Cindy Hannen (Athena Massey) has gone undercover as a high priced call girl to track down a killer, but soon she discovers that she likes her new life.

There are a few reasons why I picked this movie.

Obviously, as you can tell from the title, it’s Gregory Dark week. These quasi-giallo erotic thrillers are kind of his thing, so you know that you’re in good — if somehwhat dirty — hands.

Mrs. V, the woman who runs the brother, is Meg Foster and I can’t tell you how many movies I’ve stuck with just because she’s in them. And hey! There’s our old friend Rena Riffel, a woman brave enough to make her own sequel to Showgirls. And is that Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a pre-fame part? It sure is. And the more prurient minded of you will recognize Lisa Ann.

With I enjoy about Dark’s erotic thrillers is that he makes them better than they need to be, but he never tries to go all Adrian Lynn and make an artistic statement. He knows that he’s making a sexy cop movie and works to make both parts of that, well, work well.

EDITOR’S NOTE: When I first took a look at this film on September 14, 2017, I didn’t seem to like it so much. Maybe I was having a bad day, as my thoughts have grown more rose-colored in the time that has passed. 

If you’d like to see it for yourself, Arrow Video has released a UK blu ray of this film, which includes a 2K restoration of the movie, three sets of commentary (critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson; “Manglophiles” Matty Budrewicz and Dave Wain and co-writer Stephen David Brooks), Nature Builds No Machines (a brand new visual essay by Scout Tafoya, author of Cinemaphagy: the Films of Tobe Hooper, This Machine Just Called Me an Asshole! (a visual essay by author and critic Guy Adams on the monstrous life of inanimate objects in the work of Stephen King), an interview with star Robert Englund, behind the scenes footage and a trailer. 

If you have an all region player, you can get this in the U.S. from Diabolik DVD.

What happens when you put together three of horror’s biggest stars — Robert Englund, Stephen King and Tobe Hooper? That’s the question posed by this film, based on a King/Harry Allan Towers short story that first appeared in the men’s magazine Cavalier before appearing in King’s 1978 collection Night Shift, which also spawned the movies Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive, Graveyard Shift, The Lawnmower Man, Sometimes They Come Back, Trucks (yes, I know it’s the same story as Maximum Overdrive) and Battleground.

Bill Gartley (Robert England) owns the Blue Ribbon Laundry service, which is based around a laundry press that everyone calls The Mangler. His niece, Sherry cuts herself and gets blood all over the machine, which leads to the machine coming to life. It starts to eat anyone who gets too close to it, like Mrs. Frawley, by folding them just like a sheet.

Drunken police detective John Hunton (Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs) and his ex-brother-in-law Mark — who just happens to study demonology — investigate the many deaths that follow. It turns out the Tha Mangler is how Gartley runs the town — when their virgin daughters turn 16, the town’s most powerful men and women sacrifice them to the machine. Sherry is next.

Sherry is next, but she helps the two men take out the demon — even if it kills Gartley, his lover Lin Sue and Stanner, the foreman. They throw holy water on it and the machine nearly beats them, but they succeed in taking it out. That is — until John talks about the antacids he’d been taking, which once belonged to the now dead Mrs. Frawley. One of the ingredients is deadly nightshade, also called “The Hand of Glory.”

Here’s where the movie descends into bullshittery. It only follows some of King’s story — which was a novella, so we can cut them some slack. It takes passages from Sir James George Frazier’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. But the “Hand of Glory” is usually the hand of a murderer who has been put to death or part of the root of the mandrake plant. That said — the endings of the book and movie are totally different, so I shouldn’t expect anyone to do actual research or make the occult make sense within their film.

The Mangler comes back to life, killing Mark and chasing John and Sherry. She tries to give herself to it to save him, but he stops her. They fall through a manhole cover and escape, with him taking her to the hospital, as he’s fallen in love.

Oh yeah — Mark is friends with an old photographer named J.J.J. Pictureman, who tells him the hidden history of the town before he dies. As John waits for news on Sherry’s condition, he gets a letter from the dead man. He warns him not to trust anyone in town with a missing body part, as they may have sacrificed it to the Mangler.

When John goes to see Sherry, flowers in hand, the machine is back in place and she has replaced her uncle, looking like a female version of him. She waves to him and he notices that her finger is missing. Throwing away the flowers, he leaves.

I worry that my description of this movie makes it sound better than it really is and that people will watch it. Hooper may not have even finished the film, as some say he was replaced by the producer, Anant Singh. It actually played in around 800 theaters, but was considered a failure. Hooper would go back to directing for TV after this.

When I first looked at this a few years ago, I looked down on it. Maybe it’s the years of worse movies in between or perhaps a reappraisal — more likely I miss the time when I could just go to the video store to rent stuff like this — but my memories of The Mangler have grown more fond since then.

This movie went into production before Carnosaur was even done. That’s how it works in Corman world, because this was going to be a big direct to video success. It’s still Aliens with dinosaurs and ends the same way as the first one, as a T. Rex battles a forklift.

What starts as a nuclear meltdown turns into a storage facility packed with cloned dinosaurs. Along the way, you’ll see the boom mic, tape marks on the floor and puppeteers in frame, but the dinosaurs are a little better as the team had a week of post-production this time.

Director Louis Morneau also made some other sequels, like Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead and The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting. Michael Palmer, who wrote it, also was behind another Corman sequel, Watchers III.

You can make fun of these down and dirty sequels all you want, but the crew worked 16 hour days for 18 days in a row, which is a huge effort to deliver a movie under budget and way ahead of expectations. So if some things go wrong, well, so be it. It’s incredible that any movie gets made.

Gregory Widen has had a great career, creating Highlander, Backdraft and this movie, which is a pretty great record. This was the first film he directed and man, it’s stayed with me since I first saw it more than 25 years ago.

Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas, who somehow can be in a kids movie like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Crash) is a Catholic seminary student who loses his faith after watching a battle between angels and becomes an LAPD cop just in time for Simon (Eric Stoltz) to enter his home, tell him that the war between angels is here and get attacked by Uziel, an angel under the command of Gabriel (Christopher Walken).

Seriously, Walken owns every frame he’s in and he actually has some great company in this one. That said, the cast is packed with heavy hitters like Virginia Madsen, Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer and Amanda Plummer.

None of them would deliver lines like Walken: “I’m an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now until kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.”

Then again, Mortensen does get this one: “Little Tommy Daggett. How I loved listening to your sweet prayers every night. And then you’d jump in your bed, so afraid I was under there. And I was!”

Well, when the cops do an autopsy on Uziel, who has been killed by Simon, and learn that the body has no eyes, both sexual organs and the blood chemistry of an aborted fetus. Yeah, this is the kind of movie that drops those strange bits of knowledge on you just to see if you’re paying attention.

I got the opportunity to speak to the film’s producer, Joel Soisson, who said, “The idea was that these Hallmark angels in the Old Testament were not nice at all. They were brutal. And they just take you down. And I looked at it as they hated humans and then we have these predatory angels and nothing had been done like this before. Now, TV is starting to do things like Legion but in 1995, nobody was doing this.

The producers didn’t get it. They really liked the story but said, “What if instead of angels, they were zombies?” And we answered, “Well, that’s not the story.”

When I look back at all the genre things I did, that’s the one that I would remake or make another sequel. Gregory made something as engrossing as The Bible and it’s just as full of paradoxes as The Bible. So whatever you believe, you don’t have to be Christian, you can interpret so many things out of the Scriptures. And the angels are mysteries that we can’t understand and it’s fascinating to me.

I love that we find this conflict between the angels, with Walken’s Gabriel leaving Heaven and trying to start a new Hell, but Satan comes to Earth and says, “Not on my watch.” And Satan helps humanity! There’s humanity and even some John le Carré espionage.”

This is one of my favorite films because it’s so unashamed to be as weird as it gets. If this movie was only the scene where Walken hung out with school children and yelled out, “Study your math, kids. Key to the universe!” it’d already be one that I adore.

It’s years ahead of its time and still feels fresh.

As for the four sequels, well, stay tuned.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Scanners: The Showdown, this brings back LAPD scanner cop Sam Staziak (Daniel Quinn) and places him on the case of renegade scanner Karl Volkin. He’s already put the man in jail once before and killed his brother, but now Volkin has been killing other scanners and adding their power to his own.

Volkin gets his revenge by causing Staziak’s mother to kill herself — well, she sacrifices herself instead of letting him scan her — and that leads to a brutal final battle in a warehouse.

Khrystyne Haje is in this, following being in Head of the Class. She’s also in  Cyborg 3: The Recycler and Demolition University, but don’t feel bad for her. In 2001, it was reported that she was the quarter owner of a Silicon Valley company worth $500 million.

Director Steve Barnett also made Mindwarp and Hollywood Boulevard II, a movie that I never knew existed until now. Writer Mark Sevi seems to be a sequel master, scripting films like Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, Ghoulies IV, Dream a Little Dream 2, Excessive Force II: Force on Force, Dead on: Relentless II and Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes.

Plus Robert Forester automatically adds several stars to any movies he shows up in.

Bill Condon wrote Strange Invaders and Strange Behavior before this movie, which didn’t fare as well with the public and critics as the original movie.

Maybe the movie Bernard Rose wanted to make would have been better. Virginia Madsen told Horror News Network, “They originally wanted us to do Candyman 2, but they didn’t like Bernie’s idea for the sequel. They made the Candyman into a slave which was terrible because the Candyman was educated and raised as a free man. Bernie wanted to make him like an African American Dracula which I think it was so appealing to the African American community because they finally had their own Dracula. The Candyman was a poet and smart. He wasn’t really a monster. He was sort of that classical figure. The sequel that Bernie wanted to make was a prequel where you see the Candyman and Helen fall in love. It was turned down because the studio didn’t want to do an interracial love story.”

There was also a plan to turn the Clive Barker story “The Midnight Meat Train” into the second movie years before that story became its own adaption.

That said, this movie — which explores the legend and shows that the Candyman was really an artist named Daniel Robitaille who was born to free slaves after the Civil War — isn’t horrible. It’s just that Candyman is one of the greatest horror movies ever, so making a sequel is such a major burden.

So this one is a slasher where the original was a meditation on race and rage. Maybe I should say something nice about the score.