Doin’ the Laundry

By Fearless Young Orphan The Mangler (1995) Directed by Tobe Hooper

“The Mangler” is a short story by King, from the collection called Night Shift, about an industrial laundry machine that becomes possessed by a demon. Now, if you read that idea and your interest is not tweaked, then you are not the target audience for such a story, obviously, and most of what I write from here to the end is going to seem unconvincing. The thing is, if you’ve never read the story and have only seen this hilariously terrible film, you have no idea what a genuinely scary little horror tale it is.

I liked this short story. Within its own universe, there is a plausible explanation as to how an industrial machine could be possessed and what might happen as a result. And the ending gave me the willies. We all know how suggestible I am, how easily I get freaked out, so perhaps I’m one of the few people who actually can get a bit nervous at the idea of a gigantic crushing monster machine on a rampage (not like Transformers, though) but I like to think that I’m the one for whom such stories are written. Yes, it’s all about me!

I reread the enjoyable little tale for the purposes of writing this review, and found it just as entertaining as before. A cop called Hunton is called to the scene of an industrial accident at a professional laundry. There, despite all safety regulations and physical evidence that such a thing should never have happened, a woman has somehow been pulled through the Hadley Watson Model 6 Speed Ironer and Folder, meaning that she has just been rolled through 16 pressurized, steam-superheated rollers meant to press sheets nice and flat. Cause of death? Death by misadventure. No one can figure it out. A week later, three women are burned by the pressurized steam. After that, a man loses his arm when the machine grabs him and cannot be shut off. Strange things have been happening around that thing lately, say witnesses.

Hunton, with the aid of his friend Mark who is a conveniently knowledgeable college professor, entertains a hunch that the machine may be haunted, possibly possessed. Another detective relays a story to him, an old case of a junked icebox that seemed to lure victims in to suffocate. The only fault I found in “The Mangler” is that the men in question accept the idea of demonic possession rather too easily, instead of first investigating sabotage or manslaughter, but otherwise, it all makes sense enough for what it is: a scary short story. We travel with Hunton to find plausible ways through which such a thing could happen, and we join him and Mark as they attempt an exorcism, badly, because they do not have a valuable piece of information that we, the audience, do, thanks to our narrator and the wisp of a ghost. The story ends on cliffhanger: here is a gigantic demonic machine on the loose. Now what are we going to do?

Now, on to the filmed interpretation. What we’ve got here is a movie so very bad that it leaps into a sphere of comedy; I laughed harder at this than at the last few Matthew McConaughay movies I’ve seen. Of course, one of those was A Time to Kill, which was somewhat less than hilarious. With schlock this lousy, I feel like the creators were saying, “We know this is going to be awful. Let’s make it a monument to being awful! Get Freddy Kruger!” This is the sort of movie that isn’t good enough to be on my Chunks of Awfulness list. Movies over there require some stab at quality or some misuse of talent, but there was no such thing happening here.

Did you notice the director is Tobe Hooper? Tobe Hooper has joked with me before in his movies; he is a known jokester, and I have always felt he measured entertainment with a different yardstick than the mainstream. I have to admit that The Mangler is often quite entertaining, though you’d never want to swear to it in court, or around someone you’d like to impress.

Our biggest problem is that this is a short story and has enough material for, oh, say, a 25- minute episode of The Twilight Zone. Yet someone tried to stretch it into 90 minutes of movie, and to do that, one must fill in another 65 minutes of plot. But the story is about a possessed speed-ironer-and-folder. How much plot can you fill in, exactly? This would be a good test for creative writing skills. Give the wannabe writers this plot and say “Make it three times longer,” and see what happens. The would-be writer who would fail this test would be the one who wrote, “Rip off Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery. Have the Mangler be a machine from the turn of the 20th century, which requires the sacrifice of a 16-year-old virgin every so often, so that the surrounding town will enjoy peace and prosperity.”

Do you know why that would-be writer would fail? Because what he just did was eliminate the need to “possess” the machine at all, implying that this evil beast has actually been a conduit for demonocity for a century. Yet, though this may be the case, the events which prompt the possession still happen in the film, which I suppose must mean that the machine is even “more” possessed than before.

Oh, and this business about virgin sacrifices is a lot of hooey because whatever wonderful shit is happening in the town that justifies the old money worshipping a speed-ironer-and- folder is never shown to us. What I saw was very little of an ordinary town, in which most people seem to have to work at a miserable industrial laundry. Robert “Freddy Kruger” Englund plays the badly mutilated, scary-lookin’, horrific, disgusting old geezer who owns the laundry and shouts at everybody; he’s the Sith Lord of the laundry, who likes to sacrifice members of his family to the Mangler. He sexually harasses his female employees, too. Breathes out of a hole in his neck. Nice character there. He gets folded in the end, so that’s interesting.

Our, ahem, “hero” is the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs. You know, the guy who has such a firm belief in rubbing lotion on the skin, or else we get the hose again? It’s not fair of me to typecast this actor, but screw that. So here he is, playing the worst detective I have ever seen in any movie, ever, ever, ever. He’s so bad at his job that I think he was kidding about it. He does most of his “detecting” while eating over at his new-age hippie brother-in-law’s house. His wife died a few years ago, and now he and his new-age hippie brother-in-law are best pals (i.e., “life partners”).

I liked Serial Killer’s Life Partner. He’s the best character in the movie . . . maybe he’s the only character in the movie. Let’s see, we’ve got a girl who screams and cries incessantly, that’s Sherry . . . we’ve got the Serial Killer playing awful detective . . . we’ve got the nine- fingered slut . . . we’ve got Robert Englund breathing through a hole in his neck . . . we’ve got a completely unexplained, weirdly clairvoyant photographer with lung cancer who looks as if he died several weeks ago and it just being moved about via wire . . . yes, Serial Killer’s Life Partner is our best character. He’s a hippie, so he’s got a lot of crystals, chimes, and books on how to perform exorcisms on industrial machinery, because that’s what hippies are in to. Serial Killer has a problem with a fridge, too. Rather than having the nasty junked icebox be just an analogy from another character to demonstrate precedent, it now must somehow figure into the plot of this movie as being directly related. See, there’s this fridge that got too close to the Mangler, and then the fridge gets possessed and eats a kid. Strange looking fridge, this is. It’s very old, really heavy. I bet you never thought you could see a movie in which the Serial Killer from The Silence of the Lambs dismantles a fridge with a sledgehammer while screaming at it, as it tries to eat the arm off his Life Partner. Well I’m here to tell you that you can see such a thing, in this movie right here! The fridge part was so very funny. Eventually the fridge explodes in a towering blue flame of demonocity and I was really, really hoping Serial Killer would find Indiana Jones hiding inside. Alas, no.

“But wait,” you say. “Fearless, wasn’t this movie about a possessed industrial speed- ironer-and-folder?” Try to keep up, people! I can’t be sitting here all day explaining the ins and outs of demonocity and fridges and speed ironers and pills. Oh, yeah, there’s this bottle of pills that are important. No, stay with me, this is totally a scream. See, the first woman that was eaten by the Mangler after it got “more” possessed was a woman who was always popping antacids. Some of her antacids fell into the Mangler, as we saw. Now, Serial Killer shows up to investigate her gruesome death (being folded and ironed is gruesome) and the scene makes his stomach hurt, so one of the blood-covered onlookers hands him the bottle of antacids that belonged to the dead woman, and he starts swallowing them like candy. That’s very professional! Especially later, when he steals a new, unopened bottle of the same pills out of the dead woman’s personal effects.

For the next eighty minutes, damn near every time we see Serial Killer he is downing those pills, so they remain in the forefront of the movie. In the meantime, Serial Killer’s Life Partner is theorizing away and comes up with a “foolproof” way of exorcising the Mangler. Here’s some valuable knowledge to take with you on life’s journey. There are two kinds of possession for industrial sized speed-ironer-and-folders:

1) Possessions brought about by virgin’s blood, and

2) Possession’s brought about by virgin’s blood and belladonna.

It is very important to remember that the exorcism for one kind of possession does not work for the possession of the other kind, and can, in fact, result in a gut-bustingly funny scene of screaming and mutilation.

Now what Serial Killer’s Life Partner surmises is that this possession must be of the former type, virgin’s blood only, because how in the hell could belladonna ever have fallen into an industrial sheet loader? Well it couldn’t have, obviously. Then he repeats, oh, about twelve more times, “We’re good as long as there wasn’t any belladonna involved,” and “I’m sure glad there wasn’t any belladonna around,” and “Nosiree, no belladonna in this possession, which is why I’m using the belladonna-free exorcism.” Boy, is his face red when they all discover that Mrs. Folded-and-Ironed’s antacids are made from belladonna! Because most common, over-the-counter antiacids do contain some variety of a deadly nightshade. Or calcium; that’s another way to go, if you want to be a big pussy. Never mind that these guys have no way of knowing that any of those pills ever fell into the machine; they’re going to assume that this happened because assuming things has gone so well for them in this movie so far.

So, it is about time to wrap this up? Yeah, I guess; I feel like if I give away any more of this movie’s treasures I’ll just spoil the experience for you. A couple weeks ago I said that Dreamcatcher was the worst King adaptation I’ve seen, and I’ll stick with that opinion, because that movie was trying somehow to be meaningful and exciting. The Mangler is so terrible that I do not think it could have become this way without effort. Someone was having us on. If it had stayed a little more lively in the middle act, I would call it classic turkey material. See it with your Life Partner today!