells his Dad (Darrin McGavin) about the pledge gag it results in probably the funniest, worst directed flashback in the history of film! Starting with blaring music that is a riff on the MIAMI VICE THEME! Then featuring McGavin as a teen played by current indie film fave Sam Rockwell who just grins into the camera in slow motion. Words cannot describe the intense stupidity of the scene. Then it's over and we still don't understand what we just have seen. But what Eric doesn't know is that his girl Liz (Laura Carney) is bumping the uglies of town bad boy Pete (Scott Bell). You know he's a bad boy because he wears a leather jacket and rides a motorcycle. But wait, there's more melodrama because Pete is Eric's brother! Say WHAT?! Eric spots Pete's bike at the local motel and decides to look for his brother in various windows and spots the couple making the beast with two backs. Or, I should say, spots a couple of body doubles, because the gal has huge breasts that do not match Laura Carney at all. A close-up of Laura Carney's face is cut in as she sees Eric through the window. Being the great ho she is, she doesn't tell Pete his brother just saw them fucking! So when he arrives at the party later, his brother punches him out and makes him go on the psycho frat prank with the pledge to prove his worth. (Did I mention earlier, Say What?!!!)

Bad Boy Of the Town Ladies. Watch Out!

Naturally, it goes wrong as the priest gets loose and tears off the hand of the pledgling. So Pete, being the bad boy hero he is, does what an all American badass should do: leaves the guy there to get butchered and runs for it. He makes no attempt to push the monster back into the cell and lock it (which would have been easy) or help the guy. Nope, just makes for splitsville.

Now here is where the movie really goes wrong. The priest is actually really creepy looking. Bald, pale, with total black eyes, he's a real shocker; and when he is on screen, he is a presence to be reckoned with. But you have to remember this was made in 1991, when all horror movies were under the influence of Freddy Kruger and therefor all bad guys have to make witty jokes, this being no exception. So every time he kills someone he has to spit out something funny. Like, he'll kill someone in a car and then say "no parking!" So what menace he has is right out the window, becoming a laugh riot, but not for the right reasons. The frat guys are almost as good. All of them are so interchangeable that you end up losing track of who is who, except that one of them has a broken leg. When Eric decides to bed down one of the girls, he uses the awesome pick up line of "I've seen you here before, wanna fuck". She likes it. But when they get to that point she turns him down because "your little jimmy isn't wearing a raincoat!" to which Eric confusedly asks "you mean a rubba?". So he stumbles out of bed goes downstairs to get one, sees his bottle of vodka and starts drinking instead. Forgetting all about the girl upstairs. Which is fine with her because she proceeds to rob the dumb mook anyway.

BARA is watching you get naked!

The Killer starts working his way through the kids at the party one by one, but no one seems to care. There is a semi-clever subplot were Bara has wired the whole house with video cameras to record the girls getting laid and undressing so he can sell the tapes, but instead ends up using this to monitor what the monster is doing. When the reveal of who the monster is, and the connection to the Frat kings happens, his own greed does him in. There's ridiculous witchcraft/exorcism mumbo jumbo to wrap things up and a Phantasm 2 rip-off ending.

HAPPY HELL NIGHT is incredibly entertaining, for all the wrong reasons.