A sweet-natured teenager inflames the fantasies of small town boys, with unforeseen consequences.
Orphaned Mandy (Amber Heard), a breathtakingly beautiful high school junior, moves to a tiny Texas town to live with her aunt and cousin (Peyton Hayslip, Brooke Bloom), and every boy sets his sites on her. She's not interested, preferring to hang out with artistic Emmet (Michael Welch), which gets her a reputation as a stuck up bitch; she's actively shunned after popular jock Dylan (Adam Powell) dies trying to impress her at a backyard party – goaded by Emmet, he tries to leap from the garage roof into the pool and misses the water. But it's impossible to hate the untouchable Mandy for long: She cut all ties with the clearly unstable Emmet, and she's so nice, fundamentally decent and, yes, smoking hot – not that she'd use her looks to manipulate boys or make other girls feel bad. Nine months after the accident, the popular kids are starting to warm to her; when Red (Aaron Himmelstein) and his bitchy girlfriend, Chloe (Whitney Able), invite her to a weekend party at Red's family's ranch, she agrees. The other guests are insecure Marlin (Melissa Price), along with Bird (Edwin Hodge) and Jake (Luke Grimes) –typical teen guys with one thing on their minds. There's no cell phone service and it's a one-mile walk from the road to the house; the only adult on the premises is ranch hand Garth (Anson Mount), whose authority is limited to threatening to call Red's parents. The stage is set for drug and alcohol-fueled ugliness, but no-one is expecting the hooded killer who begins stalking and murdering the teens.
A body-count movie whose big twist is so obvious it's hard to imagine who thought it would constitute a surprise, MANDY LANE is a self-conscious throwback to minimalist 1980s slasher pictures, which isn't the same as being revisionist or clever. The young cast is attractive and competent, and the murder scenes are effectively staged. But the whole endeavor is so fundamentally pointless that it's hard to imagine why horror buffs would bother. Originally slated for a July 2007 theatrical release, the film abruptly dropped off the Weinstein Company's release schedule, reportedly because the high-profile GRINDHOUSE performed so poorly. --Maitland McDonagh
