Seeing as tickets have just gone on sale for the upcoming re-riff of "Manos": The Hands of Fate by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy, I decided to dust off a review of "Manos" that I wrote a few years ago.
My intention in watching “Manos”: The Hands of Fate uncut, without any help from Joel Hodgson or the ‘bots or anyone, was to give a fair appraisal of a film that has so many times been kicked while it was down. Just recently Entertainment Weekly dubbed “Manos” the worst movie of all time. Surely, I figured, this cannot be true. A no-budget movie like “Manos” has a kind of charm to it that is absent from big-budget big-studio clunkers like, say, Corky Romano. There have to be at least five or ten movies that Hollywood has released this year that are worse. A movie like “Manos” has the deck stacked against it, which should invite our, or at least my, sympathy.
And it did, for a while. But in the end, I’m sorry to say that there’s not much good I can say about “Manos”: The Hands of Fate. It isn’t bad simply because it has no budget and no real talent behind the camera. It achieves badness the old-fashioned way: by being bad for its entire running time. It earns its badness.
Now, is “Manos” the worst movie ever made? Not really. It is not the most painful movie I’ve ever watched; I had much more trouble getting through Dr. T & the Women and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. And there are good things about it. The opening few scenes, while they might seem to be contentless, are an appropriately eerie setup for what’s to come. The grainy look to the film, while purely unintentional, adds to the overall creepy tone. And I dig that oddball jazz score, man.
The story, with a little more effort, could be made workable. It’s the simple tale of a family—Mike (Harold P. Warren, who also wrote and directed) and Margaret (Diane Mahree), their daughter Debbie (Jackey Neyman), and their poodle Peppy—taking a vacation somewhere near El Paso, Texas. They get lost, and stumble upon an old house run by a creepy caretaker, Torgo (John Reynolds), who has some kind of handicap in his legs. It soon becomes apparent that Torgo is a member of an evil cult, led by the hibernating Master (Tom Neyman) and his many wives, who worship a devil-god called Manos.
With smarter writing, this could have been a nice, scary little homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” seeing as Mike and Margaret are two selfish oafs who pretty much deserve the hell they’re being put through. But the script is as ludicrous as they come, even incompetent at times. Perhaps the biggest glitch in the writing comes near the beginning, when the family arrives at Torgo’s house. Mike immediately declares that they’re spending the night there, and orders Torgo to fetch their bags from the trunk. Of course, Mike is set up as just the kind of jerk who would impose himself like that, but in this scene the movie doesn’t take a tone toward his attitude as he orders Torgo around like a bellboy. Only once, later on, do we get to see a fed-up reaction from Torgo, and it is hilarious.
There’s also a frustrating moment when Debbie goes missing, and Mike suggests she might have gone outside. “She couldn’t have gone outside. That door’s bolted!” Margaret exclaims. Mike asks Torgo if there’s another door; it’s in the kitchen, Torgo says. “That door’s bolted too!” he says, after checking. Then, not a minute later, Mike and Margaret are outside, looking. What happened there?
The sloppy editing doesn’t help matters. There are many scenes where the camera seems to just linger on its subject, long before and long after the action has obviously ended. My favorite is when Joyce Molleur, as the girl in the car at the beginning, fixes her hair and then says “Why won’t you guys leave us alone?” There are times when the movie is clearly put together out of order, such as when the Master arrives at his altar, then is immediately standing outside of Margaret’s window, then he’s at his altar again.
Other moments seem to have been written with no concept of how they would play out on film, like one where Torgo knocks Mike out and then ties him to a pole. With proper photography and editing, this should have taken only a few seconds to show, but Warren insists on showing every bit of it—Torgo knocking Mike out, carrying him over to a pole, taking off Mike’s belt and using it to tie him up—and it takes forever. Torgo, with his walking impediment, isn’t able to do this quickly, and it is to John Reynolds’ credit that he doesn’t get impatient; he takes just as long to do it as Torgo would.
It is Reynolds’s performance as Torgo that makes the film actually bearable for a while. Torgo is a technical failure as a monster; according to people involved with the film, he was supposed to be a satyr with horse’s legs, which accounts for why it looks like he just has humongous knees. But Reynolds actually holds our sympathy as the poor Torgo. He is something of a lecherous character—especially when it’s implied that he has molested several of the Master’s wives in their sleep—but we feel sorry for him.
But even Reynolds’ inspired performance can’t overcome the overall misogyny of the rest of the movie. I am not quick to give movies such labels, but Warren’s condescension to women is more than apparent. He goes for a cheap laugh by having the Master awaken his wives, and then cutting to a few moments later, when we see the wives doing nothing but bickering loudly, and the Master sitting there getting irritated. That’s fine, but a little while later the wives, after arguing about the same thing for what seems like hours, break out into a massive catfight. It’s hard to see what Warren is trying to accomplish here, other than the pure joy of watching women wrestle while bright jazzy music plays in the background. In what is supposed to be a disturbing horror film, here is something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Russ Meyer film.
Shortly afterward, we come to a scene where the Master’s oldest wife is tied up to be sacrificed for some reason, and the movie gets downright filthy. We are treated to a nice drawn-out scene where the Master angrily beats the woman, and I think sexually assaults her (the shots are not framed well enough that I could tell). In a movie that walks a fine line between real misogyny and silliness, this scene crosses the line. It’s at this scene, which was thankfully not included in the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” version of the film, that “Manos” stops being a fun bad movie and turns into a real bad movie.
I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised that there is a scene in “Manos” that’s too bad even for MST3K. But don’t be fooled by the film’s cheesiness, or how funny it appears to be on MST3K. MST3K’s Kevin Murphy has said himself that there is nothing funny about bad cinema, a statement which I have never really agreed with, but this time he is right. “Manos”: The Hands of Fate is a legitimately bad movie, and I will not be watching it without the help of Joel [or Mike] and the ‘bots again.
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