The Mangler (1995) - Episode 130

“I'm uh, investigating a laundry folding machine with a bad case of demon possession.” We’re on the road to haunted Maine for Tobe Hooper’s 1995 Stephen King Bargain Bin curio The Mangler.

When the gigantic industrial speed iron at Gartley’s Blue Ribbon Laundry Factory graphically swallows an elderly woman, bug-eyed, troubled local cop Officer John Hunton (Ted Levine) and his amateur mystic brother-in-law Mark (Daniel Matmor) begin to see this as more than just a freakish industrial accident when strange occurrences and gruesome injuries follow, under the grotesque, watchful eye of the company’s mad owner (Robert Englund) who harbours an ill-concealed secret.

Released after the 1980s horror boom had long-since peaked, and before his fellow genre veteran Wes Craven breathed new life into it with the sly meta-horror Scream, Tobe Hooper had struggled to capitalise on his post-Poltergeist success, with his Cannon Films-funded Texas Chainsaw sequel flopping, leading him to embark on a pinballing career directing TV episodes and low budget features. This South Africa-shot would-be shocker, one of many adaptations of tales from Stephen King’s 1978 short story collection Night Shift, came at a time when the King name was increasingly ubiquitous. But with a spectrum of quality that ranged from the estimable Shawshank Redemption to the inexplicable Lawnmower Man, where does this mad tale of evil appliances land? Join Gali, Devlin and Patrick as they talk haunted refrigerators, magic legs, and expository antacids, and debate whether this is a forgotten gem, or a justly discarded sock in the cinematic laundry basket.

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