The Mangler

One would expect a horror movie about a possessed laundry-press to put the audience through the wringer. Instead, this tedious Stephen King adaptation takes the two-dimensional characters of the source story and squashes them even flatter. Englund and Hooper last teamed up on the abysmal straight-to-video Nightmare (aka De Sade), on which this is no improvement. Levine fails to get inside the skin of his jaded cop, investigating a series of industrial accidents at the grim Blue Ribbon Laundry. The bone-crushing, limb-severing mayhem centres on an ancient machine jealously guarded by irascible owner Bill Gartley (Englund), who clanks around on stainless-steel leg braces following an earlier mishap of his own. Although the mechanical beast is a fearsome creation, and some of the mangling is gratifyingly gory, the bizarre ranting of the cop's veggie, mystic neighbour - about Faustian pacts and the sacrifice of 16-year-old virgins - takes some swallowing, as indeed do the stodgy plotting, scenery-chewing performances and dodgy sfx.