All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

"Mandy Lane" (Amber Heard) is the most beautiful and desired person at her high school and all of the guys lust after her. But while she is nice to everyone she only has one person she considers a friend and he is the social outcast named "Emmet" (Michael Welch). Then one day she surprisingly accepts an invitation to go to a pool party at the house of another student named "Dylan" (Adam Powell) with one provision-that Emmet is allowed to go too. Since Dylan is obsessed with Mandy he reluctantly agrees. Once there Dylan tries to get Mandy to take off her clothes and Emmet interferes. Dylan punches Emmet who then goes onto the roof to get away from the crowd. Eventually Dylan goes up to the roof to try to get Emmet down. Since Dylan is quite drunk Emmet convinces him that Mandy would be very impressed if he jumped from the roof into the pool. Dylan does and bangs his head on the concrete which kills him instantly. Everybody, including Mandy, rightfully blames Emmet. Because of this Mandy decides to start hanging out with some of the more popular students and eventually accepts a weekend invitation out in the country with 3 guys and 2 other girls. What Mandy doesn't know is that the intent of the vacation is to drink and have sex and she is the primary target of the guys. But things begin to take a turn for the worse once they get out there. Anyway, rather than reveal the rest of the story and possibly ruin the film for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this was a decent slasher film for the most part. Although some scenes were definitely slow it had more depth than most films of this type. It also had 3 very attractive actresses in Whitney Able (as "Chloe"), Melissa Price ("Marlin") and the aforementioned Amber Heard. The ending is also quite wicked. All things considered then I rate this movie as slightly above average.

... that is how much the Boys love Mandy Lane. But of course this is not another teen ... I mean romantic movie. Nope this is a horror movie. A slasher to be precise. Now slashers do live with two premises: Either a great twist or original killings. In this case, you kinda have both.

At that is what makes this movie worthwhile watching. Of course it is aimed more at the teen/twen audience, but what slasher isn't. The really illogical things that do happen, stay at a minimum, which is a good thing and the actors fit the bill(their roles), no more, no less than that. If you don't like slashers at all, you should of course stay away from this movie!

A frustrating experience, because so many elements are just right. Amber Heard is absolutely perfect in the title role, with a well-balanced mix of class, innocence, beauty and a great sense of mystery, which is absolutely essential to this film. You always feel that there's more to her than meets the eye, and so the film does indeed succeed in holding your interest. Darren Genet's cinematography applies many subtle effects to create an atmosphere of wonder and suspense. A feeling which is strengthened by a soundtrack, consisting mostly of melancholic adaptations of sometimes almost unrecognizable classics.

As a psychological thriller this might have made a very effective movie, but unfortunately there is a pointless prologue which explains too much of what we are about to witness. 'Mandy Lane' gives the impression of an intelligent psychological drama, which the production company felt wouldn't be a commercial success, and was therefore turned into a rather mediocre - and minor - gorefest for the yahoo-crowd. This could have been - and probably should have been - one of this year's best films, but it's ruined by extreme violence and a rather silly finale.

Before renting "All the boys love Mandy Lane", I saw its trailer in the YouTube to check it out. Good cameras, interesting story and there were some good reviews in IMDb. Well, maybe I was in for a surprise. You never know. So I took the risk and rented the film. But in the first moments of the film, I noticed that this one was not different at all - it was just another brick in the wall.

To begin with, apart from the differences of sex and looks there's nothing to really differentiate the characters in this film. Other films are able to provide simple characters (even if one-dimensional ones) with whom we can identify with. This film gives us a very superficial glimpse of the characters, their relationships, conflicts.. What we see in "All the boys love Mandy Lane" is just a bunch of stereotyped American teenagers like we've seen so many times before.

And how is Mandy Lane? Mandy Lane, as portrayed by Amber Heard, is just your typical high school girl. There are many girls like her - in any high school there are dozens of Mandy Lanes. Amber Heard has nothing really distinctive about her. She's pretty, that's all. Then, why do all the boys love Mandy Lane? This is a film, that's why.

That said, let's go to the film. As you well know, all the guys are mad about Mandy Lane. The boys (with the help of the girls) prepare a party. Mandy Lane is invited to this party. The party is to take place in an isolated ranch. No one had succeeded till now in scoring Mandy. The objective of this party is to ease things out. A girl in the group wants to make it with a guy, there are rivalries, frustrations, and last but not least, there's someone that loves Mandy so much that he/she is ready to kill for her. But make no mistake, anyone will guess from the beginning who the killer is, but prepare yourself for a wild twist that will put everything upside down.

If the script had managed to give us flesh and body characters and describe in more detail the relationship among the characters (their emotions, their conflicts...), this film could have been a memorable slasher teen flick. Had the film been done in the right way, there would be in it a growing sense of fear, of encirclement. Conflicts, fights, suspicion, and death advancing on and on.. outside just the empty fields... but the film is unable to build up the suspense.

"All the boys love Mandy Lane" is just a passable entertainment and nothing more. If you want to see a film with more substance try "High Tension" (Haute Tension), a very good french slasher flick.

All the boys love Mandy Lane, and the way she is portrayed by Amber Heard, who wouldn't? She's blonde, she's demure, she's so hot that the camera in the movie's introduction to the character, lingered on her T&As. She's a fine athlete though we don't really get to know what kind of graaes she's getting. Every boy in school wants to talk to her, and every one of them wants to get into her pants, earning bragging rights to be the first amongst everyone else to have conquered probably the last bastion of virginity in school. People would do silly things like dying for her too.

In typical slasher flick formula, a group of students, Mandy included, organized themselves for a getaway in a secluded ranch, where a ranch hand Garth (Anson Mount) provides that element of question as to who amongst the group will be the hunter, and who will fall as prey. Like how the formula warns against decadent teenage lifestyles, such as the unwritten rules of having the non-virgin being dispatched first and the likes, you're constantly kept guessing as everyone in the group, save for our goody-two-shoes Mandy, get sloshed in a flood of sin, with the smoking of weed, snorting of coke, being highly sexually charged and active, and downing alcohol as if it was water.

It does take quite a while for the first person to fall, and you probably won't feel much for the characters that had to kick the bucket in the most violent of deaths, which get shown quite graphically, only to pull back at the last minute through visual tricks and edits the filmmakers use. But for slasher flick fans, it's a long ride to get to this stage, and frankly speaking given that the characters all don't appeal to you (i.e. you couldn't care less if they live or die), the movie does seem to coast along the tried and tested, until its last act.

Surprisingly, the narrative decided to reveal its boogeyman quite early on in the film, which provided some perplexing questions. Again for those familiar with the genre, there'll always be a thought niggling in your mind in disbelief that the plot would be so straight forward. Granted as mentioned, the payload comes at the finale, which I thought had two meanings, depending on which concept you subscribe to. First, following reality that the most perverse amongst us tend to be the one most disconnected, and second, punishment coming from someone who doesn't see eye to eye on immoral lifestyles, and want to put a deadly stop to it.

I did see the revelation coming, but for the longest time had decided not to believe my gut feeling in the hopes that it would develop into something that will genuinely blow my mind. It's not perfect, but it did have its moments with the following of recent trends in the slasher genre that bad guys don't have to necessarily finish last. Nothing fanciful here, but it still worked to a certain degree. And kudos to both the casting director in putting Amber Heard in the titular role, and for the actress to pull off one of the more memorable lead characters in such a genre flick.