DUNGEON SPOT - Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

                                              


Everyone has seen Manos: The Hands of Fate, and yet no-one has seen it. The majority of people who claim to have actually seen this film have usually only seen the MST3K version readily available on YouTube. The problem is, that watching this film in an abridged form with a comedy commentary is rather missing the point of Manos. I had heard of it and read amusing recaps, but decided I wanted to watch the film myself. Luckily, unlike quite a few other legendary bad movies, it is quite easy to find. The reason being that no company really wanted to take responsibility for it, and it is public domain even now. I watched it just to see how atrocious it really was. Well...

Yeah, it's bad.

In order to experience why this film is one of the worst ever made, you have to watch it in it's entirety with no witty commentaries. The film is just shy of 68 minutes long, and yet, as you will see - it feels a hell of a lot longer. No commentary or comedic sketch can do justice to the mind numbing tedium that is Manos: The Hands of Fate. What the film purports to be is a horror tale of a family who get lost on a cross country vacation and stumble across a mysterious house with a sinister keeper, and find themselves drawn into the clutches of an evil cult wizard who wants to destroy them. Now the idea is schlocky, sure but the core idea is actually rather cool. This is perhaps the reason it is so hard to wrap your head around how bad the film actually is; basically, the idea is interesting but it could hardly have been worse executed. The story begins with a man named Harold Warren, a fertiliser salesman, who made a drunken bet in a bar with Oscar-winning-writer-to-be Stirling Silliphant that he could make a smash hit horror film with the minimum of budget. As befits a film born in a drunken stupor, Warren decided to write and direct the film, and also cast himself as the main lead, Martin. If you ever wondered what a fertiliser salesman with precisely zero filmmaking experience would produce for his feature debut, Manos gives you some idea as to the result.

It just screams class, doesn't it?

This film is so embarrassingly amateur that the majority of the cast and crew actually sneaked out of the premiere to avoid being associated with it. In fact, the only person who was ever truly happy with the film was Hal Warren himself, who went to his grave unrepentantly proud of his only feature film. It was his first and last cinematic venture. This should give you a pretty good impression as to just how mangled and incompetent the film is. It looks utterly hideous, with film quality so bad it's as if it were dragged through a desert before they put the film in the projector. The poor quality should come as no surprise, given it was shot on a handheld camera capable of shooting only thirty seconds of footage at a time, and had no ability to record sound. No joke, all the sound you hear was dubbed after shooting, in what passed for 'post-production' in Manos. It's production values make early Doctor Who episodes look like Avatar. Boom mikes are constantly seen, actors seem to barely realise they are there and there is even a glaringly visible clapper-board in the final cut of the film. Not the outtakes or the work-print, but the final cut.

I made this especially to prove I am not making it up.

While I remind you that the idea was at least interesting, the script itself is utterly bewildering. Dialogue is so stilted and vague that you get the impression Hal Warren has not only never written human speech but never heard it either. There is so much padding that the film would probably be half its actual length without it. The legends surrounding the 'Manos' driving scenes are not exaggerated. Nearly ten minutes of the film's opening comprises of driving footage, filmed either out of the window in the form of landscape drive-by shots, or from the back of the car where it is so confined and dark you can barely see anything. Given that the film is only just over an hour long, this is not a good thing.

I got chills. They're multiplying.

The performances range from dull to plain weird. On the dull side we have the family, who are clearly not a family, in which Hal Warren tries to play hero and a barely conscious child who seems to not so much speak as honk like the adults from Peanuts. The film for ten minutes is just dull, but then we arrive at the house and meet the magnetically strange Torgo, played by John Reynolds. I dare you to take your eyes off this guy for the whole time he's on screen. And given the penchant of Warren to hit you with sudden and endless close-ups, you will often have no choice. Not that his acting is good, it's just that he's....strange. He twitches the whole time and walks like he's filled an adult diaper. Apparently he's supposed to be a satyr, according to my research, but actually looks like he has water on the knees. The reason for this is that John Reynolds was higher than a kite that is tripping balls. The crew confirmed that he was on several varieties of LSD during the making of 'Manos'. Which does explain how he was able to complete filming.

TRIPPY DUUUDE...

The majority of the middle act of 'Manos' is spent inside the house with the camera shifting awkwardly between Margaret (Diane Mahree) looking faintly upset, and her husband reassuring her as to the absolute normality of their situation despite the drug addict hosting them in his 'cabin in the woods'. The little girl runs away and comes back, their dog goes missing and as night falls the film stock has another major drop in quality. Very little is revealed during this segment, although it is proved that Torgo is kind of a gigantic creep as he openly hits on Margaret while her husband is barely six feet away. Having somehow hoodwinked the family into staying the night by telling them to not stay the night, we finally start getting glimpses of the master himself - at the near thirty minute mark. And what a sight he is. Costuming certainly was not the strong suit of 'Manos' (as if any part of it was) but the cape that belongs to the master has to be one of the most eye-boggling garments ever put in a film. It is a giant flowing robe with great red hands printed on it. Pictured below.

Fabulous, darling.

The film from this point onward becomes a head-scratcher, with the action shifting between the freshly awakened master and his 'wives' who seem to spend most of their time nattering like a knitting circle or fighting amongst themselves as the Master swirls his arms around at them.

'Look as uninvolved and bored as possible.'

The plot at this point starts to go way off track as the family stumble around in the darkness with the master in hot pursuit, and Hal Warren kills a snake from another dimension with better film quality (it's a stock footage snake. Really.), and Margaret whimpers and fails to make a mark as one of the great progressive female characters by crying all the time and failing to do anything at all. Musically, this scene is grating. The music in the rest of the film is annoying and repetitive, but at least classifies as 'music'. This scene appears to have been scored by a dog that has discovered a recorder and is blowing into it repeatedly to keep making that funny noise it is hearing. Meanwhile, the master is gesticulating and gurning like a dog with a toffee as he hunts them down. Torgo makes one final appearance before disappearing from the film altogether, having had little or no impact on the plot at all. There is a sort of subplot in which Torgo is revealed to be jealous of the Master and his way with the ladies, demanding Margaret for himself. As I said however, this goes absolutely nowhere. The lack of interest in the plot is pretty clear to see, especially towards the end and one of the reasons the film is so short. Eventually, the film just sort of stops and tacks on a little epilogue in which a new couple arrive to find John the keeper of the house and the women now brides of Lord Gurnalot.

Director / Star / Producer / Writer / Well Meaning Lunatic, Hal Warren

The sheer badness of 'Manos' is almost a wonder to behold. It is currently public domain and subsequently not hard to find digitally. I have heard rumours of a Blu-Ray re-release with a full restoration, but exactly how you could restore film stock this shitty I have no clue. The legend of Manos is so enormous that even Quentin Tarantino owns an original print, calling it his favourite 'comedy'. Documentaries and even an unofficial sequel have sprung out of this bizarrely awful flick, with a following that is second only to 'The Room'. The film is a bizarre testament to the power of deluded belief. It is a terrible film and yet we are still talking about it; Hal Warren, in a weird sort of way, did win his bet. It is a film worth watching, despite It's dullness - and especially for filmmaking students. if only because it will remind you that no matter how bad you think some of your work might be, it'll never be as astronomically amateur as Manos.