THE MANGLER REBORN

A man builds in the basement of his house a small mangler adorned with knives and rotating blades. The mangler immediately begins to exert a negative influence on the man and induces him to kill his wife. The man continues to kill anyone who crosses his path, sacrificing his victims to the infernal machine, often pretending to be a plumber and kidnapping his clients. Two thieves who enter his home will discover the horrors to which the man is devoted. After the bad and apocryphal "The Mangler 2.0", the good film that Tobe Hooper directed in 1995 inspired by a mediocre story by Stephen King, is once again sullied by an equally bad third chapter. In this case, little or nothing connects to the original story: no laundry, no ironing worker, no crippled entrepreneur, but only a small homemade mangler, in which people are imaginatively poked with knives, sliced with blades, and the pieces are discharged into the house's basements through a slide, as if it were simple garbage. The relationship that binds the man to the machine this time has been approached in a too superficial way and almost without a real logical connection: Mr. Gartley who managed the Blue Ribbon in the first film had a symbiotic relationship with the mangler, the machine had assimilated parts of the man's body and the man had approached the machine by grafting it onto his own body, a somewhat Cronenberg-like discourse that gave depth to the narrative and metaphorical characterization of Hooper's film. In "Mangler - Reborn" none of this happens: the man is inexplicably controlled by the machine, the machine devours his arm but the man regenerates as if he were a supernatural being, drinks the blood of his victims and behaves mechanically and apathetically, like a zombie. All this without explanations. The entire film is constructed as a variant of the home-style survival movie with explicit references to the now over-exploited "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"; the story takes place almost exclusively in the house of horrors where the victims are trapped before being fed to the machine and the corpulent killer acts like a new Leatherface, frequently hitting his victims in the head with a heavy hammer. If there had been no connection to "The Mangler", the story could have given rise to a decent film, albeit unoriginal, because ample space is given to the splatter component and there is also an unusual underlying meanness, but the Kinghian ironer seems almost an intruder, as if the story had been adapted to an already existing screenplay that had nothing to do with "The Mangler". Then one must draw a merciful veil over the artistic-technical quality of the film. The direction, handled by Matt Cunningham and the debutant Erik Gardner, is of disarming mediocrity, as is the screenplay by the same directors, repetitive and filled with flat and sometimes ridiculous dialogues. The cast is composed of little-known actors and without any talent: from Aimee Brooks in the role of the protagonist to Weston Blakesley, who plays the killer. Among the actors also appears Reggie Bannister, dear to the horror public for having played Reggie in the "Phantasm" saga, here in the role of one of the thieves who enter the house of horrors. Ugly and useless.