Infamous for being stuck in distribution limbo in the US, in spite of sporting fast-rising It-Girl Amber Heard, and directed by Jonathan Levine, whose career is likewise gaining momentum after the well-reviewed The Wackness, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has been released straight to DVD in Australia, and I found it filling out the shelves of video store’s Horror section between the Eli Roth and Ulli Lommel flicks. For much of its length, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane suggests something new and interesting happening to the traditional teen slasher flick template, and Levine’s evident talent is certainly on display. The title miss is a teenage girl (Heard) who, having bloomed into a knockout, still kicks about with her weedy outsider pal Emmet (Michael Welch). An orphan raised by her aunt and cousin, Mandy radiates precious, coltish sex appeal and the capture of her virginity represents a challenge to all the would-be lotharios in her high school. When Mandy, and by her insistence Emmett, are invited to a pool party by the aggressive jock Dylan (Adam Powell), Dylan’s pushy attempts to make Mandy earns a rebuke with a super-soaker from Emmet. Infuriated, Dylan tackles Emmet and wrestles him in the pool. Emmet subsequently lures Dylan onto the roof of his house and seems to drunkenly challenge them both to try and make the leap into the pool from their vantage point: Emmet hangs back, Dylan makes the jump, and smashes his head open on the edge of the pool.
The way Levine shoots this bit, with its judicious framing, the way the sound of the impact is audible just before Dylan’s body flips into view, seemingly unharmed, but then his bleeding head drifts into the frame, indicates a cinematic intelligence is at work, less interested in gore money shots than a careful sense of achieved impact. The notions floated in this prologue, with the shark-like entitlement of the young stud clearly anticipating the way predatory sexuality resembles and traditionally offsets predatory violence, a constant correlation in slasher films which Levine smartly attempts to build on.
Mandy Lane
is rendered a beauteous vision of ripe femininity, whether it’s running the training track with her bosoms a-swaying or, most archly, stripping down to go swimming to the strains of elegant classical music. Levine here almost sanctifies Mandy’s sexual bounty, with a restrained, sensual moodiness that resembles what Peter Weir managed in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), except that Levine takes care to explicitly offset this against the randy, trashy, more patently generic portraits and sensibilities of the other teens around our heroine. Nine months after Dylan’s death in the pool, a new guard of wannabe males set their sights on Mandy, with Red (Aaron Himelstein), whose absent parent’s sizeable homestead is free for orgy use, inviting Mandy to spend the weekend with him and his pals Bird (Edwin Hodge), Jake (Luke Grimes), and fellow luscious femmes Chloe (Monsters’ Whitney Able) and Marlin (Melissa Price).
Levine and screenwriter Jacob Forman hit all the familiar beats of contemporary teen decadence, from the girls’ hierarchal bitchiness, expressed in jibes about weight and excessive pubic hair, to the guys’ casually grotesque sexism. Jake won’t go down on Marlin, after she’s given him a blow job to allay his despondency over her crack about the comparative size of his manhood. There’s plentiful indulgence of intoxicants, from swilling liquor to snorting crushed-up Ritalin tablets, and the general perception is of a generation that wants to get wasted and fucked in the best available manner and in roughly that order. The idea is to paint as obnoxious a portrait of entitled contemporary American youth as possible, and then to embellish and mediate the portrait. The characters, even the most caricatured, reveal their unexpected depth and nuance, or, at the very least, their human vulnerability in their attempts to live up to images prescribed by society, and by dramatic necessity. That vulnerability is all too brutally confirmed when a killer begins targeting them. In between, as über-bitch Chloe reveals her puerile but genuine psychological distress and some of the teens begin to relate on a more substantial level, the urge to gamesmanship that will deliver the desired results – sex, proof of dominance – blends almost imperceptibly with a wish to kick back, strum the guitar, and have a good cry. It’s as if Levine set out to make the hitherto undiscovered link between teen hang-out flicks like American Graffiti and The Breakfast Club, and the slasher films that twisted their mutual affections inside out.
There’s a likely suspect for the killings, Emmet, and an alternative in the form of hunky, self-contained but reportedly troubled former Marine Garth (Anson Mount), who works as ranch hand for Red’s father. His competency with a gun and general demeanour of hardboiled introversion can initially be interpreted as either threat or potential saviour. Such ambiguity extends to the reasons mooted for Mandy’s sexual tentativeness, which she says stems from her awareness of her solitude in the world, but which seems to alternatively be impressed by the sight of Garth and thus responsive to a more mature kind of male, or possibly homosexuality, heavily hinted in a charged scene she shares with Chloe. The fact that Heard has, after a fashion, played out at least an aspect of her role here in real life, only adds now to the teasing lustre. Either way, Mandy is the “Final Girl” conflated with archetypal virgin maiden, ripe for sacrifice and coveting, and it’s clear the killer’s intentions are as much about possessing her as they are about punishing the teens for their sins. That Levine and Forman make this element explicit – this film really is about such punishment of the teens for being young, horny, and blithely cruel in their caprices – is a great conceit in itself. That Emmet is revealed as the murderer almost casually signals Levine’s slippery approach to the usual niceties of the slasher film; the identity of the killer, usually in this subgenre kept as secret as long as possible, becomes less interesting than why.
The conflation of phallic and murderous aggression is coldly confirmed when Emmet, having captured Marlin, shoves a shotgun in the mouth that just had Jake’s prick in it, and takes relish in using the barrel to shatter her teeth and jaw. There’s a similarly punitive, tactile savagery to the rest of the violence in the film, and we’re clearly a long way from the sheer cynicism of the Friday the 13th films. There’s even an unexpectedly beauteous dash of liebestod in the sight of Red kissing Chloe as they, only to be shot, his blood quite literally daubing Chloe’s lips having poured from his mouth as they kissed. Unfortunately, the film blows its own foot off in the final stages, for this, being a ‘00s movie, is slavishly adherent to the need for a Big Twist. Here the Big Twist is that Mandy is nominally in league with Emmet, committing a vengeful spree killing, exterminating all the dirty pretty things before their own planned suicide. This notion isn’t necessarily bad, but the way it plays out, with Mandy betraying their bond and killing Emmet in a final tussle, is a serious disappointment. This surrenders appropriate development and emotional heft for glib surprise and a cheap dissension from the usual dynamic of the Final Girl role, where Mandy still overcomes the killer, but with one’s empathic response radically altered. Worse, this conclusion sidesteps the emotional and thematic intelligibility of what’s taken place, as well as being pretty unlikely on a mere plot level. Whereas the outsider’s revenge theme could have made the film a kind of genre-inverting expansion on Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2002), here we’re just lumped with the clichéd anti-cliché of “the bitch gets away with it”, lacking the unease of the conclusion of Brian Bertino’s more enigmatic and cinematically refined, if not dissimilar, The Strangers (2008). Still, by the standards of contemporary American horror films it’s almost radical in its bent until the last ten minutes, and certainly seems, in spite of its lack of a proper release, to have served as an appropriate calling card for Levine, technically excellent in spite of a very low budget. But a braver, more imaginative end might have saved this film from aesthetic, as well as commercial, limbo.
