Manos: The Hands of Fate

This movie should serve as warning to anyone who tries to make up a movie as you go along. An overused concept (family gets lost) meets a cliche (wierd guy who talks of a master)and then degrades into one big mess. The couple's little girl vanishes during filming or seems to be and a wierdo shows off his girl collection; they may or not be vampires or zombies, you never know. The story is missing, the flow is ambigous and it moves like words in an alphabet soup. Nonsense and confusion are the result. Thank you, but no thank you, Doctor Forrester.

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.

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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.

This isn't a movie. This isn't even a home video. It's a home video that aspired to be a movie but crashed somewhere in-between, and plummeted through the abyss to depths unimaginable by the mainstream. Coherence is the film's greatest foe: bizarrity and incompetence its watchwords. This is it, bad movie buffs. This is Manos: Hands of Fate.

Years ago, in the dusty desert outside El Paso, an unknown fertilizer salesman decided to craft a horror film with the assistance of friends throughout the El Paso area, and a legend was born. Armed with $19,000 dollars, a cheap 16mm camera, and absolutely no knowledge of the art of film-making whatsoever, Hal P. Warren set out upon his masterpiece.

There is absolutely no redeeming quality about Manos. There is no directing, the editing appears as if it was done by a blind member of some mud-crawling insect species, the artwork is a stain upon the name of art, the script is a poorly cluttered and illogical joke masking the director's fantasies, the dialog will have you tear out your eardrums with your fingernails, and the acting is so atrocious you will feel as if the movie has violated you. It isn't as bad as Monster-a-Go-Go, but it almost manages to snatch the sorry laurels of worst movie ever made from that Lovecraftian abomination.

Manos must have put good directors like Kubrick or Capra in convulsions during its production: so powerful is the elemental force of badness flowing from every stinking pore of its perverse form. It is the polar opposite to the good movie, the parameters of its illogicity and non-acting existing to defy the borders of taste, and ultimately, sanity. Every grainy, scratchy, blurry frame of the muddy color palette and every sound byte of the poorly synchronized and terribly dubbed dialog offers an entrancing glance into a deeper, darker world of madness that is Manos the Hands of Fate. It is not of this earth. It is not of our dimension. Surely Hal P. Warren was some malfeasant alien god from a realm far removed from our own, hurtling across the icy chasms of space with a vile mission in store for the unsuspecting members of the cinematic world.

Its legacy, however, lives on in the form of Mystery Science Theater. The acid-tipped barbs flew fast and furiously, striking the venerable beast in its countless weak points, crafting from the chaos a comedic gem that approaches cinematic perfection stamped into the world of movies in its own stinking ichor. This is Manos: Hands of Fate. This is the purifying baptism of fire that scourges the detestable vestiges of mediocrity and normalcy from the mainstream viewer and forever makes them a member of the cult world, the world of bad movies and weirdness that cannot be imagined. It is the cornerstone, the figurehead, the mighty totem representing everything that Mystery Science Theater and the legions of bad movie sites across the Web hold dear to their hearts.

Rejoice, connoisseurs of bad movies! Fall upon the dark altar of Manos to pay homage to Torgo and the Master, and forever remember the twisted legacy they wrought from the tangled celluoid! Imitate Torgo's stumbling walk and high-brained drawl, until it fuses with the very core of your being!