The Mangler (1995) - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - March 3, 1995

I remember studying one of the newspaper ads for The Mangler with no small degree of incredulity. How did this thing manage to get a theatrical release? By 1995 this kind of stuff was released direct-to-video, not to big screen venues.

Perhaps it was the film's source material. The Mangler is one of my all-time favorite stories from Stephen King's Night Shift anthology, so I knew I would be seeing it. 

Although Tobe Hooper had done an impressive job directing the 1979 Salem's Lot mini-series, his work post The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 wobbled between disappointing, at best, and dire, at worst.

Robert Englund being in the film did not hurt, but it also might not help all the much. While Englund was game for becoming a Vincent Price style horror icon, his on screen charisma could only carry a film like this so far. Hooper would need to bring his A-game, if that were still possible.

Those were all the pluses I saw in the ad. Yet there was one gigantic minus that eclipsed them all and raised my doubt level all the way up to critical. The name Harry Alan Towers.

Towers was an exploitation writer-producer best known for his numerous film adaptations of works by Sax Rohmer, Agatha Christie, Marquis de Sade, and/or Edgar Wallace. He also produced several of the more "notable" films made by the euro-sleaze-exploitation titan Jesus Franco in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Towers earned my eternal distrust by producing the lackluster sleaze-fest Edge of Sanity, which starred a slumming it for the paycheck Anthony Perkins. The friend I was unfortunate enough to see it with can and will attest that I writhed in my seat throughout most of that film's runtime.

So I was a tad suspect of The Mangler.

It is unfortunate that those suspicions proved to be well founded. While there were some things I liked about The Mangler, such as its production design, theatrical to the point of camp tone, and pitch black humor, I thought it dragged horribly. Cut some ten to fifteen minutes, starting with the extraneous, over-the-top, and painfully drawn-out dialogue exchanges between Ted Levine and Daniel Matmor, and maybe, just maybe, this could have become a campy horror hoot drawn from the same horror-comedy vein as HBO's Tales from the Crypt series.

But it was not to be. So it goes.