ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE

Jonathan Levine Written by Jacob Forman Starring: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Michael Welch, Aaron Himelstein, Melissa Price Distributed by Optimum Releasing Film is released in the U.K. on Feb 18th and in the U.S. on April 25th, 2008. Review by Michael Edwards

rating: 3.5

I have to admit that I didn't read more than the brief synopsis of this film before I went to see it, a pretty slack approach on my part I know. (Sorry guys - I'll make it up to you!). Briefly summarising, it went as follows: Mandy Lane. Beautiful. Untouched. High school royalty waiting to be crowned. Since the dawn of Junior year, men have tried to possess her. Some have even died in reckless pursuit of this 16 year-old Texas angel. Chloe and Red invite Mandy out to Red's family ranch for the weekend. Mandy sees it as an excellent opportunity to cement her new friendships. The boys see it as an opportunity to finally get with Mandy Lane. Driving across the Texas landscape, the kids begin to gently chip away at the wall that surrounds her. Joints are smoked. A keg is stolen off a beer truck. Pills are crushed to fine powder and inhaled. Mandy observes it all with the gentle interest of a foreign tourist. And they love her for it. In high school, learning to be yourself and not succumbing to peer pressure is the ultimate test. And this is one exam that Mandy is determined not to fail. I went in not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE is a dirty, dirty slasher film and it knows it. There is no Tarantino-esque pastiche with all its weighted overtones of 'cool', nor is there the wry comedy edge applied to this sort of thing since SCREAM, it is just a simple, scary and fun slasher-flick which flaunts its gory sheen and attractive cast, plays around with the cinematography and has a couple of decent twists thrown in for good measure. The film opens with scenes of Mandy Lane (the beautiful Amber Heard) being gawped at by ever high school kid within a 100 metre radius, before descending into the crux: all the boys want to own her. We are quickly thrown into a pool party where we see one attempt to get with her end in a superbly nasty way. It progresses nicely from there. At the aforementioned ranch the kids begin to be hunted by a mysterious psychopath. The ambiance on the whole is not particularly intense or scary, nor is it consistent. This film draws all of its energy and appeal from the gruesome killing scenes, and each death is a triumph of style and gore. Colour, framing and music are all cleverly manipulated to create a psychotic hyper-realism which is at times brutally contrasted to simple subjective camera shots of death scenes and in one particularly disturbing attack some of you with more pretentious tastes may see a nice little influence from UN CHIEN ANDALOU, and where better to draw surreal violent absurdity from I say! Each hit of pain brings with it many a delightful cringe of disgust, but we are quickly thrown back into the youthful revelry of skimpy nightclothes, booze and drugs to prevent us dwelling on the bloody violence for too long. Perhaps this makes pretty clear again that the most consistent aspect of the film is its nastiness, its ability to portray the sordid world of the well-off high school kids as they become sexually aware alongside the dark world of the psychotic slasher. Again I say, this is a dirty, dirty film! But perhaps I'm underselling this a little by simply bracketing it a stylised but not-too-nostalgic blood-fest. Director Jonathan Levine has been keen to emphasize that this film is supposed to reflect the heady pleasure and pain of high school, which it certainly does, and the twisted ending adds another dimension to the film as a portrayal of deviance and psychosis. Either way, this film is well worth an hour and a half of your time, but only if your tolerance levels for filth are pretty high! http://www.mandylane.co.uk/http://www.myspace.com/welovemandylane?sendEmail=%5Btype+Function%5D