Okie dokie. So- It's been over a month since my last post so I thought I'd get back into it with a doozie of a film from 1995 called The Mangler. This little gem was recommended to me by a dear friend who thought it would be right up my alley. Boy was she right. This magic film is based on a story by Stephen King, and you all know that's a recipe for disaster. For some reason it has also inspired a number of sequels.
So the film opens in Riker's Valley, Maine at the Blue Ribbon Laundry which appears to be a laundry folding sweat shop complete with buxom babes sweating in shabby uniforms; a dark, dank, steamy dungeon of a factory; and a tyrannical boss with an eye patch, leg braces, and white hair, who screams orders from his office placed high above the factory floor. They're training a new girl, Sherry, on the folding machine and she manages to cut her hand open pretty bad on a rusty lever. I couldn't help but hope she'd had a recent tetanus shot. At the moment that some of the girls have stopped to take a look at her injury a bumbling duo of movers accidentally bump into her with an antique icebox they're removing from the building. The ice box knocks her back into the folding machine and manages to cause lightning to shoot from the ancient contraption.
After the movers have gone and everyone gets back to work the film's token sweet old lady, Adelle, manages to drop her medication onto the loading bed of the folding machine. When she reaches to retrieve it the machine opens up and swallows her, crushing her feeble old bones and spraying her elderly blood and guts all over the place and folding her neatly at the other end. The girls run and scream in horror and the Blue Ribbon's owner, Bill Gartley, manages to cackle, "Hell's Bells Adelle."
The police bring in an investigator, officer John Hunton, played by Ted Levine, who frankly is looking a little rough since playing "Buffalo Bill" in The Silence of the Lambs. Before officer Hunton can really look into the case the sheriff comes in and declares that the folding machine meets state safety standards, that Adelle's death was an accident, and that the Blue Ribbon can resume operations immediately. The very next day there is another accident with the same machine. A steam hose busts loose and sprays three women, burning one so bad that she's sent to the hospital screaming in pain. Officer Hunton goes to visit her and she blurts out that it's almost as if the machine had a taste for blood after Sherry cut her hand and liked it so much it wanted more. Hunton's neighbor Mark, who's into the occult, suggests that the machine might be possessed so they go to ask Sherry some questions about the accidents. Hunton is convinced that when the ice box hit the safety bar on the machine that there must have been a short that would cause the accidents that happened since. Back at the factory as everyone is leaving for the day another girl manages to fall into the folding machine but the factory foreman saves her and she only looses a finger.
On their way home from interviewing Sherry, Mark and Officer Hunton drive past a neighbor's house and see the police outside. They go to check out why and find that another neighbor's missing child was found suffocated in an old ice box. The woman who lived in the house insisted that she had no idea where the ice box had come from. She said she found it on the lawn that morning and had no idea why it was there. When the child's body is removed to the morgue Mark and Hunton notice Sherry's bloody hand print and a Blue Ribbon Laundry logo on the outside of the ice box. Mark decides that when the antique hit the folding machine that the evil spirit of the possessed ironing board must have transferred to the ice box as well. Hunton gets really pissed off and starts bashing the ice box with a sledge hammer and accidentally releases the evil. A blue swirling spirit tornado erupts from the top of it and Mark manages to chant some gobbledygook to make it stop.
Hunton goes and breaks into the Blue Ribbon Laundry to figure some things out but decides to have a cigarette before getting down to the nitty gritty. So, of course, he sits down on the loading bed of the folding machine he now has every reason to believe is possessed by evil spirits. I mean, why not? Of course the machine comes to life and sucks in his coat, trying to take him with it. He takes out his gun and starts shooting at the fabric of his coat so he can free himself, which brings the factory foreman running in. Hunton runs up the stairs to find the owner Mr. Gartley. The foreman insists that Gartley's out of town but Hunton bursts into his office anyway. Of course Gartley is there and before dismissing him he tells Hunton that there is more to his power than money, and that everyone has to make sacrifices. When Hunton leaves the foreman suggests that they shut the machine down, but Gartley refuses. So, the foreman decides to take matters into his own hands he gets sucked into the machine as well.
When Hunton digs a bit further he finds that all the town's rich and powerful families lost their daughters to "accidents" with the folding machine on their sixteenth birthdays. It also turns out that Sherry is Gartley's niece and that it happens to be her sixteenth birthday on this very day. Hunton calls Sherry and tells her to stay home and not go anywhere until he tells her its safe, but he's too late. Gartley's already in the house, drugs her, and drags her to the laundry. Mark and Hunton have decided to perform and exorcism on the machine and arrive just in time to save poor Sherry. The machine sucks old Gartley though and folds him up neatly like a clean bed sheet. They perform the exorcism on the old machine, and end it with, "Amen God Damn it!"
Just when they think they've stopped the evil machine and the worst is over the machine rips free from the ground and starts chasing them through the factory. That's right. The evil laundry folding machine sprouts arms and legs and starts chasing them. Mark stops for a moment to try to read some more incantations but the machine tears him in two. Sherry and Hunton escape with their lives but not before the machine manages to get one of Sherry's fingers. It appears that the machine has been stopped but when Hunton drops by the laundry the following day to see Sherry he finds the factory fully operational with the folding machine back in place and Sherry in the position of her late uncle Mr. Gartley.
Hunton gives up and drives away.
The end.
There were a few bits of this film that I found pretty hard to swallow, beyond the fact that the film was about a haunted laundry machine.
First of all, why does a small town in rural Maine with a lack of major hotel chains and institutions need a gigantic laundry folding facility with an endless supply of young female employees? And even with the devil on his side how does the owner of said facility become the richest, most powerful man in town?
Secondly, I find it really offensive that the audience is supposed to buy that Sherry is celebrating her sixteenth birthday when the actress playing her appears to be about thirty or older.
