Trivia tidbits: Horror fans will recognize Reggie Bannister from the Phantasm series, while the true hardcores will spot director Jeff Burr as a lawnmowing imbecile. Unless they decided to go ahead and remake The Mangler 2, that is. because they sure in hell couldn't bang out anything much worse than The Mangler Reborn. I fully believe that Cunningham and Gardner could go on to bigger and better things. This is a formless, meandering, and stunningly boring little turkey, and no amount of Gorehound Goodwill can help me to locate the bright spots. Low-budget, derivative, silly, and pointless I can forgive if a low-end horror flick can deliver the goods on one level or another, and I really was hoping to come out of The Mangler Reborn calling it something like "unexpectedly entertaining," but after watching the entire 80 minutes, I now know that this is impossible.
The outfit must have picked up the "Mangler" license for about $4.50, which is quite the worthwhile investment for the distributor behind The Jackhammer Massacre, The Slaughterhouse Massacre, and Ghost Watcher 2. The facts that Tobe Hooper's The Mangler is a well-known joke among the horror fans and that The Mangler 2 is one of the worst dungpiles ever committed to film mean nothing to the fine folks at Barnholtz Entertainment. Points for trying to neophyte filmmakers Erik Gardner & Matt Cunningham, who obviously had a moronic concept and a skimpy budget to contend with, but the kids are at the mercy of the In-Name-Only Sequel Machine, which means that any horror title with only the slightest amount of name recognition will, eventually, yield two or three sequels. People intermittently wander into the house, bop, mangle, repeat. He apparently becomes possessed by the evil machinery, and spends the next hour bopping people on the head with a mallet before feeding the shrieking asses into a conveyer belt surrounded by knives, saw blades, and tiny cleavers.
It's not scary, it's not funny, and the Act III blood-splurtings feel tacked on as an apology to the gorehounds who somehow made it a full hour into this horrible mess.Īpparently the plot is this: A repairman is trying to rebuild the original "mangler" (aka "haunted laundry press") up in his attic. That's pretty much the long and the short of The Mangler Reborn.
Imagine you're trapped in one boring house for 80 minutes, and the only thing you can see is a bunch of aimless idiots wandering through hallways, getting lost, and occasionally earning a bop on the head from a mallet-wielding lunatic.
It's not just that this is a bad movie it's that The Mangler Reborn is barely a movie at all. Produced for less than $100,000 and third entry in a series that, frankly, should never have yielded a first entry, Lions Gate's The Mangler Reborn feels more like someone's home movie than an actual motion picture.