Mandy (2018) Directed by Panos Cosmatos
In 1983, Red Miller is a lumberjack living in the woods of Oregon’s Shadow Mountains with his lady, Mandy. While on a walk one day, Mandy is passed by a van full of drugged-up Children of the New Dawn disciples, the leader of which – named Jeremiah – becomes instantly infatuated with her. Two of the cult members, Swan and Klopek are ordered to summon leather/pvc-clad biker demons called The Black Skulls by blowing on the horn of Abraxas and sacrificing the newest member of their cult, with the intention of using them to abduct Mandy. The Black Skulls and the cult members kidnap Mandy and Red and bring them back to Children of the New Dawn HQ where Mandy is given hallucinogenic drugs to prime her for her meeting with Jeremiah. While she’s trippin balls, Jeremiah explains he’s permitted by God to take whatever he wants and starts beating his meat like he’s Louis CK during a hotel room business meeting. She laughs at him and, humiliated, he exacts revenge on her by having his cult Members burn her to death while she’s suspended upside down in a burlap sack in front of a bound and stabbed Red. Red manages to painfully escape his binds, retreats home and has a first class freak out in the bathroom while tending to his wounds and savaged heart with vodka. The next day he gets his crossbow – which he calls The Reaper – from his friend in the woods, named Caruthers – and then he metalworks a battle axe from smelted silver. Revenge on his mind, the remainder of the movie has Red in violent conflict with Black Skulls and cult members, dispatching them in more and more surreally graphic ways.
Mike, you’ve done it. You’ve done gone and pissed me off. As this was my second viewing of this sprawling madhouse of irrationality and sadism, I can say without too much exception that this is the most disappointing movie I’ve seen in ages BECAUSE SO MANY PEOPLE FALL UNDER ITS SPELL.
It’s the kind of movie that forces me to question my taste in all movies, like an inverse case of my affection for something like Terminator 3, I have to ask why is it that I am on the outside with this thing when so many are inside, getting warm and cozy in their satisfied agreement of how smart or superior Mandy is to everything else.
Then I realized something simple: Mandy is a movie made for people more at ease with, well, everything than me. Never someone to partake in anything more mind altering than a cup of coffee, pint of beer or glass of wine, I’m simply not relaxed enough to allow this cinematic freak out to wash over me.
What’s more, I cannot abide the way it stomps all over concepts like dramatic cause and effect, relatable emotions, or motivated light sources. As hallucinatory as they come, this thing is either for the shake and bake crowd, or “elevated” horror fans, the type who watch things like “Salo” or “A Serbian Film” and see merits and allegory in their narratives when others – like me – see very little of value beyond production value.
You see, as I’m someone who cares more for story, character and logic in my flicks, Mandy is an endurance test that grants few joys and many an eyeroll. It’s a cousin to the Rob Zombie ouevre, a dirty, grimy, allegedly edgy and fucked-up movie that suffers from horrifically bad pacing – pacing that masquarades as trippiness – and anemic character development that can only be the result of ignorance or ineptitude.
Notes for discussion:
After a trippy and interesting opening titles sequence that essentially took eight minutes, and which was largely pretty good, we get a horrifically awful knock knock joke with Erik Estrada as the punchline and fuck, that just took the wind out of my sails.
Not sure what the motivated light sources are in their bedroom. It’s like they’re in a moving car driving through the Vegas strip.
Gorgeous visuals and atmosphere for days.
Pillow talk:
- Favorite planet
- Wake up from bad dream so I can tell you a horrible childhood memory about kids killing starlings at the behest of a terrible adult
No one in the Children of the New Dawn van looks like they belong in the same movie, never mind the same van.
- The deaf actor Guy from The Fifth Element with the 17th century wig hairdo.
- Weird poor man’s Lance Henricksen mixed with David Morse who looks like a divorced 80’s dad that owns an auto body shop.
- Grown up version of Malachai from Children of the Corn
- Concubine past her prime with bedraggled hair looks like she fell out of a Rob Zombie Clown car along with the big toothed carny-henchman.
- Jeremiah, cult leader, kind of a rutger hauer had a baby with William Fichtner vibe.
- Lucy, cute young concubine.
- Like, what the fuck reason finds this motley crew hanging out on a Friday night?
Black Skulls:
- Redneck demons are like what happens when Hellraiser cenobites put on a monster truck show.
- Take Batman’s voice box modulator and make it even more distorted. Like Kane, but with more static phlegm.
I would prefer to watch whatever b movie Cage and his lady were watching than this languidly-paced Forest-based prog-rock concert.
Definitely when a home is invaded, nothing happens but long, expressionless staring!
Again, why are these fucking women even with this cult? To ascend to what? And why would they go along with this shit?
Eye drops and then a fucking mega wasp sting? Like what the fuck version of a wasp lives in a jar full of liquid? And why is it the size of a baby’s hand?
I feel like the girl is wearing the same shirt JoBeth Williams wears in Poltergeist when the ghosts decide to get a little bit naughty with her smoke show self.
Oh, all these freaks are deadass drug addicts. Ok. And ascending is being high with a vaguely ominous traditional 3D double smear-o-vision thing happening.
Always knew The Carpenters were fucking cult music.
Jesus fuck. Can this guy PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP. He is saying NOTHING AND STARING INTO THE CAMERA while doing a slow-mo 1940’s style superimposition transition into the lady in the same manner they used to do werewolf transformations. And for what? So he can get a piece? Great. Now he’s cock out. We are at minute number 900,056 and I cannot believe I am even here and OH MY GOD FUCK YOU MERRIGAN.
Haha. I love that she laughed at him while he beat it like Vince Vaughn in the Psycho remake.
Well, with the Tell Me What to do sequence, we get proof this cult leader could write modern day pop music!
Oh great! Now we’re doing Deerhunter Russian Roulette tension because NO REASON. What the shit, Lucy? WHAT ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF THIS?
So, like, is Nicholas Cage Jesus after he gets stabbed in the side?
All that talk really gets a person primed for under-lit slow motion!
In any other universe, this movie is a ten minute short film.
This whole burning a dude’s wife in a sack right in front of him seems particularly brutal and upsetting even though there was little to no chemistry between Cage and the actress playing his wife, but, like, shouldn’t he be dead because STABBED IN THE SIDE.
The fucking cult leader is wearing sunglasses at night.
Gerald’s Game did the impossibly painful pull out of bindings better. Fuck. If you ever saw that movie and you’re into hand-torture-porn, it makes Mandy look like amateur hour.
Effect of the ashen remains of Mandy blowing away was incredible. Nice job there.
Commercial on TV after wife murder: Cheddar goblin seems like an excellent merchandise tie-in for the movie. (This kind of tonal shift is bullshit).
Animated sequence! Because we all dream in cartoon! Should have been prosthetics or a latex dummy or something. This feels like a cheat.
WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS GUY NOT CALL THE FUCKING POLICE?
Oh yes, much better to pour whiskey all over your severe wounds and get rip roaring shitfaced.
Cage is awesome here, but WHY?!?
Bill Duke as Caruthers!
- Who the fuck is this guy and why the fuck does he have Cage’s crossbow? Definite hints that Red Milller is more than a lumberjack.
- Duke is like a redneck Q. Just randomly offering enhancements to Murder “Jesus Freaks.”
- Cage goes HI from Raising Arizona in the trailer. I wonder if that happens to him any time he is in a mobile home.
Cage’s character, a goddamn lumberjack at the start of the movie, randomly metalworks a goddamn murder weapon that’s somewhere between a scythe and an axe. What the actual fuck is happening here?
These animated sequences feel like Heavy Metal: The Movie and suddenly I just want animated, over-sexualized bewbs.
Cage, nailed through the hand. More Jesus imagery. Stigmata. Why? Are the baddies trying to resurrect Jesus?
“that was my favorite shirt?” Why is he doing Schwartznegger lines in this situation?
Hahaha. Biker demon 2 with the nailed forearm is doing coke and watching porn.
I think the take of Cage laughing while Biker Demon 2 dies and vomits blood all over his face is actually his reaction to being in this moment and feeling like his career is dying.
Red Miller:
- Why does Red snort coke? Seriously? Is that an another weird insight into this guy? Is it to say Jesus did Coke? Is it so Red Miller can carry on despite his myriad wounds?
- Oh good. He’s sampled the adrenochrome. Beautiful fucking radio tower man!
This custom-made weapon is lovely, but holy crap does it seem unwieldy.
Lights a cigarette off the burning head of an enemy reeks of film school horse shittery. So unmotivated. So random. So allegedly badass.
Tiger sequence:
- Now there’s a tiger in a cage randomly set free from the cage because Cage stared at the dude with the tiger.
- I have completely lost the fucking thread.
- The tiger, with the setting sun behind him, looked like he was trapped in a shirt that would traditionally feature wolves.
Are half-buried car wrecks the low budget signifier of Hell?
Did they use animation because the effects would be too much and because the lead actress wouldn’t drop her kit onscreen?
So glad he finally gets around to murdering the cult.
He lets Lucy go? The fuck?
Chainsaw fight:
- A chainsaw! Now there’s a stealth weapon! God, this movie is fucking idiotic.
- Ah yes, the heralded chainsaw fight. Seriously. What the fuck? This is grossly imbecilic.
- And the sequence is so ineptly edited that when the villain is pulled into his chainsaw by a chain wrapped around his neck, you don’t get a shot that make sense. You don’t see the chainsaw! You just sort of assume it is there under him.
Where the fuck is he at the end of this thing? Like, what weirdass cult headquarters is he in?!? Where the hell is the old concubine and where did she come from? She just appears out of the goddamn ether.
Oh good! The final boss battle has more inane babbling from the cult leader. Yay!
Why the “I’ll blow you man, I’ll suck your fucking dick” thing? Like, is that edgy? So Rob Zombie.
Nice effects on that last head squeeze!
Wrap up:
Hilariously, I did attempt – with this second viewing – to dip into an altered state. Armed with most of a bottle of wine, I set to task, essentially playing a drinking game of “take a drink every time something in this movie pisses me off.” I got a little woozy by the mid-way point, a fact largely illustrated by my notes which are liberally seasoned with F-bombs.
It’s the kind of movie made by someone who loves the ending of 2001 but who also loves Evil Dead 2, so they smash them together into something where the very few exciting moments make all the super boring moments stand out even more by contrast, ensuring viewers like me get frustrated because it’s clear the filmmakers can do better, but simply don’t.
By the end of it, I felt a little like Red – or maybe Nicholas Cage: I was not sure where I was, why I was, how I was, or even when I was. All I knew was WHO I was, and that person was someone who hates Mandy and movies like it: Who sees these as 1-part drug-induced high mindedness and 1-part fanboy “oh look at how cool my chainsaw dual is.”
Bottom Five Freak Outs
I took this to mean cinematic freak outs, largely because the “bottom five” concept can get quirky when it’s considering something negative. Take our bottom five assholes episode which presented us with the issue of having to figure out who were the worst assholes we could think of… only a worst asshole is, as you put it, Mike, a good guy instead of an asshole due to the double negative. We were actually, in some ways, applauding the performances of these assholes, which sort of makes it a best of list.
Still, we persevered with these assholes basically being people who would be at the bottom of our lists in terms of anyone we’d want to meet. Hence Nurse Ratched, Harry Ellis, and that dad from Society who literally becomes an asshole. Don’t wanna know ‘em.
For bottom five freak outs, I didn’t want to present a list of great performances featuring people losing their shit. And finding five piss-poor or over the top lost-shit scenes seemed to almost all belong to Nicholas Cage who, God bless him, appears to get hired exclusively for his ability to go wild on camera despite his mileage significantly varying from film to film. Sometimes you get Raising Arizona, other times you get The Wicker Man.
So, here we are: for this list, freak outs for me are defined as sequences where the filmmaker went bonkers and it led to crap results. A true bottom five where, like the whole of Mandy, the artistry misfires.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Stanley Kubrick
There aren’t a lot of people who would put Kubrick’s masterpiece on a bottom five list, unless maybe you were doing something like Bottom Five exciting, briskly-paced space adventures or Bottom five spaceships you’d want to be a crew member on, but this cinematic classic lands on my list of bottom five five cinematic freak outs due to its much-adored-by-everyone-else Stargate Sequence at the end; a scene that is apparently so loved that it has been the model for several other film climaxes, perhaps including one of my own favorite movies, The Abyss.
Kubrick’s light show is the culmination of what feels like decades of waiting for the movie to go anywhere exciting, and while it is visually interesting – with particular credit going to that wonderful closeup of Kier Dulles’s astronaut character David Bowman as light is reflected on his helmet – the overall effect story-wise feels like a cop-out; a light show put on to gather ooh’s and ahhh’s that does little to explain everything that went on preceding it. In particular, it’s frustrating because the entire situation with the malfunctioning – or murderous – HAL 9000 flight computer is abandoned.
I get the intention. I have read the articles and rewatched the movie with an eye toward decoding the impressionistic meaning of the sequence, the evolutionary rebirth experienced by astronaut Bowman and what it means for human kind is a wacked-out failure of an ending that attempts to give us a glimpse of “god” or a higher alien intelligence, but instead just bores and confuses. It’s the kind of scene that ultra-high-brow cinema enthusiasts and recreational drug users both adore because it’s all about the experience, man and zero about the plot which is rolled out with all the urgency of Sunday morning stroll through a mall before it opens.
Look at the pretty lights all you want, but for me, this is storytelling laziness, a deus ex machina that reveals itself in a hallucinatory barrage of trippy imagery and bizarre audio editing that purposely confounds rather than satisfies. Say I’m too dependent an audience member. Tell me I’m not getting how Kubrick wanted me to come to my own conclusions. I’ll argue it’s an unsatisfying ending to a ponderous film and that I agree with Pauline Kael, legendary film reviewer for The New Yorker and McCall’s who, upon its release, said this:
“The light-show trip is of no great distinction; compared to the work of experimental filmmakers likeJordan Belson, it’s third-rate. If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they’ve put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art.”
Kael also notably called the movie “monumentally unimaginative” and “trash masquerading as art.” I wouldn’t quite go that far, but I’ll tell you the ending makes for a bottom five experience for me.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) – Joe Dante
There’s no question that Joe Dante knew how to make good movies. The Howling? Innerspace? The ‘Burbs? The original Gremlins is a zippy, fun and mean family horror movie with a high concept and a healthy dose of both reverence and side-eye for middle America and consumerism. Dante avoided making a sequel until Warner Bros. granted him a huge budget with carte blanche, something he made them pay for dearly with the two-hour cinematic prank called “Gremlins 2.”
I don’t hate Gremlins 2 – it’s irreverent and bonkers, an off-its-rocker exercise in broad satire that trolls the original mercilessly while also – barely – continuing the characters’ stories as they leave small town USA for the big city. And that’s Gremlins 2 in a nutshell, bigger and louder in every way, but also dumber, unhinged and somewhat unwatchable as it’s lunacy takes over the plot and the whole thing becomes an anarchic series of goofy bits.
Dante has spoken a lot about his intentions with the sequel, how it’s essentially a tribute to the cartoon and b-movie influences of his youth and how it acts as middle finger to Hollywood execs more focused on films as properties than as art. They wanted a sequel not because there was anymore story to tell, but because they wanted more money. Fine, here’s your sequel.
Key and Peele did an infamous and super funny skit about the pitch meeting for Gremlins 2 – detailing the inanity of the cross-bred gremlins that appear in the movie – but the only mistake made in their retelling of the film’s creation is that Dante wasn’t in on the joke. For sure he was. But that doesn’t make Gremlins 2 any better. It’s a dumb, loud, sensory overload that goes on way too long and reaches a level of pure idiocy when the film itself is literally interrupted by the mischievous creatures monkeying around in the projection booth. It falls to none other than a wild-eyed Hulk Hogan to shout at them to resume the movie, with him ripping off his shirt of course. Fun? Sure. But as far as cinematic freak outs go, this one lands near the bottom as a failure of storytelling; a riff on excess that is itself waaay too excessive.
The Black Hole (1979) – Gary Nelson
In the waning minutes of this insanity from Walt Disney Pictures that offers absolute zero in terms of scientific credibility but still manages to thrill me despite its stupidity, the surviving members of a deep space exploration team – and their super cute robot – dive into the titular celestial phenomenon.
The resulting light show definitely pays some serious homage to Kubrick’s 2001, but it is also its own kind of a thoroughly batshit cop-out. Stars flashing big and bright, colors whizzing by, astronauts struggling against turbulence? Check! But this time you get 100% more visions of Hell and angels – actual tucking angels – guiding the survivors through the most terrifyingly destructive entity in the known universe.
Seriously, I love this sequence but I have to admit that it strains any and all credibility – somehow even more than the rest of this absurd film does. I am pretty sure it’s a dream sequence experienced by the character Kate, who has a psychic gift, so maybe it’s shared by everyone in the escape pod, but it basically finds the movie’s villain, Dr. Hans Reinhardt played by a completely off-his-rocker Maximilian Schell, free-falling in a swirling hellscape where he merges into his murder-bot Maximillian and then lands atop a mountain overseeing one of the best visions of Hell this side of Heironymus Bosch.
What this has to do with anything else in the movie is… beyond me. The film’s director, Gary Nelson, admitted in a 40th anniversary interview that they never had a proper ending, so they pretty much did this crazy wrap-up in post. And that’s a damn shame too, because despite the bad science, cutesy robots, and some pretty piss poor music score editing which actually recycles John Barry’s incredible score like a record on repeat, The Black Hole would be easy to recommend. But with a total pull it out of your ass film school freak out ending? I’d still recommend it, but only to really patient and forgiving cineasts that are also voracious lovers of science fiction, incredible set-design, jaw dropping matte paintings and some first class cinematography.
Mulholland Drive (2001) directed by David Lynch
Asking for a David Lynch movie to make sense is like asking for a well-done steak in Texas: you might be killed for even saying it out loud. Lynch wheels and dead in impressionistic dreamscapes, careening pretty wildly between nightmares and 1950’s-esque soda fountain vibes. Mulholland Drive is a prime example of his output, an often-frightening but frustratingly mysterious picture involving amnesiac actresses and the evil they do.
But at a certain point, the movie and Lynch ask way too much of its audience and while many people applaud the onion-skin layering of his non-linear, non-discernible imagery and plot, I just felt like crying.
After such an incredible journey, with some impossibly sultry and absorbing performances from Naiomi Watts and Laura Elena Herring – who gives Faye Dunaway circa Three Days of the Condor a run for her money as the most beautiful actress ever captured on film – Lynch goes apeshit with a freak out for the ages when Watts’s character starts hallucinating tiny versions of an elderly couple crawling under her door to threaten her. The defect itself is confusing with its artificiality, poorly rendered green screen that pulls the viewer completely out of the moment. The impending madness caused by the vision of the couple leads to Watts’s character shooting herself, but the effects here too are atrocious, with a weird funnel of smoke suddenly filling her bedroom post gunshot.
For me, the ending of Mulholland Drive felt like the first major misstep of many more to come from Lynch. Like Carpenter, Landis, Dante, and countless other directors, his output became inconsistent in quality as he got older, perhaps even lazy. Especially when it comes to special effects. Inland Empire and much of Twin Peaks: The Return showed that he seemed to develop an intermittent distaste for anything resembling reality, frequently embracing what seem to be intentionally crap looking sequences to set the entire tone of a piece off-kilter.
He’s still a fascinating filmmaker, for sure. I have often said there’s no director working in cinema who can control an audience’s emotions as fully as he can and that’s not changed much. In Mulholland Drive, if he wants you to feel lust, you are feeling flush. And if he wants you to be terrified, you sure as fuck go white in the face. But also in this movie, in this ending, is a director who had lost his sense of reason and, with a truly lousy cinematic freak out, drove his movie into an even bigger ditch than the one his lead character crawled out of at the edge of that famous Hollywood road.
Natural Born Killers (1994) directed by Oliver Stone
With just about all of my choices – and indeed with my take on Mandy – I end up on the other side of majority arguments in all of these films’ favor that they are quality. And with Oliver Stone’s ultimate cinematic freak out, I feel like most people who have seen it are fans of its kinetic pace, loud-as-Hell Soundtrack and eccentric, dialed-up-to-11 performances. But as we discussed during our Bottom Five Romances lists, where you listed Natural Born Killers somewhere way up – maybe even at number one – I find this trippy, violent, and ugly journey pretty much unwatchable.
It misses its point as satire by embracing the violence in media it seeks to condemn and it plays fast and loose with campiness while trying to be as serious as a car accident. The balance in this thing is way the fuck off for its duration. Sometimes it feels like it wants to be a b-movie like “Frankenhooker,” or “The Evil Dead” with cartoonish violence and hyper-kinetic camera movement. But then it mixes in Stone’s usual topical gravitas so the actors have no idea where they are at any given moment, and neither does the audience. The result is histrionics that pummel the viewer into either submission or pure rage. Guess what category I ended up in?
For most of the movies on my list, there are just sequences that sink the ship. But for this one, it’s the entire running time that’s intolerable. As we discussed it’s failings pretty substantially in our previous discussion, I’ll keep this brief: to Hell with Natural Born Killers. If you want a much better satire of violence and the media, do pay some attention to the very funny Serial Mom from the same year from John Waters.
Staff pick:
Altered States (1980) directed by Ken Russell
With all this talk about the worst cinematic freak-outs, I thought it was important for me to perhaps totally contradict myself with a pick for one of the very best film freak outs I have ever seen: 1980’s Altered States.
The heady story of scientist Eddie Jessup and his search for a unified shared consciousness shared throughout all human evolution, this thing introduced an entire generation to sensory deprivation tanks – and just as likely scared that same entire generation from ever entering one.
The movie is sumptuous, balancing rapid-fire dialogue and hallucinatory visions of god, the cosmos, evolution and nightmares, all while telling a deeply human story about a flawed man – Jessup, portrayed with believable eccentricity by William Hurt in his first starring role for which he won a Golden Glove – and the woman who loves him – played as strong-headed and blunt by the incredible Blair Brown.
Also along for the ride is the always likable Bob Balaban as Jessup’s best friend and co-conspirator and the positively amazing Charles Haid who hilariously shouts his way through 80% of his scenes in a state of understandable apoplexy!
I cannot recommend this movie enough and I cannot recommend it to enough people. I won’t be happy until I can wander into any party anywhere in the world and drop the words Altered States to kick off an involved discussion on the mind-blowing concepts it contains – I mean, it’s basically looking to unlock the meaning of life itself – or the jaw-dropping direction by Ken Russell who infuriated screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky with the choice to cross-cut, interrupt and frequently have actors mumble dialogue. While I adore Chayefsky’s screenplay, which he based on his novel of the same name, I think he was a fool to try to get his name taken off the film and Russell’s direction really humanizes the characters and creates a dynamic tension throughout.
And oh! Those damn vision sequences. I don’t know what Russell was on while creating these nightmarish scenes of religious symbolism, violence and sex – word is he was often drunk during the film’s production, so maybe just alcohol? – but whatever he did, it worked. Sadly, the movie wasn’t successful at the box office and despite largely positive critical notice, it helped sink Russell’s career. It was his first American movie, and obviously it didn’t help that he was constantly drunk and was always fighting with Chayefsky. Afterwards, he had a hard time getting movies made and only made a few more in Hollywood before retreating – quite literally – to his backyard to make short films until his death in 2011.
Still, we’ll always have Altered States, a movie with such an impactful and startlingly powerful ending that it was actually copies almost to the letter in the much-loved video to the song Take on Me by A-Ha, a staple on MTV during its heyday.
If you haven’t seen it and you’re interested in a genuinely surprising, scary and wild cinematic freak out, do yourself a favor and watch Altered States. You won’t be disappointed.
My pick for Mike:
Book of Henry