Mandy

2018 action horror movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A lumberjack gets his revenge on a trio of demon bikers and a religious cult after his wife is abducted.

This is clearly a cinematic portrayal of Kubler-Ross's stages of grief.

Stage 1: Free yourself from barbed-wire shackles, metaphorically, of course.
Stage 2: Drink, growl, scream, cry, and drink some more while wearing a tiger shirt and your underpants in a bathroom.
Stage 3: Forge your own bitchin' battle axe, motherfucker!
Stage 4: Take LSD and have your face melt off.
Stage 5: Kill the demons, and kill them good!
Stage 6: Chainsaw fight!
Stage 7: Smile a blood-toothed smile at a hallucination.

In Terre Haute, there's an old record store run by hippies. It's been there since the late-60s and manages, probably since they sell a variety of other things, to stay in business despite this particular type of store seeming like a thing of the past. On the exterior of the little building Headstone Friends operates in, there are these paintings of dragons and things. My mother never wanted me to go in there because there were rumors that they sold drugs, but that, of course, turned out to be pretty far from the truth. They were a nice group of hippies. When I first started going in there while in high school, it seemed forbidden. The incense was strong, the heavy metal they liked was blasting, there was little light, and there was a vaguely druggy ambiance. There was one particular room, about the size of a large closet, where they had these fluorescent pictures illuminated by black light. Walking in there, a person almost seemed obligated to put up a couple finger devil horns. That little room was, at least to me as a kid, the most rock 'n' roll place on earth.

Mandy is that room. I've seen it compared to heavy metal cover art or paintings on the sides of vans, and those are appropriate comparisons, too. Johann Johannsson's final score combines with the hallucinogenic artsy-psychedelia to scorch your lobes, Nic Cage manages to be simultaneously subdued and swing battle axes and chainsaws and scream "You ripped my shirt! You ripped my shirt!" like he only watched Brad Pitt's "box" lines for preparation, and the dark imagery and ridiculously bleak vibes in the characters' interactions with each other make the whole thing seem like there was a massive goth leak at a Hot Topics or something. Panos Cosmatos's long-awaited follow-up to Beyond the Black Rainbow is meticulously excessive in almost every way, every breath this movie is an inhalation of some cosmic energy and exhalation of fiery funk. The movie is nuts, but it's the product of a singular vision and refusal to compromise that has to be appreciated. You imagine people seeing a storyboard for some of this heavy-metal mayhem and telling the director that he can't do some of this before being answered with a "Yeah? Well, watch me do all of this, mo-fos! Rock 'n' roll!"

So there are cheddar goblin commercials, Erik Estrada knock-knock jokes, ax-forging montages, tigers, knife dicks, cultists entertained by automatic windows, horn of Abraxas ridiculousness, animated dream sequences, chainsaw battles, gnarly psychos, and angry power masturbation after somebody who will not be named doesn't appreciate a song that is obviously better than anything the Carpenters ever put out. The colors are otherworldly, the imagery is hellish, and the world is populated by biker demons. And Nicolas Cage has a tiger face on his shirt because why wouldn't he?

How's Nic Cage in this? Perfect! The film opens with his silhouette waking from a falling tree while King Crimson plays, and it ends with a meme-worthy smile that is as haunted as Cage has ever been on screen. In between, he does some of the best work that he's done in a while. Either he found a project that fit him perfectly or Cosmatos just knows exactly what to do with an actor that has Cage's skill set. Cage gets to be an absolute badass in Mandy, and in a lot of ways, it feels like the exact kind of performance I've been waiting for for a really long time.

My favorite moment: After a really silly playing of the "horn of Abraxas" by the bald cult guy, the cultists wait in their van for something to happen. One cult member starts playing with the automatic window. It was really funny. There were actually lots of moments of humor in this, something that keeps you on your toes.