Customer Reviews

The Mangler Reborn

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Ok Usually I find something good to say even about the worst movies. Unfortunately, I can't find anything good about this one. The only thing that even made me give this movie 1 star was the ( heroine's )acting...and she ended up dying anyway !

Aside from her, the acting was just atrocious, the villian laughably unbelieveable , and the effects we've loved from the first 2 Manglers are nowhere to be found. This is probably the worst movie I have seen this year and it should no way be associated with the original Mangler movie which kicked ass.

Whether the studio needed something in a hurry to put out or not, the budget of this movie was just awful. Don't waste the money to even rent this. I'd rent Strawberry Shortcake first before I ever watched this awful piece of crap again

WARNING: possible spoilers ahead...

Reggie Bannister from the Phantasm movies makes his move away from Don Coscarelli in this pitiful would-be sequel to the Mangler. The original, which was based partially on a Stephen King short story, was about a laundry machine that ate people. Robert Englund played the psychotic owner of the laundry who fed people to the machine. It was basically Little Shop of Horrors with a laundry machine instead of a plant.

This one jettisoned the supernatural laundry machine and went for a more straightforward serial killer tale. The story is about a repairman who buys the old Mangler on eBay and starts restoring it in his basement. Once the machine nears completion, it possesses him and turns him into its minion. The rest of the movie is about this repairman going around and getting meat for his machine. There's a lot of screaming done by women as he hits them repeatedly with a hammer. I have to wonder about the two guys that wrote and directed this movie, and where this misogynistic streak is coming from.

It seems like the writers/directors were going for that unrelenting Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Haute Tension, Saw, Hostel kind of vibe that seems to be all the rage these days. But the Mangler Reborn wound up being unrelenting only in its capacity to bore me.

After reading all the nay sayer reviews of this little opus I wonder if they saw what I saw? Granted it isn't Saw or the AWESOME High Tension, but it is a major step up from Mangler 2.0. I mean, its suspenseful, gory, and disturbing. Its a worthy sequel to a lesser effort entry to start off with.

How strange Stephen King sells his name and reputation for those Z series films that obviously only aim at making money, and even not too much, but with a small budget to start with it is not so bad after all. That Mangler should never have been reborn. The original was at least the morbid fantasizing of what Stephen King suffered in the summer when he was a high school teacher: he worked in a laundry factory and he worked with such pressing machines that could turn criminal, with no security and the bosses who did not want to spend one cent on security, as if blue collar workers were supposed to be kept secure. After all, accidents were the privilege of all these salary-hungry people. But in this film we are left with a Joe the plumber turned vampire and the Mangler is his revived invention, machine or whatever that provides him with his pint of blood everyday. It is not even entertaining. Too gross to be, too disgusting to even be horrible or terrible, certainly not even terrific, though after a little while you may have some sudden desire to vomit. Have some good blood cocktail on the house.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

this was purchased to complete a Stephen King-type/oriented horror collection. my MISTAKE and WASTE of money. If you paid 99 cents to rent this, then you paid to much. If you actually purchased this time-waster, as i did, you too were taken. the only upside of my purchase is that I'm going to donate this to Goodwill Enterprises and write it off on my taxes. Previous reviewers said a lot about the movie that i won't bother to repeat, as obviously i agree with them. trash, drivel and steaming pile are all way too good adjectives to use on the waste that was dumped onto DVD.

I honestly thought that this movie was going to be REALLY terrible but it wasn't that dreadful. Sure there wasn't any point why that guy was killing people but I did want to know what would happen next.

Stephen King should have sued the filmmakers for this abominable "sequel" to the original MANGLER. The script has none of the skill imbued in King's short story or any of the style of the original Tobe Hooper film. This one follows a middle aged plumber who buys the dreaded machine at an auction and becomes obsessed with repairing it. This leads to his being gobbled up and HE becomes a walking, killing mangler. Also involved in this mess are a father and son house burglary team, and a young girl who has just lost her job and her lover. They got trapped in the mangler's house and do innumerably stupid things, all without any real sense of suspense or credibility. The movie tries to use its gross out gore to make an impact but it ends up being sadistic and absurd. I wouldn't waste my time on this one, folks.

While "The Mangler Reborn" is certainly not a masterpiece, it is better than what is reflected in most comments about the film. It is a rare example of a low budget horror film that is played totally straight, no humor and very little self-parody.

With a budget of just $85,000 they had to be very inventive so don't expect elaborate production design or special effects. The title character looks like a cafeteria dishwasher being operated by "Edward Scissorhands". They try to pass the thing off as sinister by always showing it in shadows. When a victim is fed to the thing they change to very tight shots of knives and clippers, trying to make it seem like they are part of the machine rather than being held by crew members off-camera. Obviously the film would benefit from a more elaborate and diabolical device, or at least one with some credibility.

But the Stephen King inspired premise is a good one and the first two thirds of the film set it all up very nicely. It is almost captivating for a while but finally runs out of gas and plods through the final 30 minutes.

An appliance repairman (Weston Blakesley) has acquired the cursed parts from the original "Mangler" (named for the old-style washing machine with external rollers to squeeze the water out of clothes) and is obsessively working to reinvent the lethal thing. Eventually he becomes possessed by the machine and more zombie than human. He must feed it humans because he needs to drink their "squeezins" to keep his zombie body from decaying.

Blakesley is quite credible as the slack jawed zombie who takes a rubber mallet on his repair calls and acquires his victims from among his customers. His life is complicated when a father and son burglar team (Reggie Bannister and Scott Speiser) attempt to rob his house and when his daughter comes for a visit.

Aimee Brooks gets a whole bunch of standard scream queen moments and is extremely attractive.

The main problem is that not enough happens to sustain an eighty-minute feature. Had a parallel story periodically cut in and built up a bit of suspense, "The Mangler Reborn" could have been a engaging little film.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

I enjoyed the very first Mangler movie, though a old movie now. I rented this movie the day it came out for it looked like it promised to be a great horror film. Well, I was disappointed like I have been in many other "sequels". The gore and blood scenes make me give this movie 2 stars. Other than that, the movie is neither suspenseful or thrilling. The mangler machine is rebuilt by a repairman who decides to keep the machine alive by feeding humans to it. A couple of cool scenes but that's it. This was another let down movie. Barely worth the rental fee.

No, it's not the worst movie ever. That distinction belongs to "Crazy Fat Ethel 2."

However, this IS the worst movie I've seen in a long time. I've got better film on my teeth. When a movie is bad enough to make you actively yearn for "Children of the Corn IV," then you know you've stumbled upon a true piece of crap.

What can I say? The acting . . . well, the acting isn't great, but it's the best aspect of the movie; in places, it almost feels like you're watching professionals. But their dialogue is the type of stuff spewed out by writers who've never actually seen a good movie, but clearly think that they've seen plenty of them. The same might be said for the "scares," which are not scary; the gross-outs, which are indeed gross, but also painfully easy (I mean, how difficult is it to gross your audience out by having a guy drink a blood-and-guts smoothie?); the ridiculous use of frame-removal editing in the Mangling scenes; oh, I could go on, but life is very short.

Especially noxious is the behind-the-scenes featurette, which showcases some very nice actors . . . but also offers us a glimpse of the duo who wrote and directed this steaming pile. They very obviously consider themselves to be the coolest kids on the block, and is it possible that they don't know they're talentless hacks? One can only hope so.

If you spend money on this one, you deserve what you get. Oh, and if you're one of the knuckleheads who claims to have actually LIKED this thing, then consider your right to an opinion hereby revoked. Seriously. We all got together and decided.