I think we can all agree the cult movie scene ain’t what it used to be. When I see the tag “cult favorite” I have to squint sometimes. What does it really mean anymore?
These days, the tag of “cult favorite” gets slathered on low performing major studio features and streaming service misfits. Sometimes you’ll see the term “visual experience” bandied about, which seems to be the new business jargon for style over substance. Last but not least, anything that Rob Zombie touches.
It’s been pretty dead, so director Panos Cosmatos brought us a little thing called Mandy.
Mandy, straight from the trailer, has all the credentials of being a cult favorite: a simple story told in a completely over the top way that assaults every sense you have from beginning to end, a short run time that seems like it stretches to the ends of the earth, deranged animation that is more Heavy Metal than Disney…
And we can’t forget Nic Cage, the bar for every midnight movie for the past two decades.
Too big to fail, right? Let’s break it down.
(Mandy is best experienced with a group of like-minded friends or in a theater full of complete strangers at midnight, so if you don’t want any spoilers of any kind it would be best to stop here.)
Mandy Bloom and her life partner Red Miller are living and loving somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, in 1983 AD. She’s a gas station store clerk, he’s a lumber jack. They live in a beautiful house secluded off in the woods, a house that is all windows and wood and almost feels claustrophobic in its size. Mandy and Red both have troubled pasts that they’re working through, but all of that lovey-dovey stuff is interrupted with the cult leader of Children of the New Dawn takes an interest in Mandy. So he sends a group of Satanic bikers to bring her to him.
Isn’t it funny how quickly things escalate?
Mandy is the exact sort of movie that one would slap the “visual treat” label over, but this time really mean it. It is a beautifully crafted film that will give you an experience like few others. Panos Cosmatos has clearly grown from Beyond the Black Rainbow but hasn’t left too much behind. Cosmatos takes simple tropes and amplifies them into a nightmarish journey through Hell to make Dante rip out his own hair. In Mandy, a woman is kidnapped and her man goes on a rampage of revenge. It’s an easy movie to boil down the plot to, but not easy to explain. Mind you, Cosmatos is the son of George P. Cosmatos, director of Tombstone, yet another simple yet inexplicable good time movie featuring the best quotes in all of film history. But I digress.
Simple tropes are the blocks of all story telling and sometimes revolution comes in the form of doing something competently. What makes this one different? Is it the cinematography that miraculously functions like your worst drug trip from dimensions of horror man wasn’t meant to plummet? Bill Duke with a crossbow? Is it the loving recreation of a NWOBHM music video on a big screen with cyberpunk accents galore? Could it be the chainsaw duel? How about maybe, just maybe, the fact that Cosmatos created the Nic Cage-iest movie to ever Nic Cage and the main attraction isn’t even Nic Cage. That has got to be a feat for the record books.
The truth is, all of these things cement Mandy as a true cult film straight from 2018. It has a very small scope that it blows up to reveal grotesque detail. Sure, it’s pure male fantasy with a Fantastique touch. It doesn’t subvert expectations; in essence, the movie is what it is. There are demonic fetish bikers on potent substances, telepathic tigers, lumber jacks, and cultists that somehow work out in a single minded story without too much thought. What stops it from being a purely “visual experience” with no punch is that all the pieces work. The visuals work because, well, pretty much everyone is on drugs and that shines through in the cinematography. The revenge motif works because the audience is set up to bear witness to grindhouse features in unholy matrimony with the far out and psychedelic. A rather droll and played out trope is able to amplify the aesthetics of the movie rather than detract from them, because it fits with the time period that the movie is taking place in and what Cosmatos is trying to accomplish.
And what is Cosmatos trying to accomplish? Blowing our damn minds, man. Mandy is style and substance without sacrificing either. It’s for the Midnight Society movie goer in you. Like all cult favorites, Cosmatos invites the audience into a communal experience. A sense of “you gotta see this” and suddenly you’re fifteen people deep staring at a screen in horror as the events unfold in front of you. In the age of movies having to mean something or address certain topics however light or heavy handed, the experience of just letting something exist on its own terms has been lost. Mandy feels like a sleazy, gory, exploitation homecoming. That’s a real revolution, or maybe I’m just a shallow soul that wants to see Nic Cage swing on someone with a chainsaw. Is that so wrong?