All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

Infamous for being left on the shelf for about six years, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane appears to be an attempt by director Jonathan Levine to take a standard teen slasher film and make it into an art film. This fails on almost every level, although the cinematography, by Darren Genet, is interesting, with use of filters to make a sunny day look threatening.

Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) is a girl who suddenly blossoms, drawing attention from the boys in her school. We are led to believe she was some sort of outcast before that, but the script doesn't make this clear. I suspect there is about a half hour of story that we didn't see. She has a friend (Michael Welsh) who is a loser, and when she moves over to the popular crowd he plots his revenge.

This all plays out on a cattle ranch, of all places. Heard is invited along for a weekend trip in which three boys (none of them looking much younger than 25) will try to have sex with her. But they, along with the idiotic popular girls, get picked off one by one.

If this film had a better script it might have been much more palatable. Levine directs with some intelligence but he has nothing to work with. Frankly, Mandy Lane makes Friday the Thirteenth seem like Chekhov, as none of the characters have any development. Heard has a sullen look on her face the whole film, as if she were making the film after losing a bet. There is no one to root for here.