We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
TRAPPED (2002)
When it was released in September of 2022, director Luis Mandoki’s Trapped was a critical failure and a box office bomb. I was always aware of the movie, but I never got around to seeing it – and the overwhelmingly negative reviews were probably why I let it pass by. I didn’t see Trapped until twenty years after it was released, and when I finally did watch it I found that it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. It was actually a pretty decent thriller.
Scripted by Greg Iles and based on his novel 24 Hours, Trapped stars Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Pruitt Taylor Vince as Joe, Cheryl, and Marvin, a trio of criminals who make their living by kidnapping the children of wealthy parents and holding them for ransom. That’s exactly what they proceed to do to little Abby (Dakota Fanning), the daughter of Dr. Will Jennings (Stuart Townsend) and his wife Karen (Charlize Theron). While Marvin takes Abby off to a cabin in the woods, Joe holds Karen at gunpoint at the Jennings mansion and Cheryl holds Will at gunpoint in a hotel room, waiting for the money to come through. Of course, nothing about this ransom plan goes smoothly. Not only do Will and Karen do everything they can think of to fight back against their attackers and try to figure out how to rescue their daughter, but there’s also a medical issue that the criminals didn’t take into account: Abby has asthma and needs her inhaler, which wasn’t taken with her when she was abducted.
Trapped has caught a lot of grief, but as far as I was concerned it did everything a thriller should do. It held my attention throughout, with some twists and turns and plenty of obstacles for the characters to overcome, and featured solid performances from the leads. I won’t always vouch for Townsend or Love, but you can’t go wrong with Bacon, Vince, and Theron – and Fanning was always a shockingly good child actor.
The only problem I had with this movie comes at the very end, when our protagonists are responsible for a multi-car accident. A truck driver gets caught up in the crash and while we see close-ups of the guy as the crash is happening, once another vehicle explodes right next to his truck we don’t see if he gets out of it okay. Are our heroes now responsible for the death of an innocent truck driver? Mandoki doesn’t seem to care. He clearly didn’t learn the lesson from the likes of Smokey and the Bandit, where if you’re going to have people who don’t deserve to get hurt being caught in a crash, you have to take a moment to see them getting out of the wreckage without injury. The movie has a running time of 105 minutes and 46 seconds. It could have taken another second or two to show that truck driver getting out of his truck.
The reckless endangerment of truck drivers aside, Trapped is a thriller that’s worth checking out. I should have watched it twenty years earlier than I did.
THE MANGLER (1995)
Stephen King’s Night Shift collection of short stories contains a story called The Mangler, about a clothes press in an industrial laundry that becomes possessed when - over time -medicine containing nightshade is dropped into it, a live bat flies into it, and the blood of a virgin is spilled on it. The idea is ridiculous, but King (who once worked in an industrial laundry before his writing career took off), managed to make it work. Still, there never should have been an attempt to bring the story told in those few short pages to the screen as a feature film. At one point, a producer was planning to making a King anthology that would have consisted of adaptations of the Night Shift stories The Mangler, The Lawnmower Man, and Trucks (which King himself ended up bringing to the screen as Maximum Overdrive). An adaptation of the story could have worked within an anthology like that. Instead, we got a 106 minute movie based on The Mangler.
The film was directed by Tobe Hooper, one of the greats. The man who brought us classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Lifeforce, Eaten Alive, The Funhouse, Poltergeist, and more. This was not one of his shining achievements. Working with Stephen David Brooks and Peter Welbeck, Hooper wrote a screenplay that expands the Mangler story in bizarre ways.
Here the mangler is an over-designed, evil-looking machine from the moment it appears on the screen. It’s located in Gartley's Blue Ribbon Laundry, which is run by the very creepy Bill Gartley – played by Robert Englund, wearing old age makeup and leg braces while he hams it up and chews the scenery. Local police officer John Hunton (Ted Levine) is deeply disturbed when a laundry employee is killed in the mangler, which lives up to its name as it folds the woman like a sheet. And as more strange things start happening in the laundry, Hunton works with his brother-in-law Mark (Daniel Matmor) to figure out what’s going on there... with Mark becoming convinced that the machine is possessed. That fear is eventually confirmed, and our heroes also unearth a conspiracy where Gartley and other prominent figures in their hometown regularly sacrifice virginal blood relatives to the mangler.
As cool as it is to see Levine playing the heroic lead in something, nothing about the movie that has given him this opportunity works very well. The Mangler is ridiculous, and the story can’t sustain a film with a running time this long, making it a slog to get through. I had a tough time sitting through The Mangler when it was first released. Almost twenty years later, I decided to give it another chance – and still found it to be a difficult movie to watch. Hooper was clearly in on the joke of the whole thing, you can tell elements of this movie were supposed to be amusing, but even those attempts at humor aren’t quite effective. His attempts at humor in other movies have worked for me, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 especially, but The Mangler isn’t amusing enough to keep me entertained.
But it is baffling enough to try to watch at least once, so you can see how Hooper tried to make this work as a feature and wonder, “What was he thinking?” Maybe if he could have made it 20 minutes shorter, it would’ve been more tolerable.
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