Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Mandy)

 You ever watch a movie so good that its one major flaw pisses you off? That's the boat I'm in tonight, having watched the film Mandy earlier today. Let me be clear. Mandy had the chance to be a transcendental thing, almost an experience rather than a film, something which used the language of cinema not to tell a plot but to invoke a mood, an idea, an ethos in the one sitting in front of it. It could have been one of my favorite pieces of spooky media ever. Then it does something at the halfway point which I cannot forgive, which lowers its status down to a still pretty good movie. Oh, but how I lament what could have been. What was burned at the altar of plotting decisions for the sake of that which I cannot sanction. Let me talk about those halves. What could have been, and what is instead.

What could have been, in the first half of the film, is genuinely strange and surreal. Again, for stretches here at the beginning it didn't feel like I was watching a movie, looking in on the life of the titular Mandy and her boyfriend Nic Cage in a cabin in the woods. Everything about the movie just felt like a disjointed dream, drifting away on the currents of an idea while the lighting goes absolutely gonzo with gel lights and stuff. The beginnings of a plot drift into town along with a bunch of strangers, some crazed religious cult led by a sociopath who believes that the Lord God's highest decree is "You shalt have whatever you personally want". What he wants is Mandy, and so some satanic bikers are summoned from the depths of hell, kidnapping occurs, drugging occurs, and Mandy is forced to kneel before this man who wants her, and God has decreed he can have whatever he wants, so this is really just a formality. In a drug-fueled haze, Mandy laughs at him. She laughs at this petty man with his petty selfish desires.

And it kills her. This is where the movie lost me. They kill Mandy in front of Nic Cage, burning her to ashes. The rest of the movie is Nic Cage's anguished screams of loss and rage before cleaning himself up and going on a vengeful streak of vengeance. This is a fridging. We have killed the title character in order to make a man feel bad and fuel the next 60 minutes of revenge streak. That is a textbook fridging. To the movie's credit, that fucked-up transcendental drug trip of a film never leaves it. This is the most gonzo fucking revenge film ever made, only accentuated by the fact that it's a bloodsoaked Nic Cage yelling shit about demons ruining his shirt as he stabs them to death or getting into chainsaw combat with creepy cultists.

This movie is completely off the fucking wall, and something worth witnessing... but I cannot sanction a fucking fridging. Mandy, a film that could have been an absolute masterpiece, loses Mandy in its halfway point and drops down to just be a pretty good movie with arresting visuals. If you can somehow sanction a fridging, it is worth a look. Still, what a shame. I don't regret watching it, but I am disappointed that a masterpiece slipped away from me like that with just one major decision I disagreed with. Ah well. Halloween has approached, and you know what's coming. It's the final end of the season, and of one of the most iconic slashers. 

Let's check in on Michael Myers one more time.