All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane arrived in 2006 with a title that does most of the marketing work for it, then spent seven years in distribution purgatory while the Weinstein machinery changed its mind about what the film was worth. The premise is familiar. A beautiful outsider is invited to a rural ranch by her popular classmates, and one by one the classmates are dispatched. The photography borrows the sun-bleached Texas melancholy of early Malick, which is a generous way of describing a low-budget slasher with a body count and a barn.

The film's one genuine point of interest is the reveal that Mandy is not the victim she appears to be. She is in league with the vengeful Emmet, and the knife she offers Chloe is not comfort. This inverts the final-girl convention, and scholars have noted as much. But an inversion of a trope is a structural trick, not a thesis. The film offers no argument about gender, no critique of the culture that produced Emmet, no interest in anything beyond the pleasure of the twist itself. Mandy is a villain because the script needs a final kill, not because the film has anything to say about the insecurity and power it gestures toward in press interviews. That is a small gesture, and we score it accordingly.

The remainder of the film is content to be a slasher. There is no racial reckoning, no class anger, no environmental anxiety, no body politics, no meditation on the mind. The teens drink, the killer lurks, the cattle carcasses float in a ditch. It is a competent genre exercise that occasionally flatters itself as something more. We have seen this before, and we will see it again, and the classification remains mercifully brief.