Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, has a tasty treat for horror movie fans. And if you’re not a horror movie fans, suck it up!
By MIKE FRIED
Mandy
*****
Red and Mandy live in a home in the forest in 1983. Red is a logger and Mandy works at a roadside convenience store. They love each other deeply and have a generally good life. They love eating dinner in front of the TV watching crappy horror pictures.
But then one day, their lives are shattered forever. A violent religious cult abducts Mandy and beats Red within a inch of his life with the help of their drug-fueled biker henchmen. Red is hell bent on revenge. But what can one man do against ten, armed only with a crossbow and an axe?
This is not a movie for the faint of heart. If you are squeamish about spiders in your house, don’t watch it. If you watch other horror movies or movies with violence, I implore you to watch this movie because it’s just that good. From the brilliant blood red cinematography that foreshadows disaster to Nicolas Cage’s best performance in years, this movie is one from which you cannot avert your eyes.
This movie also posts a tremendous score by Johan Johansson, the twice Oscar-nominated and too soon departed composer. It is so eerie that if you want the full effect, watch it in the dark with headphones. Wow.
Like I said, this is Cage’s best performance in years. It is a throwback to his 1980s roles, like Vampire’s Kiss. He plays a man who has snapped and he brings out the bug eyes, grinning teeth and the screaming in a big and effective way. He is almost godlike-beaten and stabbed and drugged he, like Rasputin, comes back for more. There is a scene in a bathroom that is among the best work that Cage has ever done. This is his show.
That’s not to denigrate the rest of the cast. Linus Roache is compelling as the fake religious cult leader, Jeremiah who commands his believers to do his bidding. He is a weak man in the end but when weak men have toadies who obey their every word they assume they are powerful. He is Charles Manson and Donald Trump rolled into one.
The rest of the cast is excellent. A lot of them are people you have seen in other movies but you don’t know their names (well, I do) and that’s not a bad thing. They add to the spookiness of the film without detracting from Cage or Andrea Riseborough who plays Mandy. Her repudiation of Jeremiah is riveting and, ultimately, her downfall.
The movie, to me, is a throwback to 1970s action horror films, most notably The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs. And, besides Cage, full credit goes to director Panos Cosmatos. He has created an otherworldly film. The biker henchman might actually be demons from hell; we don’t know. Or it might be drugs, which play a large part in this film. The cinematography is blurred and jarring and the sound design is played with constantly in order to leave one off-kilter, much as Mandy and Red are throughout the film. In a way, you experience what they feel.
The film’s opening song “Starless” by King Crimson originally appeared on their 1974 album “Red,” which is also the name of our protagonist as well as the general color scheme of the film.
And the violence. I’m not going to downplay the violence at all but this is not just a slasher film. It’s an art film masquerading as a revenge film. But the violence is rendered in a very dreamlike way that it is secondary to the plot. And, by doing so, Cosmatos (the son of famed director George P Cosmatos) gives this movie a heart. There is pure emotion in this film which sets it apart from so many other films I this genre — it’s about grief and loss.
Suck it up and WATCH this gem.
****
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
