All The Boys Love Mandy Lane

I came across this movie randomly, I knew it was a horror obviously, but I didn’t expect it to be halfway decent. For all intense and purposes, it’s a slasher flick but without people wearing leather masks or a location with a shady past. It doesn’t use the standard format of a typical slice and dice movie, it makes it seem almost plausible even though we are suspending our disbelief for 90 minutes.

In Texas, where all fucked up people are from, Mandy Lane is a student at {insert name of random town} High School. Beautiful and popular, Mandy is still an outsider, having become an orphan at a young age and raised by her aunt. She keeps company with the “A” crowd, but is best friends with a boy who is shunned and taunted by her peers. She is invited to a pool party by your typical jock but Mandy insists that she will only come if her friend Emmet can come with her. Since all the boys love Mandy Lane, the jock extends the invite and then proceed to pick on him. Emmet and the Jock end up on the roof of the house watching Mandy when Emmet convinces Mr. Jock to jump from the roof into the pool to impress her. Well, being drunk and dumb, they guy jumps and cracks his head and dies.

Time passes quickly to nine months later. Mandy is currently ignoring Emmet due to the non-direct homicide at the party, and is still the object of desire for many of the male student body. Some non redheaded boy named Red invites a small group of friends to his father’s ranch because I think it is a law that a Texan has a ranch, in hopes that Mandy will be convinced to join them. There would be no movie if she didn’t, so she does. ROAD TRIP! Road trips in movies are always 10 times less boring than real road trips, why is that?

The party of six arrive at the ranch, meet the ranch hand Garth, then proceed to laugh, drink, frolic in the lake, play Truth or Dare and try to hit on Mandy, because it is ALL about Mandy. When the sun goes down, a mysterious intruder arrives and proceeds to slowly pick off the party members one by one and then begins to taunt those remaining in the ranch house throughout the night.

Perhaps what sets this Slasher film apart from the others, is that is uses a modicum of your intellect similar to the way Scream was not your typical teen horror film and asked you to understand and relate not only heroes, but to the villains as well.