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. 

Based on a short story from King’s Night Shift collection, The Mangler is about exactly what I said- an evil industrial ironing machine.  The story revolves around the Blue Ribbon Laundry, an industrial laundry in a small Maine town, where a tragic accident ends up feeding one of the workers into the huge ironing machine that makes up the bulk of the factory.  This kicks off an investigation by our hero Detective John Hunton, played by Ted Levine of Monk and Silence of the Lambs fame.  

Hunton is convinced the accident was due to carelessness and that the subsequent inquest was the city fathers covering up for the wealthy and evil business owner William Gartley, played by a deliciously over the top Robert Englund.  However, as events around the mangler, as the machine is called, continue to spiral and the body count climbs steadily higher Hunton becomes more and more convinced there’s a more sinister and supernatural explanation for it all. 

On the surface The Mangler is nothing special, it’s all very standard Stephen King fair about small-town secrets, lone sheriffs, the conspiracies of the wealthy, and a creature that feeds off of death and hate usually possessing an inanimate object.  The titular Mangler is hardly that far removed from the likes of Christine or the Overlook Hotel or the possessed trucks from Maximum Overdrive.  What sets it apart as a King adaptation is the production design and quality/style of performance at hand.  

Firstly the Mangler itself looks AMAZING.  I haven’t been able to find any information about the prop construction or whether this was a real piece of machinery they reworked for the movie but it looks incredible.  A lot of that is the blend of human and inhuman appearance, creating an almost animalistic look to the sprawling industrial Hellmouth.  Its front has the look of a gaping maw but there’s no symmetrical set-up to give the illusion of eyes to complete the face.  It has a similar feeling to the Xenomorph, a thing that’s all devour and destruction and the way it stretches through the entire factory without clearly showing what it does gives it an extra air of mystery. 

All of the production design hits this same weird blend of over the top to the point of near cartoonish-ness but reserved just enough to still be unnerving.  I think a lot of that has to do with the film’s director Tobe Hooper.  Hooper is most well known for directing Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which has almost the opposite aesthetic to The Mangler, but a lot of his other work like the unfairly maligned Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or the underappreciated Spontaneous Combustion absolutely hit this same vein.  

The best way I can describe it might be “Theme Park Horror” like the design of the Mangler looks like something you might see in a horror-themed amusement park with its blend of almost too on the nose design and the buckets of blood that tend to splatter it as it consumes victim after victim (seriously this thing has a shocking body count for something that can’t move.)  For instance, the interior of Robert Englund’s office in the movie is this creepy, aging blend of taxidermy and archaic ‘40s leftovers that go well with his weird design as using this ancient-seeming leg braces, it all feels like he should be welcoming you to his haunted mansion- which I thoroughly enjoyed. 

Speaking of Englund and the Mangler’s inability to move, if you guessed from my description that Englund was purposely letting people get eaten up by his factory equipment- congratulations, you’ve seen a Stephen King film before.  The whole set-up is actually shocking similar to the Vulcan subplot from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but a lot of people can have the same idea.  In all seriousness, this is actually a cliché that really works in The Mangler’s favor, the point I suspect the movie might’ve been ahead of its time.  

The plot of the movie is a pretty clear literalization of the way the powerful and wealthy sacrifice the lower classes to the machinery of capitalism, an idea that I think a lot of people in the halcyon days of the 1990s were willing to dismiss but feels far too prescient to today’s landscape.  Honestly, there’s a lot of material in Stephen King stories like this that may have felt weird or dated back in the day but has only felt more and more acceptable, like Robert Englund’s performance.  He plays Gartley as this incredibly hammy and obvious evil factory owner which would’ve seemed cartoonish and unrealistic if we didn’t live in a world where villainy has been constantly emboldened to be its worst, most obvious self. 

On the flipside to Englund’s performance is Ted Levine as Hunton, who plays the role as basically a slightly more hardened version of his Monk cop character.  Levine has always had a weird likability to his gruffness, a rough-hewn charm if you will, and this movie really shows off his skills as a widower cop struggling to do something more than just mark time till he can collect his pension.  

It also helps that he’s not alone in his quest as he has the aid of his neighbor and brother-in-law Mark Jackson, an amateur occultist.  Mark is honestly one of the real saving graces of the film as his positive energy and enthusiasm for the idea that the Mangler is possessed help the movie move at a more even pace and not get too bogged down.  Daniel Matmor played Mark and sadly didn’t do much beyond this, which is a real shame because he absolutely holds his own in this movie alongside Levine. 

For a movie I’d honestly mocked for far longer than I’d care to admit, The Mangler was an incredibly refreshing surprise.  I think a lot of people made my mistake of writing this movie off as the dregs of the King craze and the fact it’s literally about a killer laundry machine probably didn’t help convey the right idea about what it actually was.  

It was not well received at the time but somehow managed to produce two sequels, neither of which I’ve seen.  The movie is very much in Tobe Hooper’s wheelhouse so if you’re a fan of his other work there’s a good chance you’ll like The Mangler as well.  It’s a tricky balancing act between child-like spook house horror, blood and guts sleaze, and genuinely compelling performances and small-town melodrama that reminds one: there are no bad movie ideas when you have good movie execution. 

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