Movie Review: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

Of all the sub-genres that have proved popular with horror fans over the years, you'd think the slasher movie would have had the shortest life expectancy. I mean, how many times will audiences pay to watch a bunch of idiotic, sex-crazed teenagers being stalked by a mysterious killer?

The answer is clearly many, because All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is the latest to join this club, arriving some 30 years since the first Halloween and proving that there's life in the formula yet.

Mandy Lane is the gorgeous but chaste new girl at school, and in an attempt to fit in with her peers, agrees to go on a weekend away with them. But someone wants Mandy all to himself, and before long is picking off his rivals.

On the face of it, there is nothing here we've not seen a thousand times before. There's a cast of characters that can be broken down into the usual teenage food groups – the jock, the loner, the slut and so on. There's also a backwoods Texan setting and requisite helping of sex and gore.

But director Jonathan Levine has loftier intentions than just giving fans the horror goods, and actually paints a believably real portrait of teenage life. He also achieves that slasher movie rarity – actually caring for the characters when they start getting hacked to bits.

Levine gives his film a raw, bleached-out look that brings to mind 70s backwoods splatter favourites such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left. In fact, although the film is presumably set in the present day, there is very little to date it, and it's refreshing to watch a horror film in which most of the big scares take place in broad daylight.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane might not be a horror classic, but give me this over Rob Zombie's horrendous Halloween remake any day.