![]() Maybe that’s what happened to Gartley, a walking apparatus of crutches, leg braces, a dead eye, and a crooked glare-a broken-down machine of a human being who oversees the laundry from his office on high. Owned by local magnate Bill Gartley (Robert Englund, behind make-up so bad it must be intentional), it’s an ancient-looking machine of dimpled black metal that has a reputation for stealing the occasional finger or appendage. The Blue Ribbon Laundry’s enormous press, a Hadley-Watson mangler, has been around for decades. The Mangler is about several archaic machines. And yet, somewhere between the over-the-top performances, Hooper’s unique blend of unrelenting comic horror, and the sheer weirdness of it all, The Mangler urges our viewership along for the duration of its runtime. If that sounds silly to you, you’re not wrong to feel that way. It’s about a small Maine town whose community leaders have a deadly secret: all of their power and success can be attributed to the possessed press inside Gartley’s Blue Ribbon Laundry service. The list goes on and on, and so it’s easy to see why The Mangler, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, follows in Hooper’s thematic current. Both Poltergeist (1982) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1982) featured literal underground worlds, one comprised of forgotten corpses, the other a killer family’s subterranean lair. The Funhouse (1981) explored a monstrous element operating from behind the walls of a traveling carnival ride. When he adapted Stephen King’s novel Salem’s Lot into a terrifying television miniseries in 1979, he followed a vampire who takes over a sleepy Maine town from right under its inhabitants’ noses. In the intense The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), he uncovered a family of cannibals somewhere in the forgotten Texas countryside. Tobe Hooper told scary stories about worlds that exist beneath the surface of things.
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