He’s baaack! 

It took a while, slogging through the rough early days of the second decade of the new millennium, but we have finally returned to the promised land:

A prime Nicolas Cage film that lives up to the man, the myth, and the legend himself. 

Mandy (2018)

That’s right!

Finally we’ve arrived at Mandy, a horror thriller revenge fantasy that’s LSD bonkers and super gory and kinda awesome.

Maybe the story takes place on a different planet? Maybe Red is still killing people there across the universe? Or maybe Mandy is just so stylistically realized it just seems like an entirely different planet while you are watching it with bated breath. But it’s enough like our earth to be believable and truly disturbing.

Regardless, of what kind of movie it is or where it takes place, this film 100% kicks some ass, but before you take my word for it, here’s what RogerEbert.com writer Nick Allen says about this film: 

For all of the endless feral performances that Cage has given, in movies good, bad and forgettable, Cosmatos’ style-driven, ‘80s-tastic passion for weird worlds and characters takes full advantage of Cage’s greatness, and then some.

That’s the truth alright. Cage greatness is on full display for this one and while my words won’t do nearly enough justice to the cinematic punch of this now cult classic, I am going to attempt to summarize and analyze it all the same. 

The World According to Red Miller

Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) lives somewhere in the remote and wooded Pacific Northwest. (Probably not that far from me, but who knows) He lives on (I believe) the fictitious Shadow Mountain near Crystal Lake, where he works as a lumberjack by day (flying into remote areas to chop down trees) and where he snuggles up to his artistic and kinda eerie heavy metal loving wife, Mandy (Andrea Risborough). The year is 1983, the musical score is one part David Lynch soundtrack and one part King Crimson. Mandy, who looks like a cross between Morticia Adams and belated Shelly Duvall’s character from The Shining, enjoys fantasy novels, sci-fi TV, solitary walks in the creepy woods, and creating her own artwork. She works at a local gas station by day where she smokes, reads, talks to customers in a deadpan stoicism, and sports printed rock-n-roll t-shirts as tribute to bands such as Motley Crue and Black Sabbath. She is a pretty introverted character who suffered what sounds like some abuse as a child. A scar to boot.

Red and Mandy seem to have a happy (if solitary) life together. They spend time smoking cigarettes, talking about their favorite planets, and watching cheesy sci-fi shows while eating microwave dinners on the couch. They sleep in a floor to ceiling 3-windowed room that highlights how deep in the woods they appear to be and how far removed from their closest neighbors they are. What they lack in human contact, they make up for with snuggling, star-gazing, and hikes in the natural world.

Shot in Panavision anamorphic format, the cinematic distortion and colored hues and filters harkens back to an even earlier time period than the 1980s, in which the story is set. To me, it felt like mid- to late-70s but I am probably splicing hairs a bit. Regardless, the other-wordly look, feel, and sounds sets the stage for the tense action to unfold. At the outset, we know that things will not be going well for the characters in this film as the opening epitaph predicts:

When I die

Bury me deep

Lay two speakers at my feet

Wrap some headphones

Around my head

And rock and roll me

When I’m dead

The trouble starts as Mandy walks a lonely road from their cabin in the woods to her place of work–a gas station and convenience store. She is spotted by a passing van–that holds a cult family (think the Charles Manson family), and their psychopathic cult leader, Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache). Jeremiah, who believes God has made him his heir-apparent on this mortal plain, is smitten by Mandy whom he believes he must possess as part of his growing entourage of drugged-out hippies, mystics, and thugs. 

Jeremiah, enlists the support of his lieutenant, Brother Swan (Ned Dennehy), and commands him and his minions to seize Mandy by recruiting the help of the cannibalistic motorcycle gang called The Black Skulls. (Yes, you read that right.)

Brother Swan, who is the ever-devoted supplicant of Jeremiah, makes a bargain with The Black Skulls in exchange for their muscle. The monstrous bikers, who are more similar to the Orcs / Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings than the hardened bikers in Sons of Anarchy, are offered super strong psychedelics and a human sacrifice for their assistance in neutralizing Red and abducting Mandy for Jeremiah. 

The Black Skulls who always appear in leather S&M style outfits, arm / helmet spikes and masks (and who also speak in mostly incomprehensible hisses and growls) make good on their promise to Brother Swan and show up at Red’s woodland house in the dead of night. The Skulls knock Red unconscious and tie up Mandy, who is painfully aware and awake when introduced to the psycho Partridge family.

The matron of the clan, Jeremiah’s first mistress, Mother Marlene (Olwen Fouere) is envious of the attention paid to Mandy and slaps her hard around and then doses her with a heavy serving of LSD, followed by a chaser sting from an surrealistically LARGE wasp creature that must have crawled out of an Aliens movie or Freddy Krueger nightmare. 

Mandy, whose entire existence has become this psychtropic horrorscape, trips hard on the drugs she’s been given and is subjected to a strip tease and posturing sesh from Jeremiah. Jeremiah also forces Mandy to listen to crap hippie music he created on vinyl and diatribes at length about how he’s kind of a God now who needs a new partner. 

With his dingus flapping in the wind, things get pretty surreal before Jeremiah’s inept advances make no mark on Mandy, who takes Jeremiah for what he really is, a buffoon, as she laughs maniacally at his speech, his small penis, and his terrible musical talents. This infuriates and psychologically emasculates Jeremiah in front of his “family” and he quickly sours on his newfound muse, Mandy.

When we finally get to see what’s become of Red, his mouth and arms are bound in barbed wire and he is hung from a metal structure outside of his home. Jeremiah introduces himself by stabbing Red deep with a dagger to the side. Harking back to a story Mandy told him in an earlier scene, about her own helplessness as a child witnessing the cruel murder of some hatchlings by her abusive father, Red must now face a similar but more extreme horror–the murder of his wife.

As Jeremiah gets preachy and the family surrounds him outside, Red must listen to the jilted ramblings of the madman. He accuses Mandy of being a “whore” and other things and tells him he’s going to show him something to prove his power. Jeremiah bids his minion to bring her forth. Whether Mandy is unconscious or dead, it’s uncertain, as she is shown to Red in a black body bag, which quickly gets covered in kerosene.

With only his eyes to emote his mounting despair, Red seems to scream, wail, and beg for the life of his wife as she is brutally lit on fire, a terrible effigy in the dark night sky. The Family gets caught up in the reveries of the violence as they all witness Mandy burn slowly to ash. Red, of course, is decimated by this.

Inexplicably, the cultist creeps leave Red behind with the corpse, assuming (I guess) he’d die from either grief or the elements, and drive away as the ashes of Mandy smolder into the lawn. As the morning comes, Red tears free from his shackles (losing a lot of skin in the process) and cradles the skull and ashes of his immolated dead wife. 

The rest of the film is all focused on the white-hot, blood-red revenge of Red Miller. (And let me tell you after witnessing that nightmarish burning scene we ALL WANT THIS TO HAPPEN.)

Luckily for us, Red, it turns out, is ex-military (with similar skills and story arc as John Wick) and once he is able to bottle up his grief (by chuggin a bottle of vodka and screaming into the abyss) and put on some pants (covering those tightie whities) he sets off on his mission of vengeance.

First, he recovers the weapons (a crossbow he’s lent to a military friend).

Next he gets to know his enemy (Black Skulls are a biker gang gone wrong due to all the experimental psychedelics and debased behaviors they thrive in).

Then, in epic fashion, he forges a new weapon (a silver battle axe!) Talk about bad ass.

Then he sets out to make them all pay for what they have done to his innocent wife. First he hunts down The Black Skulls, tries to kill one of them, wrecks his car, and gets captured instead. Not a man to give up so easily, Red starts out a prisoner, but soon escapes murders each biker one by one until they are all dead.

Then he hunts down The Chemist (Richard Brake) who kinda created (or at the least enabled) the bad behaviors seen by The Black Skulls and Jeremiah’s religious crew by cooking up these crazy drugs in his dark lab. It looked like the Chemist might even sic his bengal tiger on Red when he arrived with weapons, but instead just lets the beast out of his cage for a nightly walkabout.) 

Somehow the Chemist escapes the exploding wrath of Red because (I guess) they are both on the same mind-meld frequency with each other due to the very strong psychotropics they are both taking at the time. Red never speaks but the Chemist dialogues through the entire scene answering Red’s unvoiced questions and complaints. TC points Red to the Sand family’s location, where Red, now bloody and bloodied, can take on the final stages of his angel of death campaign on his wife’s murderers.

Riding an ATV into the heart of some apocalyptic wasteland / meditation retreat, Red finds each of the Family members responsible for Mandy’s death and “takes care of them” in satisfyingly brutal ways. The battle axe gets some usage, slicing through the yammering throat of Brother Swan and cleaving another family member’s head clean in half and Red improvises with a chainsaw, a chain, and his bare hands.

At the end of the road is Jeremiah–the instigator and cause of all of Red’s misery. Using Mother Marlene’s head as a bowling ball greeting, Red enters the “ring” with Jeremiah, but now stands as his sociopathic equal of deranged hatred. First Jeremiah attempts to persuade Red of his purpose in inflicting all this misery on him, then, fearing he can’t be reasoned with, begs for his life by offering to do him (ahem) sexual favors, and finally, as the floor begins to collapse on his hopes, he goes full megalomaniac and berates this hulking wreck of a human being with death in his eyes. Not a good move for a weak little puff of nothing like Jeremiah.

Red seizes Jeremiah’s head in both palms of his hands, and bellows at him, “I’M YOUR GOD NOW!” before crushing his skull and popping his eyes out like a cuckoo clock. 

Having completed his avenging tasks and murdering all involved in Mandy’s death, Red Miller, or what’s left of him, returns to his car and drives away from the burning sanctuary. He envisions his wife both past and ghostly present in the passenger seat beside him and drives off into the sunrise / sunset / dusky knife. 

In the distance multiple planets are visible on the near horizon…as if this world Red is driving in and away from is not the world in which any of us are currently living. He’s living, either literally, figuratively, or both at the same time, in a completely different world now.

Why So Much Explanation

I realize that’s probably a much more detailed summary than what was needed to explain this film. However, since this film is so intense, graphic, violent, and disturbing, I can’t really recommend it. It’s not the type of film that everyone will enjoy. So I thought walking through the more detailed plot points would help with my analysis–and maybe provide a proxy for someone who might be interested in the storyline without actually wanting to view the entire film. 

So there you go.

Did I find the film engaging? Of course I did. Did I watch it twice in less than a week? You bet. 

But at the same time, it’s still hard to watch. 

Nobody should be subjected to what Red and Mandy Miller went through–even vicariously. Dark shit. The Black Skulls and specifically their sicko “cannibal” lair were particularly vile and disturbing. They are hyperbolically evil, clouded in masks and mystery, and yet just human enough to make them all the more unsettling. Religious cults like those lead by Jeremiah Sands—are adept at kidnap, torture, brainwashing, manipulation etc–and that added another layer of disturbing and unnatural to the mix. 

And then there’s the filter of psychedelics that strings us along through the gauntlet of Mandy’s imaginative world, Jeremiah’s delusions of grandeur, and Red Miller’s anguish-filled rage and vengeance.

Nothing Like This 

Say what you will about Nicolas Cage as an actor or a human being; he is unafraid to star in films that are unlike anything you’ve seen before, and he often thrives when the story is compelling and the director / writer has a clear and solitary vision. This stylistic film written and directed by Panos Cosmatos (and produced by Elijah Wood) falls into that camp of having a unique, singular story to tell and a clearly defined way of telling it. In some ways, the film creates its own genres. Grimdark Fantasy Thriller. Cosmic Shoegaze Gore-noir.   Whatever you want go with, Cosmatos worked for many years on this film, which he saw as a companion piece to Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) and casting Cage as the tragic protagonist was a stroke of genius. Who else could pull off the absurdist bedlam and romantic berserker bloodlust in quite the way this film needed it to be portrayed? None but Cage.

Not only did the film defy categorization, the role also disrupted the character categories I typically parse Cage’s roles into. You may remember the general categories but I’ve adjusted them slightly here: The Misfit Savior, The Tragi-comic Fool, or The “Straight Up” Everyman / Hero / Villain / Loser. I think I need a new category–maybe something along the lines of The Devastated Avenger. Red Miller is a good example of this and I think I could go back and find some others if I tried. 

Some other notes on the “weirdness” of this film.

• David Lynch vibes. When Mandy takes her first walk in the woods, she finds a young deer that has been killed and discarded with its innards poking out. The deer looks strange and the atmospheric way in which it was shot reminded me of something from Eraserhead or Lost Highway. Additionally, the way that Brother Swan calls The Black Skulls (i.e. in the black of night using an eerie bird call) felt a lot like other Lynch scenes in Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, or Blue Velvet.
• After Red escapes from his barbed wire bondage he walks into his home and he sees a TV commercial for a macaroni and cheese brand (that looks like Kraft) but it’s called Cheese Goblins. The commercial  features some freaky looking puppet goblins that vomit mac and cheese all over the laughing children in the commercial and then leer at the audience as the commercial ends. Why? Why not I guess.

• T-shirts. Mandy and Red wear a variety of T-shirts with heavy metal bands, an illustrated tiger, and the number 44 on them. 
• I mentioned earlier the film was shot in Panavision anomorphic format creating an atmospheric and other-worldy dimension to the scenes. The dark black, purple, red, and green camera filters and coloring of the scenes creates a galactic (far out) or aurora boreal effect that turns dreamy visions into abject nightmare (pretty quickly).
• After her death, Red dreams of Mandy only in animated scenes. The animation work is solid and adds to the overall surreal / drug-feuled fugue state that Red finds himself in. 

• Seeing the strange planets on the horizon in the closing credit scene really did make me wonder if we witnessed this whole interaction with Red and Mandy that occurred on a parallel earth. 

Red Miller: John on Fire

There’s a pretty good vengeance movie starring Denzel Washington (as John Creasy) called Man on Fire. Red Miller is John Creasy and John Wick x 100. John Creasy lost a child he was responsible for to kidnappers and John Wicks lost his puppy (that he got from his dead wife) to assassins. Red Miller lost his wife and love of his life, horribly, to cultists and ogres. She was burned alive right in front of him.

What did he do in response? 

• He crafted an ornate battle axe of what looked like solid silver. 
• He armed himself with a crossbow and metal piercing bolts.
• He hunted down the pack of motorcyclists and shot one off of his motorcyle
• He freed himself from being nailed to the floor (by his palm) and threw a biker down a flight of stairs.
• He sliced the throat of another biker who was wearing as a long blade as a strap-on. (Red got covered in his hot fat blood in the process.)
• He shot another biker in the throat with the metal piercing bolt. The guy survived somehow. 
• He set him on fire. 
• He faced down a tiger, a bowl of millipedes, and the armageddon of some strong strain of LSD that he took.
• He made Brother Swan swallow the business end of his battle axe until it obliterated his throat.
• He split a cultist head in half by throwing his battle axe at him.
• He waged chainsaw war with a ripped Sand follower before he lassoed him with a giant chain (like Ghost Rider) and pulled him chest down on top of a large chainsaw.
• He decapitated an old woman and treated her head like a bowling ball.
• He crushed Jeremiah’s head completely flat, popping out his eyes while he sighed orgasmically.

I mean, c’mon, when has John Wick or John Creasy, combined, ever attempted even a fraction of those things in an action movie? That’s seeing Red.

The Moral of the Story 

The “wrong answers only” answer to this question is: “Don’t do drug, kids. Or perhaps “Just say no (to cults).” But neither of these adages would have helped Red or Mandy survive their experience. They were innocent bystanders who got caught up in this cluster fuck of a brutal world. 

The only moral I can think of is “listen to your gut when it is telling you it’s time to move.” In a scene preceding Mandy’s abduction and subsequent burning alive, Red poses the idea that perhaps they should move on from this remote woodland cabin. Like hey, maybe it’s time to go somewhere else kinda thing. Mandy, of course, poo-poo’s his wise suggestion because it’s their home where she is comfortable, where their life is, blah-blah-blah.  Sometimes you gotta just listen to what the universe is whispering to you, and put that 2-bedroom up on Redfin, pronto. 

Otherwise you’ll be weeping into your cheddar goblins, smithing up a wicked battle axe, and raining hell down on your enemies. 

They shall know you by the trail of your dead…

Firsts as Red Miller

• Watching wife get burned alive
• Dreaming in animation
• Retrieving a bottle of vodka stashed in the bathroom
• Going through all the stages of grief while screaming and drinking vodka  in his underwear.
• Forging his own weapon, a battle  axe (out of silver)
• Living in the Pacific Northwest (or another planet entirely)
• Having a nail put through his hand…like Jesus
• Appearing in a film with a bengal tiger
• Winning in a chainsaw battle
• Crushing a man’s skull in

Recurrence

• Smoking (Multiple)
• Taking vengeance on a cult leader (Drive Angry)
• In a film with Russian roulette (The Trust)
• Stabbed in the side…like Jesus (Outcast)
• Snorting cocaine (Multiple)
• Using a chain to take out a thug (Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance)
• Annihilating those who hurt a woman he cared about (Vengeance: A Love Story)

Quotable

“Erik Estrada from CHIPS.”

“I change my mind. I like Galactus. He eats planets. Woof. Woof. Woof.”

“Sometimes I wonder if we should move away from this place.”

“Come for the Reaper.” 

“Jesus freaks.”

“They lit her on FIRE!”

“They were weird hippy types.”

“They were bikers and gnarly psychos. Crazy evil.” 

“Don’t be negative.” 

“That was my favorite shirt.” 

“You’re a vicious snowflake.” 

“YOU RIPPED MY SHIRT.”

“The psychotic drones where the mystic swims. You’re drowning. I’m swimming.

“I’m your God now!”

Conclusion

Weird to say this, but Mandy was a welcome relief in the WATC(H) journey slog of late, especially after the rough offerings of 2017 and 2018 (so far). I don’t know if this psycho-horror grimdark weirdness will just be a one-off oasis or a strong turning point to better films to come, but I’m very happy to have some food for thought and some stylistic and artistic fodder for these over architected reviews. 

I recently joined a Nicolas Cage Reddit channel called r/onetruegod. I like the title because it carries some weight and echoes the last utterances we heard from the tortured Red Miller at the end of Mandy,

“I’M YOUR GOD NOW!” 

Bow down, bitches. Bow down to the All Powerful Cage.