Manos: The Hands of Fate

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Upon starting this DVD entitled "Manos:The Hands of Fate" I was immediately impressed by the sincere tackiness during the intro sequence. The inappropriate music, voice overdub and the poor color quality and graininess of the film do create an atmosphere.

Perhaps the most striking first impression is the illogical use of a grown woman's voice to overdub the little girl's voice. It cuts to the heart of the production values and most importantly post production technique. The use of the adult's voice for the little girl immediately tells us that the film will be asking a lot from the audience-perhaps too much. It is beyond reason that a editor would use this technique unless as an absolute last resort. The use of this voice for dubbing the little girl's lines is way beyond our expectations of even very problematic editing. It immediately tells us there are real problems with this film. It also tells us that we are going to see and hear something which we will not see very often on video.

For this reason we must continue to watch the movie. We must see how intense this technique will become. We must see what the next mistake is and how it will happen and what the film will ask us to accept next.

This is one of the keys to watching "Manos". We want to see the mistakes, the poor editing, amateur acting errors (the actors overall were good in this film-they only made the mistakes of beginning actors) the inappropriate music and improperly timed sound edits, the incredibly long pauses and illogical cut aways.

The use of a silent camera may have actually influenced the actors and directing on this movie. They may have began acting as if they were in a silent movie ( making gestures, over expression of the face was often used to communicate in silent films).

The actor John Reynolds gives a most inventive, quirky and yet sincere interpretation of the Igor type character. He is actually very good in several scenes-both comic and serious. The scene where he is deciding whether to allow the family into the "Master's" house is very intensely acted. The First Bride also gives a good performance. She is relaxed, comfortable and yet concentrated.

The filmmaker/lead actor Hal Warren gives the impression he's in a hurry to get film finished. The film ends with his image greeting the next group of visitors.

There is no question that Warren was out to get the job done-the movie made. He accomplished this but in the post production it seems stopped "putting a film together" and truly just did a rough assembly of scenes and sound track.

Unlike Herk Harvey (Carnival of Souls)who had tremendous experience in film-making, and Ed Wood Jr.(Plan 9 From Outer Space) who evidently had professionals working on his productions and post productions- Hal Warren had no funding for post nor experience.

He seems to have relied on rough, haphazard and truly mistaken editing and thus cinematic storytelling. For this reason we must watch. Because after awhile of watching this movie we begin see what is happening occasionally is that our perspectives and paradigms of what is expected in film are not only being broken and disregarded; they are being smashed apart. This is a common goal of the experimental film.

Although this is most assuredly not what Warren intended, he accidentally did create a film to watched and appreciated for its often illogical sights and sounds.

The leading man is a Frank Zappa lookalike with only a fraction of the talent Zappa (being dead) has.

However, the real star of the film, Torgo (a goat-man), performed in some of the best walking-from-one-end-of-the-set-to-another scenes I have seen since 1950s Corman films.

Finally, the fights (or are they orgies?) between Manos' wives, which we are asked to believe to be deadly, are utterly hilarious.

The MST3K version of this incredibly dreadful bit of late 60s trashola is one of Joel and the Bots' best, but even their antics fail to make this movie wholly tolerable.

Rated: For Insomniacs Only.

Equaled in clarity of vision and flawless execution only by the greater works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, brilliant independent film auteur Hal Warren's ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate' transcends its genre to do everything that it should and even more. Not only is it riveting edge of your seat entertainment, it also boasts a psychological depth unequaled by any other horror movie, achieved mostly through John Reynold's Oscar-worthy, divinely subtle performance as the tormented, tragically misshapen caretaker Torgo. Part Quasimodo, part Hamlet, this gentle soul's noble end, in which he is massaged to death by a group of terrifying succubae in luscious robes, is unarguable one of the most poignant in motion picture history – it is both a tragedy and a triumph of the human spirit. Oh, was I alone with a tear in the eye at the end!

Indeed, Hal Warren's masterpiece achieves the perfect balance between the heartrendingly sad, the refreshingly sardonic, and the chillingly satanic. The Master and his hellbeast are as much evil personified as Margaret is the embodiment of goodness and chastity. In a way, this is the definitive modern-day equivalent of Goethe's Faust, though even more sublime in the simple poetry of its dialogue. When Torgo describes his master as being `not dead the way you know it' and `with us always' he is speaking for all of us, how we truly live on through the memory of our words and deeds in the minds of those who follow us, be they righteous or malevolent.

Hal Warran not only changed the face of the Texan film industry by encapsulating such a grand story in less than 75 minutes, it also helped usher in a whole new perspective of looking at film, discovering different forms which never would have been conceived. Also, it's obviously a very personal film for Warren, who allows us to share his love and devotion to the project, and it is a truly moving, cathartic experience.

It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, and maybe – just maybe – you'll learn a little bit about yourself.

I watched Manos last night.

Oh, I was the cocky one, intrigued by all the attention Manos receives, even though it is, after all, 40 years old. Sure, I thought, it'll be a laugh to investigate the claim that this might be the worst film ever made. Why, if its that bad, there must at least be comedy value in its awfulness? And in consolation, it is only an hour long.

No, the warnings are true and serious, this is bloody terrible.

After twenty minutes, I had stopped sniggering at the unimaginable ineptitude. I only realised that twenty minutes had passed when i flicked on the timer on the DVD; I honestly thought it was closer to forty-five.

After forty minutes I was shifting uncomfortably in my chair and I wanted to cry.

After an hour, I was submerged in despairing, pointless anger. I was angry with everyone involved in the film, angry with my cup of tea, my flat, the world, even God Himself (or Herself).

You will lose faith in humanity watching this film.

Imagine any conceivable measure for any possible aspect of film-making, and Manos still gets zero out of whatever. This "film" fails so utterly in every way, you'll wonder if anyone involved in its creation had ever seen or even heard of films or television. No, more than that, you'll wonder if they'd ever even spent a day on this planet. There isn't one single moment that you forget that these people are standing in front of a camera, ineptly executing one of the most awful scripts ever imagined.

I've never been so insulted by any form of "entertainment". I lost count of the number of times I was beaten over the head with a totally obvious point. I lost count of the number of times completely random stuff just *happened* with no genesis or consequence. I certainly didn't lose count of the number of locations used, or the number of musical cues, you could count those on one hand, after a circular saw accident. It baffled me that they never realised that you can't shoot film at night without some form of lighting. And the music itself... oh God.

I don't need to warn you about spoilers, there's plenty to complain about without resorting to inconsequential detail. Like the way that every time it cuts to the family, they're just standing, for no reason, in the same spot, waiting to talk to the camera. Like the absolutely shocking and disgraceful editing. People jump from awake to asleep and back, from one spot to another, from happy to sad, instantaneously. The awful acting... I don't know, its like everyone was given a piece of paper with some emoticons for happy, sad, scared and angry, and told to learn them off. The dialogue... well, technically it *is* dialogue, in the same way that McDonalds is food. Well, some people might enjoy McDonalds. See, I can't think of a parallel awfulness; "Manos" is to "bad" as... you can't finish that sentence.

Good Lord, I could go on, and on, and on, but I won't. This film cannot warrant anything but a 1/10 on IMDb. I haven't seen any of the other bottom 100 as of today, but i'm willing to bet that they are at least a rough approximation to what we call a "film". This is not.

Seriously, you really, really need to be in a masochistic kinda mood to see this out. I had to leave the screen timer on after 45 minutes just so I could keep reminding myself that, second by second, it *would* end. Because Hell itself might just be never-ending Manos.

I should note here that I sort of like bad movies. If it's amusing and campy, I'll cut it a break.

But Manos is different.

My god. What can I say about a movie so bad that it makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Casablanca? What can I say about a movie that has endless looped scenes of driving, the worst evil henchman in movie history, the lamest dialouge this side of my first grade hebrew school play, a movie that seems to have put together by people with utter contempt for the audience's intelligence? All I can say is this: it seems The Master's prayers to Satan have been answered. This movie is pure hell.