All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

... that is how much the Boys love Mandy Lane. But of course this is not another teen ... I mean romantic movie. Nope this is a horror movie. A slasher to be precise. Now slashers do live with two premises: Either a great twist or original killings. In this case, you kinda have both.

At that is what makes this movie worthwhile watching. Of course it is aimed more at the teen/twen audience, but what slasher isn't. The really illogical things that do happen, stay at a minimum, which is a good thing and the actors fit the bill(their roles), no more, no less than that. If you don't like slashers at all, you should of course stay away from this movie!

Fmovies: I approached seeing "All The Boys Love Mandy Lane" with caution. I had heard a rumour that the Protection Of Punters From Horror Movie Cliché's fast response squad (a subdivision of the Committee For Protection Against All Hollywood Movie Clichés) were sweeping UK cinemas and arresting anybody caught watching bad movies about good looking teens being slaughtered by evil forces unknown in remote and eerie locations. The punishment, I heard, was 30 years hard labour watching Martin Lawrence comedies.

I was OK. The squad didn't catch me. Anyway, despite being based on well worn movie clichés, "All The Boys Love Mandy Lane" was really rather good, not a bad movie at all, so the squad would have been forced to let me go.

My interest in a film like this lives and dies on outside of what is going regarding the horror content. Horror is boring in and of itself. Luckily there is plenty of other stuff going on in "All The Boys Love Mandy Lane".

"All The Boys Love Mandy Lane" boasts really great, stunning cinematography. Just beautiful work, dreamy and atmospheric, utilising all sorts of time lapse effects and film stock. I think the work is as as good as anything you might see in a serious art house film. "All The Boys Love Mandy Lane" also has a really good soundtrack of melancholy pop music, culminating in a song that everybody knows: One of the creepiest pop songs of all time. (You will know what it is. It is in the trailer.) There are good performances and an inventive script, touching on interesting issues such as sexual attraction, jealousy, the school hierarchy, peer pressure and rivalry and the problems of the modern body image.

Hey! Don't worry! The filmmakers do not forget that "All The Boys Love Mandy Lane" is supposed to be a horror movie. Add to all of the above some particularly bloody, hands-over-your-eyes, murders.

The eventual identity of the killer was no surprise to me, but that is just the way it goes. I have seen a lot of movies. Suffice to say that "All The Boys Love Mandy Lane" is a superior horror film. One of the best I have seen in years.

All the boys love Mandy Lane, and the way she is portrayed by Amber Heard, who wouldn't? She's blonde, she's demure, she's so hot that the camera in the movie's introduction to the character, lingered on her T&As. She's a fine athlete though we don't really get to know what kind of graaes she's getting. Every boy in school wants to talk to her, and every one of them wants to get into her pants, earning bragging rights to be the first amongst everyone else to have conquered probably the last bastion of virginity in school. People would do silly things like dying for her too.

In typical slasher flick formula, a group of students, Mandy included, organized themselves for a getaway in a secluded ranch, where a ranch hand Garth (Anson Mount) provides that element of question as to who amongst the group will be the hunter, and who will fall as prey. Like how the formula warns against decadent teenage lifestyles, such as the unwritten rules of having the non-virgin being dispatched first and the likes, you're constantly kept guessing as everyone in the group, save for our goody-two-shoes Mandy, get sloshed in a flood of sin, with the smoking of weed, snorting of coke, being highly sexually charged and active, and downing alcohol as if it was water.

It does take quite a while for the first person to fall, and you probably won't feel much for the characters that had to kick the bucket in the most violent of deaths, which get shown quite graphically, only to pull back at the last minute through visual tricks and edits the filmmakers use. But for slasher flick fans, it's a long ride to get to this stage, and frankly speaking given that the characters all don't appeal to you (i.e. you couldn't care less if they live or die), the movie does seem to coast along the tried and tested, until its last act.

Surprisingly, the narrative decided to reveal its boogeyman quite early on in the film, which provided some perplexing questions. Again for those familiar with the genre, there'll always be a thought niggling in your mind in disbelief that the plot would be so straight forward. Granted as mentioned, the payload comes at the finale, which I thought had two meanings, depending on which concept you subscribe to. First, following reality that the most perverse amongst us tend to be the one most disconnected, and second, punishment coming from someone who doesn't see eye to eye on immoral lifestyles, and want to put a deadly stop to it.

I did see the revelation coming, but for the longest time had decided not to believe my gut feeling in the hopes that it would develop into something that will genuinely blow my mind. It's not perfect, but it did have its moments with the following of recent trends in the slasher genre that bad guys don't have to necessarily finish last. Nothing fanciful here, but it still worked to a certain degree. And kudos to both the casting director in putting Amber Heard in the titular role, and for the actress to pull off one of the more memorable lead characters in such a genre flick.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane fmovies. Wow, I didn't expect much from this movie considering that its story sounded pretty mediocre. But it didn't take long to realize that "All the boys love Mandy Lane" is far from the typical Slasher Movie and that is because its in all ways superior done... biggest plus is the stunning visuals and cinematography that captures you in a strange dreamlike feeling throughout the movie and is well supported by the use of music which is kind of cynical and used very little but effective. Seeing that this is the first feature film production of Producer Levine I have to lift my thumbs way up for this one! So what do you get... Mandy Lane is a beautiful but rather distanced girl and most boys in her school are after her. After a friend of her dares another guy who is after her to impress Mandy by jumping from a roof ending in a serious accident Mandy distances from him and gives in to join a couple of cool guys and girls on a weekend stay at a land house. You pretty much know whats coming when you got a bunch of teenagers in a house far from other people, so soon the first ones start to disappear. What makes this movie work is the in-depth depiction of the characters, most having their issues behind the mask they wear at high school. A big part of the movie seems to look into a rather bleak and cynical youth, making it seem like a modern high school version of "Stand by me" on acid that heavily mixes with Slashers like "Scream". If you are in for some serious slashing you don't get much but there is some scenes that are incredibly harsh not so much for the blood but rather for the cynical editing and use of stop-frames and music. After all you are in for 1-2 twists in the end and to me the movie leaves a lot to your own interpretation. But all this makes it enjoyable and different. Definitely give this movie a try because it would be a shame if it got lost in the masses of redundant slasher movies... if you got a little bored with the genre like me "All the boys love Mandy Lane" is a real gem.

I struggled for most of this film; the archetypes were cliché ridden empty vessels. If Mandy uses her beauty to attract attention that's a hell of a long game and a pointless objective. Why was being an orphan relevant to this script? why was being beautiful such a distraction for a whole school? why was the dowdy aunt even in this film? why did the edgy male in the gang show us he could fire a gun at a clay pigeon? why do whippets and drugs have a five minute high in this film? why do I care about any of the characters? Too much of this film is subjective; some shots are excellent and stylised but the content leaves a lot to be desired; some of the gore is well done; in the q & a on the DVD the lead actress talks about awkwardness in Mandy Lane's character as she took her clothes off to join the group in a lake - I saw a classic playboy disrobe shot of a pretty girl. So much potential was overlooked in the script from a very good premise.

Before renting "All the boys love Mandy Lane", I saw its trailer in the YouTube to check it out. Good cameras, interesting story and there were some good reviews in IMDb. Well, maybe I was in for a surprise. You never know. So I took the risk and rented the film. But in the first moments of the film, I noticed that this one was not different at all - it was just another brick in the wall.

To begin with, apart from the differences of sex and looks there's nothing to really differentiate the characters in this film. Other films are able to provide simple characters (even if one-dimensional ones) with whom we can identify with. This film gives us a very superficial glimpse of the characters, their relationships, conflicts.. What we see in "All the boys love Mandy Lane" is just a bunch of stereotyped American teenagers like we've seen so many times before.

And how is Mandy Lane? Mandy Lane, as portrayed by Amber Heard, is just your typical high school girl. There are many girls like her - in any high school there are dozens of Mandy Lanes. Amber Heard has nothing really distinctive about her. She's pretty, that's all. Then, why do all the boys love Mandy Lane? This is a film, that's why.

That said, let's go to the film. As you well know, all the guys are mad about Mandy Lane. The boys (with the help of the girls) prepare a party. Mandy Lane is invited to this party. The party is to take place in an isolated ranch. No one had succeeded till now in scoring Mandy. The objective of this party is to ease things out. A girl in the group wants to make it with a guy, there are rivalries, frustrations, and last but not least, there's someone that loves Mandy so much that he/she is ready to kill for her. But make no mistake, anyone will guess from the beginning who the killer is, but prepare yourself for a wild twist that will put everything upside down.

If the script had managed to give us flesh and body characters and describe in more detail the relationship among the characters (their emotions, their conflicts...), this film could have been a memorable slasher teen flick. Had the film been done in the right way, there would be in it a growing sense of fear, of encirclement. Conflicts, fights, suspicion, and death advancing on and on.. outside just the empty fields... but the film is unable to build up the suspense.

"All the boys love Mandy Lane" is just a passable entertainment and nothing more. If you want to see a film with more substance try "High Tension" (Haute Tension), a very good french slasher flick.