Film

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2007)

Director: Jonathan Levine

Synopsis

Mandy Lane. Beautiful. Untouched. High school royalty waiting to be crowned. Since the dawn of Junior year, men have tried to possess her. Some have even died in reckless pursuit of this 16 year-old Texas angel. Chloe and Red invite Mandy out to Red's family ranch for the weekend. Mandy sees it as an excellent opportunity to cement her new friendships. The boys see it as an opportunity to finally get with Mandy Lane. Driving across Texas, the kids begin to gently chip away at the wall that surrounds her. Joints are smoked. A keg is stolen off a beer truck. Pills are crushed to fine powder and inhaled. At the ranch, all the boys start to make their move – each one hoping to be the first to attain the unattainable Mandy Lane. However, as night falls and the booze, drugs, and hormones take over, things are said and advances made which can never be reversed. Suddenly, sweet Mandy finds herself pit in a brutal struggle for survival against someone whose interest she has rejected.

Movie review

From Time Out London

The first half of this postmodern ‘slasher’ movie flirts with some intriguing ideas. At a high-school pool party, golden boy Dylan – egged on by weirdo outcast Emmet (Michael Welch) – tries to impress the enigmatic, virginal Mandy (Amber Heard) by diving off the roof – head-first into the concrete pool surround.

Nine months later, Mandy and some photo-fit teen victims – naive jock Bird, airhead blonde Chloe, under-confident shag-beast Marlin, and dumb waster Jake – enjoy/endure a drink- and drug-fuelled weekend at Red’s family’s Texas ranch. Things turn nasty when a masked, shotgun-toting psycho starts picking them off one by one. The prime suspect is handsome ranch hand, Garth, a solid blue collar guy who resents these decadent, privileged teens. Or perhaps someone inside the group harbouring a grudge?

Jacob Foreman’s uneven script shows its hand too early, before destroying our credibility with a final twist that makes nonsense of everything we’ve seen. The film-makers think they are making a serious statement about Columbine-style rampages, but their scuzzy fanboy horror movie is more self-conscious than subversive.