"Love" is a Bit Strong, But I Definitely "Like Like" Mandy Lane

So I watched All the Boys Love Mandy Lane just now. Having said that, half of the people reading this are wondering "How the hell'd you see it?!" while the other half are wondering "What the hell is All the Boys Love Mandy Lane". Both are appropriate answers.

First off, Happy Fourth of July! Now back to the movie.

The backstory is this: back in the glory days of 2006, this little indie horror movie popped up at film festivals and started getting a bunch of good reviews and all of us horror fans with internet connections were very excited. The Weinstein's picked it up and were gonna release it more than a year ago, going as far as creating that truly awful poster above and this truly awesome trailer below.




However, something happened and the movie never got released. The Weinstein Company eventually sold it to a smaller company who, as of yet, still haven't released it in America.
So, how did I see it? Note that I just said "America". The movie's been out forever in Germany which means the internet is littered with torrents of itof both mediocre and horrible qualities.

That's right. I stole the bitch.

I did. I downloaded it illegally and now I'm admitting it online. I'm very, very sorry. How ever am I going to make amends? How about this: Everyone go see the director, Jonathan Levine's new movie The Wackness which is supposed to be very good and just opened this weekend in limited release. There. We even? Ok, moving on.

So, having seen Mandy Lane, is it worth the hype? Well, yes, but not just for the reasons I expected. The movie is absolutely beautifully shot. It basically looks like an Ambercrombie and Fitch commercial if, after all the gorgeous models stopped reclining in a field, someone came in and killed them all. And the acting is really good too. And the best part is, the script gave me a vision of high school and high school kids that I could really believe.

And the downside? Well, the movie really isn't that scary. There are tense scenes (a water moccasin is scarier than 30 dudes with knives put together) but I was never really much fear while watching it. And the reason for that is, the movie really isn't a slasher flick. It's set up like one and the advertising sold it like one (that creepy, deep voiced "I love you" in the trailer is just plain not in the movie), but in the last few minutes of the movie, it reveals itself to be something very different and much more disturbing and I believe the ending is the real reason the movie hasn't been released (even though Wikipedia says it was because of poor box office grosses for other Weinstein released horror movies).

The film begins as a loving ode to 80s horror movies and lead actress Amber Heard's body and ends as something that's gonna have problems flying in America. When the killer said he was leaving a diary at the scene of the crime for the "copycats" I said to myself, "There's your release problems right there". Scream may have pulled that shit off, but Scream was made before "killing all the cool kids" became just the trendiest thing in American schools.

So, yeah, see All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (it's supposedly finally coming out in the US in the next couple of months) because it really is a good movie and because Amber Heard is probably gonna be mega famous in the coming years because (judging by this movie) she's quite talented and more importantly because of, uh, this:


Anyway, I have another thought on the ending but it's spoilerific, so I'll put it after this great Bobby Vinton song they use in the movie.




Spoiler Section:
At the end of the movie, it's revealed that the killer isn't offing the kids because of competition for Mandy, he's actually in cahoots with her. The two of them are cooperating to kill off these popular kids and have some suicide pact. Once this happened, I started to think it was kind of tasteless. Then I stopped myself.
Why did I think it was more tasteless to have two people killing a bunch of kids with a suicide pact than just one crazy guy killing off kids?
It was totally hypocritical of me but it was my gut reaction and I'm sure it would have been the reaction a lot of people would have had had this been released stateside.