"You have no idea how hot you are, do you?" says a randy teen to the title character of All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, shortly before jumping off a roof in a fatal attempt to impress her. His is just the first demise in this generic slasher, a throwback to the days of Halloween and Friday The 13th when horny youngsters were routinely slaughtered as a symbolic punishment for giving in to their hormones. Post-, alas, how can one take Jonathan Levine's film seriously?
Starting as it means to go on with a lingering close-up of Mandy's chest, All The Boys swiftly establishes its virginal heroine (Amber Heard) as a high school Lolita whose bones everyone wants to jump. Plans to do so during a weekend break on a remote ranch quickly go pear-shaped, however, when an uninvited guest starts blowing away her admirers. Suspicion soon falls on Garth (Anson Mount), the hunky ranchhand whose skill with a shotgun has not gone unnoticed. With both jocks and bimbettes falling left, right and centre, though, the chances of anybody making it to graduation are getting slimmer by the minute.
"THOROUGHLY DERIVATIVE, BORINGLY ORDINARY"
After a languid first half spent detailing the swoony, hedonistic lifestyle of its pot-smoking, pill-popping protagonists, some may feel the carnage can't come soon enough. Long before writer Jacob Forman springs his last surprise, though, Mandy Lane has been exposed as a thoroughly derivative, boringly ordinary affair in desperate need of a hockey-masked psycho or razor-gloved ghoul to liven things up.
All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is out in the UK on 15th February 2008.