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...

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!

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.

A laundry folding machine is possessed by a demon from Hell.

The reviews for "The Mangler" are predominantly bad. Richard Harrington wrote, "The Mangler is ludicrous from start to finish: its plot lines dangle, its effects fail to dazzle and the acting and directing are uniformly bad... even the least demanding of genre fans will be hard-pressed to tremble in its presence." This is partially true. The plot is not as strong as it could be, but it does have a few nice touches, most notably the gore.

Mike Long rated it 0.5/5 stars and wrote, "There have been many bad, throw-away projects based on material from Stephen King, but The Mangler has to be one of the worst. The movie's laughable premise is only brought down by the inept filmmaking on display here." Yep. The acting is pretty bad (especially the way lines are delivered), and there is just no getting around the fact this is a story about a possessed laundry machine... it might be good as a short story (I don't know), but to make it believable on screen? And I think they made at least one if not two sequels...

This movie rocked. It scared the heck out of me and I loved it.