All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

“Everyone is dying to be with her. Someone is killing for it.” ~All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

IMDB Summary: A group of high-schoolers invite Mandy Lane, a good girl who became quite hot over the summer, to a weekend party on a secluded ranch. While the festivities rage on, the number of revelers begins to drop quite mysteriously.

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 41% (God damn, it wasn’t that bad)

Why I love it: I’m a sucker for the “…and then there was one” formula.

First of all, the title. It’s a horror movie. WTF? You just know something very bad is going to happen, in a different way that you know bad stuff is going to happen in other horror movies. I was always intrigued by the title. I actually named one of my elephant journal pieces after it, All the Boys Love L.A. Chicks. But I bet if someone thought it up in a film class, they would have gotten an F. It’s on an IMDB list called Pretty Bad: A List of Titles. It doesn’t really say much. It’s no “Terror Train.”

I read about this movie years ago, before it was available in the states because of distribution problems. It had reached a certain cult status. And the people who had seen it would almost brag about having seen it. And they dug it. I did too.

I’m not sorry. As one reviewer on washingtonpost.com puts it, “what kind of teen slasher movie is this? Too dumb for the arthouse, but too smart for the mall multiplex, the movie satisfies, paradoxically, precisely because it doesn’t deliver on expectations.” Sometimes that’s exactly what your in the mood for.

Amber Heard is a snotty little virgin-type. Guys want her. Girls kind of want her. At a party, one of the many idiots hitting on her jumps off the roof into the pool and dies. Cut to nine months later, and the cool kids invite her to hang for the weekend at one guy’s ranch house. Sister Golden Hair is playing as they venture out to the middle of nowhere. (It’s all very stylized and 70’s-ish. I’m surprised they’re not drinking Tab.) You get the feeling she’s going to get gang raped.

They drink, get high and have sex like proper teenagers about to get murdered. They bait Mandy into joining them but she’s too busy flipping her hair and batting her eyes at the ranch hand. The whole thing has a weird way of making you wish you were in high school again. And then…

That’s it. This is the only movie I’m not going into detail about who dies and how. I’m guessing you haven’t seen it. I won’t give away the ending. If you’re in the mood for a throwback kind of slasher flick with a twist ending, watch.

Next: The Omen