All the boys, except me. Well sure, I’d do things with her (I didn’t want to use “to her” but this sounds even worse), but I hate those girls. I am guessing that you all know at least one of them. They are beautiful and attractive, just fucking perfect and they are aware of that. And of their power over a man if they’re smart. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a movie centered around a gorgeous teenage girl called Mandy Lane, which takes a couple of sharp turns, dashing through different genres.
It starts out as a typical teenage coming-of-age movie, then it devolves into a drama that later on turns into a decent horror movie. While I liked the premise and the start of the movie with a lot of important issues tackled and presented quite realistically like teenage hazing, high-school outcasts vs. popular kids, and finally discovering sexuality, later on, the movie emerges as a brutal horror. Granted, the intensity of the violence is equal to the number of feelings that were shown at the beginning of the movie.
Mandy Lane is a shy orphan girl, who grew up under the wing of her strict aunt. As puberty sets in, she starts getting more and more attention from her friends, especially male friends who adore her. With her seductive body that screams decadence and a strict upbringing and manner that screams innocence, she is irresistible. A couple of months after an unfortunate incident she starts hanging out with a group of friends that finally invite her to a secluded ranch in a desert. Three couples, a lot of tension, and sexual desire, what could go wrong… Plus one tough guy who’s in charge of running the ranch, I totally forgot about him.
Sexual drive is one of the most powerful and with our entire social structure based on it and the need that we measure our success in life by the number of sexual partners and their beauty is an interesting subject that has always intrigued me. If you’re looking to further explore this subject I recommend two movies: Black Snake Moan and Sleeping Beauty. Apart from really hating Mandy Lane, I have one more complaint about the movie as its reality bar as the time went on, became lower and lower, with more and more artistic shots and surreal imagery. And the number of joints smoked here. Especially if you’re on the T break.
In a nutshell, this is a quite strange horror movie that tried to do too much. It deserves to be seen because it has two great and developed characters to offer: Mandy Lane and Emmet. They were the thing that tipped the scales and got this movie 6 out of 10 stars. Starring beautiful Amber Heard, the young cast of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane was really solid with breakout performances by Edwin Hodge and Luke Grimes. And speaking of Amber, if you liked this one, you might give Carpenter’s The Ward a try. She’s starring and the movie has a this strange atmosphere like this one. Enjoy.
P. S. Mandy Lane sounds very similar to Candy Cane (guess the movie)
Director: Jonathan Levine
Writer: Jacob Forman
Cast: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able, Michael Welch, Edwin Hodge, Luke Grimes
Fun Facts: A little girl died in the upstairs bedroom in the ranch house after asphyxiating. Locals claim she still haunts the house. It is claimed a little girl in a white dress was seen several times in the ranch house during night shoots, even though there were never any children on set.
Rating:
IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0490076/
