The Mangler

The original short story by Stephen King is bizarre and terrifying. The idea of a possessed laundry-folding machine becoming sentient and homicidal sounds ludicrous, but it works in book form. Obviously, this is due to the titular horror being conjured in the mind of the individual reader.

As a movie it suffers on several fronts:

#1- The source material is only a few pages long, so, the movie had to be padded out to the extreme. This bloat adds nothing to the story, except for nonsensical side issues.

#2- The special effects necessary to make such a mechanical monster even remotely believable would cost many millions of dollars. This movie's microscopic budget made it look more like a poorly-realized cartoon.

#3- Director Tobe Hooper seems to have tried his best, but had very little to work with here. If there's ever been a tale that should remain only in our imaginations, it's THE MANGLER!

On the positive side: Robert Englund and Ted Levine are hilarious. This actually makes the movie bearable, bringing some much-needed mirth into this catastrophe. Their performances are so histrionic that the movie becomes a comedy...

Its not great but still entertaining when you don't know what to watch. I saw what i wanted to see, there are movies that tease you with "horror" but never show real juicy things, for example the movie "its alive" is about that baby creature but they never show us the baby, but this one did just enough. The only small problem i had was the characters are a bit cartoonish like the way robert englund's character speaks sounds too fake, we are far from freddy for sure. Besides all that, the story is entertaining because freak accidents like that can happen in real life and it gives me chills.

This is a B-movie through and through. Terminally flawed, but, if you let yourself, you can have a lot of fun watching it. Levine and Englund are both over-the-top and captivating, the plot, script and score are simple and stupid, but in a way that renders them unimportant. Just invite some buds over, get some beer and laugh as Robert Englund hobbles around cursing, Ted Levine pops pills and the machine folds people like sheets. Don't get me wrong, it's really bad and, at times confusing. But, while Tobe Hooper may have dropped the ball on this, he never kicks it out of the court. If you're looking for stupid fun, this is pretty solid.

Tobe Hooper has directed a couple of good horror movies (e.g. 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre') and too many bad ones (e.g. 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2' and this piece of garbage). After watching this atrocity it's a wonder he has any career at all!

This movie is based on a Stephen King story I haven't read. I really find it hard to believe that most of what we see on the screen had anything to do with King's imagination. The plot is so unbelievably STUPID and badly executed that you will be unable to understand how it ever got financed. It flabbergasts me that people read this script and gave it the green light! Shame on you! It's ridiculous movies like this that have nearly killed contemporary horror.

Robert Englund has been hamming it up for more years than I care to remember so it's not much of a surprise to see him appearing in schlock like this, but it's a crying shame that an actor as talented as Ted Levine ('Silence Of The Lambs', 'Bullet', 'Heat') is. Poor Ted, I suppose he has to pay the bills...

One of the poorest, most embarrassingly silly horror movies of the last twenty years. Don't watch it!

A 3.0? Really? Have horror fans suddenly come down with a case of collective amnesia in the facts in the case of Tobe Hooper? The same director whose signature traits include a smattering of extreme gore garnished with dark humor? The man who made one of the most influential, landmark films of the 1970s ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre")? I mean, granted, Hooper's career has been frustratingly inconsistent overall, but "The Mangler"--easily one of his most maligned works--is an unsung gem that suggests his tongue was planted firmly in cheek, but nobody really noticed. While the concept alone has "disaster" written all over it (a feature-film rendering of a Stephen King short story), what Hooper does with (and to) "The Mangler" is, really, what should have been done with "Graveyard Shift": he tears into the story with the veracity of a mental patient chewing the head off a rag-doll, elevating the absurdist elements to their breaking point, filling the film with (un)intentional humor to counteract the bloodletting, and fleshing out the characters and concept into a satisfying marriage of B-movie bliss. The plot? It's all about an anachronistic laundry facility where an ugly beast of a steam press starts folding the employees into bloody pulp; a pill-popping, chain-smoking local cop (Ted Levine) and his wiccan brother-in-law (Daniel Matmor) suspect foul play on the part of the disabled owner (Robert Englund, once again under a heavy latex mask), but the real reason is much more sinister (Hooper does succeed in making a compelling argument for the ridiculous explanation). While I haven't read King's short story, I will say that the script (by Hooper, Stephen Brooks, and Peter Welbeck) efficiently captures the quirky, small-town mannerisms of his characters, juxtaposed against evil spawned out of the banal territory of Everyday Life. While Hooper is unable to sustain the tricky balance between terror and dark humor that has made "Texas Chainsaw" so endearing, he ultimately transforms "The Mangler" into a sturdy, clean-burning B movie, buoyed by fantastic performances by Englund and especially Levine (who seems to be operating under the influence of a perpetual hangover).