Week of Review - The Mangler (1995)

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On to day two of my look back at the forgotten Stephen King adaptations of the ‘90s, today we’ll be taking a look at the Tobe Hooper film The Mangler.  This was one of the last King films of the Golden Age of adaptations, released in 1995 right before the well of adaptive works dried up almost overnight.  It’s actually somewhat staggering the level of King adaptations that cropped up between 1990 and 1995.  Including TV mini-series like IT and The Stand the first half of the ‘90s saw a staggering 12 King adaptations, the same as the entirety of the ‘80s and double the number that was made in the 2000s.  

That’s also part of why these mid-decade adaptations like The Mangler or Thinner started getting into the stranger corners of King’s canon, most of the more cinematic or standard pulp options like Christie, Misery, and The Shining had already been done so they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel with stuff about Romani weight loss curses or an evil industrial ironing machine from hell.  However, don’t let the goofier subject matter fool you because The Mangler is easily one of the best King adaptations this decade produced. 

Week of Review - The Batman

Edited by Robert Beach

By the mid-2000s, the superhero multimedia landscape had decidedly reversed fortunes. DC was still dominating the television landscape with monster hits like Smallville and the twin animated powerhouses of Justice League and Teen Titans; however, in the world of film, Marvel had more or less supplanted DC’s previously held stranglehold on the superhero genre. After Batman & Robin’s major failure, DC had spent nearly 7 years rebuilding its brand image while Marvel had cranked out adaptation after adaptation. By the year 2004, we had Blade 1 through 3, X-Men 1 and 2, Spider-Man 1 and 2, The Punisher, Hulk,and then Daredevil, Elektra, and Fantastic Four waiting in the wings. 

By this point, it was obvious the superhero genre was not only back from the dead, but it was enjoying an unprecedented boom in adaptation and success. Quite surreptitiously, DC began plans to reintroduce their most successful hero back to the big screen. Plans that culminated in 2005’s Batman Begins. Before that, DC first worked to get Batman back on TV in his own solo show, and thus we got The Batman.