MANDY (2018)

DIRECTED by Panos Cosmatos.

SCREENPLAY by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn from a story by Panos Cosmatos.

STARRING  - Nicolas Cage as Red Miller,  Andrea Riseborough as Mandy Bloom,  Linus Roache as Jeremiah Sand,  Bill Duke as Caruthers,  Richard Brake as The Chemist,  Ned Dennehy as Brother Swan,  Olwen Fouere as Mother Marlene,  Hayley Saywell as Sis,  Line Pillet as Sister Lucy,  Clement Baronet as Brother Klopek,  Alexis Julemont as Brother Hanker,  Stephen Fraser as Brother Lewis,  Ivailo Dimitrov as Skratch,  Kalvin Kerin as Scabs,  Tamas Hagyuo as Fuck Pig,  Paul Painter as Cheddar Goblin.

PLOT - The year is 1983 and Red Miller (a recovering alchoholic) is living a peaceful and idyllic existence with his girlfriend Mandy Bloom in a log cabin in the Shadow Mountains. All is well and life is good.

Until one day when The Children of the New Dawn roll into town. The Children of the New Dawn are a religious cult led by self styled messiah and failed psychedelic folk musician Jeremiah Sand. Sand spots Mandy walking to town and becomes obsessed by her ethereal beauty, he has to have her at all costs.

Using a satanic artefact  - the Horn of Abraxus - Sand summons up The Black Skulls - a demonic biker gang - and together they raid Red and Mandy's home. Red is tortured and Mandy is taken to Sand.

Sand tries to seduce Mandy but she ridicules him in front of his followers. Flying into a rage Sand burns Mandy to death before Red's horrified eyes and the cult then leaves.

Fueled by the need for vengence Red embarks on a one man swathe of destruction. Armed with a self forged battle axe, a crossbow and a chainsaw, Red hunts down the cult members and the demon bikers one by one and woe betide anyone who gets in his way...

DIALOUGE  - Red - "They where weirdo hippie types, whole bunch of 'em. And then there was some muscle - it didn't make any sense. There where bikers...and gnarly psychos and...CRAZY EVIL !!!"

PERFORMANCES - Nicolas Cage is an utter loon. Fact.

He's quite possibly one of the most eccentric actors ever to grace the screen. He also tends to polarise a lot of people, they either love him and everything he turns his hand to or they think his acting is terrible. The weird thing is, the man can clearly act - you only have to watch his harrowing (and massively depressing) performance in Leaving Las Vegas to establish that. It's just that he has a tendency to go completely O.T.T at times (which for some reason seems to upset some people).

What Cage is really, is one of the most unusual and experimental actors working today. Not everything he does is great (but you've got to give him credit for trying), he was in some terrible films in the late 90's/early 00's when Hollywood felt the need to market him as some kind of "action hero". But leave the big studios out of it and leave him to his own devices and he usually winds up being in some pretty interesting and genuinely bizzare movies. Mandy is one of those movies.

Here Cage plays Red Miller. It's implied that he's a war veteran (probably Vietnam) who lost the plot and hit the bottle. He's now a recovering alchoholic and living a peaceful and idyllic life with his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). At first Red is shown to be a man of few words but with a lot of heart, he seems genuinely calm and happy. That is until the killer hippies show up and send him down a path of bloody vengence.

After the tipping point of Mandy's death Cage goes into full on "Cage rage mode". However, this is not just Cage being an O.T.T nutter like in some other films, here there's a genuine sense of loss and desolation that comes over. You're rooting for Red by this point and you really want to see him metre out some righteous vengence and by Christ he doesn't disappoint. For the entire second half of the film, Red is a one man, drug fuelled, battle axe weilding, engine of the apocalypse, he's awesome.

Andrea Riseborough is also very good as Mandy. She seems to have a peaceful aura about her character and an ethereal understated beauty to her. Mandy is obviously the one thing that has kept Red from going off the rails for many years and her loss is the catalyst that sends him into his own personal descent into hell. She also shows a lot of spirit when she openly humiliates Jeremiah in front of his sycophantic bunch of followers, this action costs Mandy her life but at least she gets the satisfaction of deflating Jeremiah's ego.

Perhaps the best performance belongs to Linus Roache playing Jeremiah Sand. This character is a great villain, he's a washed up failed psychedelic folk musician who uses his failure to justify his horrific actions. He believes that God came to him in a dream and told him that it was his mission to take what he wants from life rather than waiting for it to be willingly given. Somehow, he's managed to draw together a group of brown-nosing followers and created a cult of personality around himself, the comparisons with Charles Manson are obvious which only serves to make the character more disturbing - there really ARE people like Jeremiah out there... waiting to erupt and take innocent people down with them...

Jeremiah is shown to be vain, arrogant, entitled, utterly self important and ultimately weak. His entire sense of power comes from his self entitlement and need for adoration. As Red takes down his followers Jeremiah slowly crumbles, reduced to the humiliation of begging on his knees for his life, even going so far as offering Red oral sex in return for sparing his life. As you can imagine Red finds this to be an easy pass...

There are also many good supporting characters in this film. Theres Ned Dennehy as Brother Swan - Jeremiah's slimy and sycophantic right hand man. Olwen Fouere as Mother Marlene an ageing bitter old whore who's clearly past her sexual usefulness to Jeremiah. Bill Duke as Caruthers - Red's old platoon mate who's been looking after Red's trusty crossbow almost as if he knows that his friend is going to need it again one day, and last but not least - Richard Brake as The Chemist, a drug dealer/shaman who for some reason lives with a tiger.

SFX - There are some amazing examples of experimental camera work at play here. The most memorable being during the sequence where Jeremiah has forced Mandy to take LSD and then tries to seduce her. Theres a shot that lingers for a couple of minutes where we see Jeremiah's face subtly shift and morph into Mandy's face and then back again. Its so subtle at first that you wonder if you're imagining it, that your eyes are somehow playing tricks on you, until you realise that no - you actually ARE seeing what you think you're seeing. It's sublime...

We also get the great sequence where Red fries his mind with "Super LSD", theres no way he's ever coming back from that trip...

On the less metaphysical side of things we get the demonic bikers who are basically the Cenobites from Hellraiser on steel hogs...

They're a rum looking bunch and no mistake.

Finally, we get the utter legend that is The Cheddar Goblin. The Cheddar Goblin appears in a TV commercial that a shell shocked Red mindlessly watches on TV the morning after Mandy's death. It appears to be the mascot for a brand of Mac and Cheese and the advert shows the Goblin vomiting Macaroni Cheese over the heads of two happily cheering kids. He's great, I'd happily watch an entire movie about The Cheddar Goblin puking over small children...

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Mandy is a very violent film that happens to be very artistically shot, nothing is lingered on for very long and everything has a strange otherworldly quality to it.

Mandy is burnt to death but we don't really see anything other than the sack that she's tied up in writhing around as the flames lick at it, there's nothing graphic to be seen, the horror is more implied via Red's reaction and the expression on his face as he helplessly looks on.

First of all, Red takes down the demon bikers one by one. He shoots one biker with a crossbow before running him over with a pick up truck. He then breaks another biker's neck with his bare hands, slashes the throat of another and finally sets on fire and decapitates the biker's leader - Skratch. For added coolness (and comedy) Red then lights a cigarette using the burning severed head...

Next it's the turn of the various cult members to meet thier fates at the hands of Red.

Swan gets the end of Red's axe shoved down his throat until it comes out the back of his head...

Brother Hanker gets a nice centre parting courtesy of Red's thrown axe...

In a thrilling chainsaw duel that puts Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 to shame, Brother Klopek falls onto his own chainsaw (which is literally as big as he is) and is sliced like Pepperoni...

Mother Marlene is decapitated (off camera) and her severed head is thrown by Red to land at a horrified Jeremiah's feet...

And best (and by far the most deserving) of all, Red crushes Jeremiah's skull with his bare hands until his head pops like a zit...

Unsurprisingly, at the end of all this Red ends up looking bloodier than Ash Williams after a particularly hard day at the cabin. Still, at least he seems a bit happier now...

RATING  - Mandy is a psychedelic, blood soaked, utterly insane, massively atmospheric descent into madness and hell. It's a genuinely strange, inventive and original film. It's stunningly shot, each onscreen image is a work of art in it's own right.

Imagine a mixture of Evil Dead, Mad Max, Hellraiser, Apocalypse Now, a revenge movie western, Roger Corman's The Trip and just about every heavy metal album cover you can imagine... and you're about halfway there. It really is that insane.

Mandy is a truly unique experience that like it's leading man won't be to everyone's taste, personally I love it. It's one of the best horror films to come out of the past decade and so I'm going to give it 5 mad eyed Nick Cage's out of 5. 

Highly recommended.

POSTER/DVD ART  -