All The Boys Love Mandy Lane

Director: Jonathan Levine
Screenwriters: Jacob Forman
Starring: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able
Running time: 90 min
Certificate: 18

Towards the end of All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, one of the generic dumb teen characters has his eyes slashed by a knife. Not a pleasant experience by any means, but it almost makes one yearn for the momentary loss of our own sight and hearing in order to be spared from enduring any more of this dismal excuse for a film. Crammed full of bloodshed and mutilation, the real victims of this horror film are the audience.

Revolving around a nondescript high school student called Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) as she fends off various male advances and a killer on a secluded ranch, the narrative chucks up some interesting questions along the way. Namely - how did such an ill-conceived idea gain funding to be made into a film, how did the abjectly awful tripe of a finished product subsequently bypass the 'straight to DVD' market, and will those responsible for this mess be allowed near a film set ever again?

There are desperate bids to arouse the interests of the victims (née viewers) along the way. A suggestion of a lesbian subplot is randomly hurled into the narrative out of the blue and then subsequently forgotten about; a minor character from the beginning of the film suddenly reappears later in an attempt to manufacture a ridiculously contrived twist; while a cynical attempt to arouse more than just the interests of any lads in the audience is undertaken through occasionally filming the nubile young females as if they were part of a lingerie shoot. If only noted Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst could have bypassed the racehorse, nicked a Tardis and hurled her carcass in front of the cameras that made this rubbish instead.

As for the mandatory 'shocks', they tend to alternate between extremely graphic imagery (accurately dubbed 'torture porn' by some) and sudden bursts of noise. It's tantamount to standing in a queue, patiently waiting for the bus only for someone to creep up behind you and yell "BOOOO!" really loudly into your ear drums. It'll make you jolt, but you'll feel extremely irate and not want to endure such an episode again.

The standout performances undoubtedly come from a slaughtered herd of cattle during the grizzly denouement. It's hard to tell whether these perished bovines are prosthetics, real dead cows or a bunch of moo-moos obediently 'playing dead' - yet compared to the bipeds in this film they emerge with infinitely more credit.

The boys may well love Mandy Lane, but cinemagoers are best advised to stay well away from her and the shockingly abysmal film that bears her name.