‘There she is boys, Mandy Lane…’
Most horror films fit snugly into an existing trope or subgenre. Vampire film. Zombie film. Haunted house etc. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a film that falls between various stools. It’s ostensibly a teen slasher but it also features elements of torture porn (it is 2006 after all) and in its more arty moments it feels like a precursor to the ‘elevated’ (ugh) horror movement that was lurking just around the corner at this point. That these disparate filmmaking strands never quite come together is why this film has been all but forgotten…
Much of the plot is there in the title. All the boys do love Mandy Lane (Amber Heard). Lane is not a Queen Bee type, she’s got more in common with the sisters from The Virgin Suicides. Elusive. Ethereal. Aloof. When she agrees to attend a weekend party at some kid’s parents’ ranch, the kid (Aaron Himelstein) and all his douchebag friends become very excited about the prospect of a weekend with Mandy Lane. When people start turning up dead, however, it is clear that something has gone very wrong.
Hey, I’m a positive guy, so let’s begin with the positives. Noted director Jonathan Levine (Long Shot) brings an esoteric sensibility to his debut feature, making All the Boys… feel more like an indie movie than something distributed by the Weinstein brothers. The fact that the soundtrack is packed with alternative rock music (much of it excellent) also adds to the film’s indie credentials. Jacob Forman’s twisty screenplay takes its time in fully revealing itself and the genuinely exhilarating final twist features elements of both the Columbine school shooting and the slasher whodunit movies that arrived in the wake of Scream. One of the problems here is the cast. While Heard is suitably entrancing in the titular role, her supporting cast offers very little, with many of the characters interchangeable, unlikeable or just plain dull. The other issue is that this film doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. Is it satirising teen slashers (and I hope to god that the running ‘joke’ about Melissa Price’s character Marlin being ‘fat’ is satire) or is it merely utilising the same bro humour made popular in the mid-00s by directors like Eli Roth? All the Boys… appears to want to have its cake and eat it and in the end, the tonal shifts end up being jarring rather than innovative.
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is destined to be a mere footnote in the storied history of the slasher movie but I think it deserves more than that – a flawed but interesting entry in the slasher subgenre.
