30 Years Ago, A Forgotten B-Movie Brought Together 4 Horror Legends

If you were to statistically break down the Stephen King stories that have been optioned for screen adaptation — the tightly designed dread of The Shining, the many unrealized versions of The Stand or It — you’d be left with more scripts like The Mangler than any other type of story. Based on one of the author’s 200-plus short stories, The Mangler follows a familiar pattern: an object or machine with some pre-existing eerie quality becomes possessed and contrives scenarios to butcher innocent passersby, while a flawed, fragile protagonist attempts to untangle the barbarism of both fate and human nature within their B-movie parameters. If you want an example of the dependability of this less ambitious King formula, check out Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey.

Set in a jaded Maine town, The Mangler’s horror concerns a laundry press in Gartley’s Blue Ribbon Laundry, owned by the elderly, despotic Bill Gartley (Robert Englund). After a haunted icebox and the blood of Gartley’s niece Sherry (Vanessa Pike) come into contact with the heaving, groaning machinery, it gets a taste for devouring human flesh. Enter Officer John Hunton (Ted Levine), a recent widower with a short temper, to investigate the suspicious demises with his occult-obsessed brother-in-law Mark (Daniel Matmor) — their attempts to vanquish the mangler uncovers corrupt conspiracies and ritual sacrifices perpetrated by the lecherous, power-hungry Gartley.

Now 30 years old, The Mangler may not be more than the sum of its parts but, perhaps fittingly for a horror film about machinery, there are a lot of worthy parts — namely the four horror icons lending their talents to its lowly ambitions. Stephen King may have written a lot of minor short stories, but it’s clear that short-form horror isn’t just a way to exercise his scary muscles between sprawling tomes about demons and addictions, it’s where he can knock out his most effective and efficient work. Think of the 20 pages of the average King story as a constrained delivery system of a sharp, memorable punchline built from a simple premise. Who can fault the guy for relying on haunted objects more than once? In expanding King’s text to 106 minutes, The Mangler leans on the shaggy, salacious vibes of preceding King adaptations — think of general sweaty, headachy atmosphere of Cujo and Christine — while also combining psychological and supernatural storytelling like the author did in The Shining, Carrie, and It... although director Tobe Hooper gives us a much clumsier execution than those impressive novels.

After his arresting and bone-jangling independent masterwork The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s transition to studio filmmaking was bumpy. Following his adaptation of King’s Salem’s Lot for TV, he was hired by Spielberg to shoot Poltergeist (and spawned a million arguments about who deserved top credit), before branching out into a series of now-reappraised “elevated schlock” films like Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars!, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Before The Mangler, Hooper made films about haunted Aztec fabric, people who burst into nuclear flames, and sadomasochistic cults — horror and sci-fi movies that featured an uneasy balance of detailed genre literacy and hokey recycled tropes.

Hooper never recaptured the unique success of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Mangler feels far more connected to his extensive work on TV horror than the aesthetic heights of his cinematic projects. The laborious King-inspired plot pulls us in too many directions, and while the mangler hisses and groans impressively, with many fearsome moving parts and an organic-looking design, it lacks the shuddering, jagged intensity of King’s prose or the rusty, abandoned realism of Chainsaw’s abattoirs. Or at least, The Mangler lacks consistency. In sudden moments, Hooper dials up the claustrophobia of being trapped in Gartley’s evil keep, or forces us to watch skeletal-defying murders that treat human bodies like starched shirts and cotton bedsheets, ignoring any cries for mercy.

Playing in The Mangler’s uneven genre sandbox are two actors whose horror performances have been often imitated, and their commitment to the film’s demented tone is a reminder of why their natural screen talent has rarely been replicated. As Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, Ted Levine’s twitchy eyes and deep, eerie voice lent the character an uncontrolled sense of active danger, compared to the reserved intensity of the caged Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). The fact that John Hunton is ostensibly an ordinary (if jaded and grieving) guy makes Levine’s off-kilter, aggro performance — characterized by a stuffy, irritable restlessness, like he has a bad flu, migraine, and hangover all at once — so compelling. In horror mysteries, the detective protagonist is supposed to be an empathetic bedrock to lead us into a world of strange danger: at points, you wonder if Hunton isn’t trying to shake a nasty case of demonic possession himself.

To compliment our erratic hero, Englund holds court as the nasty, pseudo-incestuous laundry baron. Adorned with spectacles and two metal leg braces, Gartley’s occultist obsession with prolonging his reign spearheads Shelly’s persecution and the manic mangler murders. Englund is a true pro — fresh off a decade spent playing the demonic jester Freddy Kreuger, his ability to contort himself and channel depravity is a reassuring reminder that great horror performances are not necessarily about the material, but rather the limits of a performer’s imagination. For each of the four legends who contributed to The Mangler’s muddled but fascinating finished state, the core promise of the story offered a low-risk opportunity to push beyond the limits of the material — it doesn’t mean that The Mangler actually coheres, but it’s a mess that’s delightful to sift through.