Previously an ugly duckling and a cliched good girl, high schooler Mandy Lane has suddenly matured and blossomed in shockingly quick fashion. Over the course of the summer, she is invited to join a group of fellow students for a getaway trip to a secluded and isolated ranch. Secretly, the men on the trip all begin to compete for the affections of the attractive young woman, thinking of different ways to get her attention and get into her pants. But while the festivities continue at the isolated terrain, a mysterious stalker begins to take out her classmates.
At this point in 2014, most horror fans are familiar with the long-troubled release of Jonathan Levine's modern day slasher, the peculiarly-titled All The Boys Love Mandy Lane. But for those of you reading this who aren't acquainted, here's the cliff notes version of its wacky history: long before he directed pictures such as The Wackness and 50/50, Levine had worked on a low budget horror flick that was completed in 2006. Outside of select screenings at the occasional festival or convention (and a very limited release for U.K. audiences in 2008), it was never screened or released Stateside for modern horror audiences for an agonizing time of seven years, mostly due to its distributor going bankrupt after purchasing it from the oh-so-powerful Weinstein Company. Just when fans thought it would be condemned to obscurity, and would likely never see the light of day until another new video format came out, it was released as a video-on-demand title during the fall of 2013, with a DVD and Blu-Ray release coming shortly thereafter.
Naturally, the main question on everyone's mind is "Was it worth the wait?" And the answer is….well, kind of. This isn't your typical slasher, thought Darren Genet's cinematography does suggest a throwback to the mid/late 70s motion pictures coming out at the time. The performances are all earnest, and as an admitted non-fan of actor Johnny Depp's current fiancé Amber Heard (Pineapple Express, Alpha Dog), I'm willing to eat crow and say that she did a pretty damn good job as the titular character. It's fairly obvious that she's playing the innocent young woman who damn near everyone is trying to corrupt, but whereas most actresses would have just made the subject of everyone's desires into a droll and meaningless individual, she brings a nice earnestness to Mandy that kept it alive for someone like me. There's also Michael Welch's (Twilight) Emmet, a shunned friend of the woman who even through occasional moments of insanity, is very easy to identify with. You'd have to be as blind as bat to not draw comparisons to the teenagers who committed the awful Columbine High School massacre, though it is a little uncomfortable at times.
And yet, despite all of those accolades, something just didn't click that well in All The Boys Love Mandy Lane. I'm not quite sure as to whether the last ten minutes of its running time were what did me in and made me shift gears on the final verdict, but it felt all-too-familar at the end of the day. The film's script by Jacob Forman suggests a smarter and more satirical movie than what we end up seeing on screen, and some of the moments in its first half gives off way too much of a late 90s vibe for someone like myself. Oh, and there's the slight hint of a certain "South Park" episode, which made me wonder if this was supposed to be a black comedy more than a horror film.
I wish that All The Boys Love Mandy Lane would have received a proper release closer to its time of completion, since I get the feeling that it will get lost in the shuffle of equally-clever horror motion pictures that were seen by wide audiences, such as The Cabin In The Woods or Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil. But as it stands, you catch this one on Netflix Instant Streaming and decide for yourself as to whether you think that it should have stayed on the shelf or should have been given the fair treatment that it deserves.
You know it's a dated picture when you see teenagers using flip-phones though.
Tomorrow (well, today), I go for something for musical with Suck!
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