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All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

5/10

Stars: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Michael Welch, Melissa Price, Whitney Able, Edwin Hodge, Aaron Himelstein, Luke Grimes

Director: Jonathan Levine

This teen slasher film is slightly off the beaten track, although not as far as the makers would have us believe. Nor is the solution to its killings as difficult to work out as the writers might hope. Guessing the answers early does admittedly take the edge off things. And the bleached-out photography, probably intended to lend a desolate feel to the countryside, around the ranch where it all takes place, doesn't really add much to the film's atmosphere.

At any rate, down to the plot: Mandy Lane (Heard), blonde goddess and seemingly unobtainable teen virgin, agrees to accompany five friends of far looser morals to a remote ranch owned by the father of one of the students. The taciturn ranch foreman (Mount) is less than impressed by the drug- and drink-fuelled hi-jinks that ensue - involving everyone but the impassive Mandy.

The inevitable then follows as the teens begin to suffer grisly deaths one by one over the course of a single night. Though the outcome is not what some horror buffs might expect, the film still obeys most of the cliched rules of the genre, with characters inopportunely left alone, or splitting from the others.

Plotholes abound. How does the killer even reach this isolated ranch? And, having gone underwater to escape a killer's rifle, would you then re-emerge in the same place? D'oh!

David Quinlan

USA 2006. UK Distributor: Optimum. Technicolor.
88 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 2, Swearing 3.

Review date: 10 Feb 2008