THE MANGLER – Put me in mind of a Dickensian pop video at first, with its hellhole factory floor panorama of workers tending to their metal beast… that set-up would’ve gone really well with a musical. Come to think of it, Robert England’s pretty much in panto mode, playing an industrial villain with calipered legs and a piercing blue Edgar Allan Poe eye – he’s up against Buffalo Bill of all people, here in the rather surprising guise of a pill popping detective. Very enjoyable. It gets slack and goes on a bit too long, but that doesn’t really matter if the main draw is Tobe Hooper’s weird vision. I was tempted to make a lazy comparison between ‘The Mangler’s fairy-tale neo-gothic looks and Tim Burton’s stuff from around the time, but then you remember that a lot of Hooper’s films have that weird sensibility about them. What about ‘Death Trap’? That was really stylised, as was ‘The Funhouse’. A lot of them have a sort of day-glo unreality. ‘The Mangler’ isn’t up there with those two and it’s not as cheerily demented as something like ‘Lifeforce’, but it definitely has its own thing going on. I can’t even remember if it’s a good match for S King’s minor short story, but it’s quite visual so I suppose it’s going for something more ‘cinematic’. Overlooked but well worth a punt in my humble opinion, it’s an odd little beast that if nothing else is always nice to look at. And it was the nineties so… cut it some slack, I guess.
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