BR: ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE

Available on REGION FREE BLU-RAY DVD from July 21st 2008 priced at £17.98 Mandy Lane is that one unattainable girl at high school that you, and all the boys you know really want to catch, the object of every man's deepest desires. She doesn't smoke, she doesn't drink, she seemingly is a virgin, she has a great innocence about her that immediately you want to hold on to and teach her the ways of the world. She is mega attractive, but doesn't know it. The perfect body, the perfect girl. She turns every man into James Mason from Lolita or Dudley Moore in 10, hell one poor drunken guy jumps off his roof to impress her but sadly miss the pool and his head bounces off the concrete in the most sickening thud I have ever heard. I could think of no-one better than Amber Heard to portray her.

There's a party going down at a classmate's Texas Ranch, and all the boys plot to get Mandy Lane to come. She has to. It might be their only chance to tame that girl, to put that poisonous women out of your mind once and for all by finally fulfilling your sexual desire for her.

You easy imagine that if these boys don't bed her, they will never be able to move on with their lives

Following in the footsteps of those poor "Massacred" teens who came across Leatherface three decades earlier, they drive across the Texas countryside and Lane flinches uncomfortably when her peers around her smoke joints, take pills and sexually arose each other. What am I doing here?, she thinks. But for the men it's a huge turn on. They like the challenge of bedding Mandy Lane and they are determined to do it this weekend. They reach the ranch, begin playing "truth or dare" and get stoned to the high heaven - with the usual inane teen slasher conversations and characters (the stoner, the jock, the creep, the blonde bimbo). Remarkably with someone as attractive as Herd, I never got that sexual chemistry from her innocence that I used to get from the archetype role in the genre. For example, in Scream - Neve Campbell completely oozes with raw sexual magnetism underneath the nerdiness and sexual repression. She feels like a character wanting to break free from her sexual chains underneath it all, here Mandy Lane just rolls her eyes. As one of the Jock's mention, she really does think she is better than the rest and that's about as much into her character as we get. Sure, she looks mega hot when she takes off her clothes and jumps into the sea but I don't know anything about Mandy Lane and the more we find out, the less interesting this movie gets. There's a scene where it heavily hints that she may in fact actually be a lesbian, which would make sense I guess given her lack of sexuality but then it just goes nowhere. It's quickly forgotten about, a sub plot that is never developed or only meagerly developed towards the films conclusion.

Typically, characters are killed off one by one by an unseen killer (who quickly becomes seen and it's obvious as to who it is) because this is a slasher film after all. To the film's credit, they treat each death as a huge occurence, there is no "sudden" deaths if you will that are quickly forgotten about. Each one is given a good ammount of time and treated with care, there is so few characters here that when one dies there loss is really felt from the narrative. And they are pretty sick deaths too, nothing clean here. Though they are never scary. Director Jonathan Levine is pretty pedestrian in creating intense environments and when are we going to get rid of the washed out colour scheme that this genre has heavily promoted since 2003's redo of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Is every horror movie from now to eternity going to be shot like a dream sequence? The last twenty minutes descend into silliness and were misguided, too obviously looking for a sequel. The "twist" at the end isn't like a sudden and nonsensical twist, it is literally the only avenue this movie was going to since the opening scene. In fact, some of the posters for the film hint towards this ending - it literally had nowhere else to go and was completely unsatisfying. Bizarelly, and I hope this makes sense to you. If All The Boys Love Mandy had been made as a straight up slasher film and focused more on intense atmosphere and inventive deaths rather than trying to the be Scream of the 21st century then I firmly believe the characterisation from Levine would have propelled this into a very good flick. But because Levine's ambitions were too high, the movie got away from him and fell into silliness and is therefore a mis-step. If he had tried to do something simpler, the movie would have been the better for it.

rating: 2.5

EXTRA'S The DVD hits the U.K. shops tomorrow from Optimum and it's not much of a disk to write home about. There is no audio commentary, indeed the only extra is the U.K. trailer and a pretty tiresome 28 minute video interview with star Amber Heard. Thankfully the Blu-Ray title is Region Free, and that always gives it an extra rating.

rating: 2.5

OVERALL Possibly the best characterisation in a slasher film since Scream (just here the characters aren't all that likeable, which is why I have only mentioned Mandy Lane!) but for this one it may have been so good that it over shadowed what eventually became a rather tame and misguided "who dun it". The movie of course looks beautiful in Blu-Ray, Amber Heard is exactly the kind of actress you want to see at 1080p and the cinematography looks good but maybe too washed out. A "nearly" movie but a very good try.