Number 25 — THE MANGLER
For the month of October, we’re counting down the best horror movies of 1995! Check back every day for a new entry in the list.
I am not going to claim that THE MANGLER is a great movie. It’s not even a good movie by any traditional metric. But it is a movie that sets out to anger and disgust its audience. In that regard, it is mostly successful. Interestingly, given the title and the plot of an industrial laundry folder doing what it does best to a series of victims, it is not the gore that is memorable, but the anger the movie elicits that gives it staying power. Thirty years on, its portrayal of the rich and powerful exploiting the poor and vulnerable for profit is still sadly relevant. After THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, THE MANGLER is probably co-writer/director Tobe Hooper’s best howl of rage at the state of America.
To appreciate THE MANGLER, you largely have to ignore the main attraction of its surface horrors. Sure, the sight of a possessed industrial folder that looks like a brutalist sculpture, belching steam and crushing people into small piles of flesh, bone, and blood is what was intended to put butts in the seats (brutal reviews and lackluster marketing led to a disappointingly few number of butts). But the film’s true interest lies in its blunt message about the evil that people will do in the pursuit of money and power. In Hooper’s vision here, the real villain is capitalism at its most cold-blooded (and bloodthirsty).
That version of capitalism is embodied in THE MANGLER by Robert Englund as Bill Gartley, the owner of the industrial laundry facility where the titular machine folds sheets and people. Buried under a ton of prosthetic makeup to make him appear older with severe facial scarring, Englund hams it up, turning the evil of Gartley up to eleven from his first scene. Watch him limp back and forth on a catwalk above the folding machine as it crushes its first victim into mulch. His angry gesticulations are mixed with what appears to be sexual arousal. Gartley literally cannot decide whether to be angry at the money he is losing as operations shut down after the death or to be turned on by the sight of someone he considers beneath him being exterminated like the vermin he sees her as. And then he becomes creepier and more depraved from there.
On the flip side, Hooper doesn’t make it easy on the audience with cop on the case John Hunton (Ted Levine). As the ostensible hero, Hunton is a hard man to root for. From the moment he’s introduced mumbling rudely to his mailman and then driving like an idiot through a residential neighborhood, his cranky energy is off-putting. But he is also the only member of his small Maine town’s leadership that seems to give a damn about the women working in the laundry. Playing up the character as a cartoonishly cynical noir detective, he watches in a mixture of disgust and defeat as a judge rams through an inquest declaring the machine safe to use as the blood of the first victim is washed from the floor beneath it.
But as the carnage continues and he becomes convinced by his hippyish brother-in-law Mark (Daniel Matmor) that the machine may be possessed, Hunton starts to act as obsessed and over the top as Gartley. Notably, Hunton’s newly-stoked moral outrage is largely useless. Protected by the other rich men in town, Gartley, who is clearly complicit in whatever force is powering the mangler, has no fear of Hunton because people without money have no power, and therefore, no leverage. Hunton is basically reduced to an angry online poster raging impotently at those in power.
Part of what doomed THE MANGLER with critics is just how dour the whole thing feels. The short story by Stephen King that serves as the source material is, after all, a very silly premise for a movie. While Hooper follows the plot of the short story fairly closely, his heart is clearly in his expansion of the story’s universe to encompass his critique of the extreme greed that is encouraged by unchecked capitalism. While the film does play at the absurdities of King’s story, Hooper gives the whole movie a sense of fatalism. Never does the audience have any faith that Hunton stands a chance at stopping the physical or economic carnage. Even as the mangler breaks free from the floor of the laundry and chases Hunton and Mark through the sewers in a goofy as hell third act, there is little fun to be found.
But in Hooper’s bleak vision of America, what fun is there to be had? Unlike Brian Yuzna’s similarly-themed SOCIETY, there is no catharsis for the audience to cheer on, and the good guys don’t make their escape in the end. While Gartley may pay a price, the bitter coda of THE MANGLER makes it clear that the innocent are easily corruptible and the cycle of power exploiting the powerless for yet more money will always repeat itself.
