Review of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006) by Inaneswine — 14 Nov 2017

Before you can even say "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane", the film falls sharply into the pitfalls of horror clichés, and never recovers. It is a catalogue of bad actors reading from a bad script, performing formulaic death scenes. The more I watched, the more frustrated I became with the film, and I became even more frustrated with the modern-day horror genre as a whole.

The film conforms to the usual dull premise of any other horror film or slasher flick: a bunch of drugged-up, alcoholic, sex-obsessed sluts and man-whores, with occasionally one withdrawn character - usually and in this case female - who becomes the focal point of the piece. Each of the other characters are picked off one at a time. I mean, surely this isn't meant to be scary. We aren't supposed to feel sympathy for the characters. The film is designed in order to give the audience a big cheer when one of the sluts or man-whores meets his or her well-deserved demise. If the film was truly scary, it would feature well-meaning, innocent humans to whom bad things happen. But no, we have to sit and watch completely unlikeable people, whose stupidity and unpleasantness leads them to an end that nobody even cares about. What's the point?

On the somewhat positive side, this films offers an interesting twist towards the end of the film, before taking it one twist too far and driving the script back into nonsense, and the scenery certainly is beautiful. But that's it. And trust me, these two positives pale significantly in comparison to the vast list of negatives. Don't watch it.