dolemite-13

Great movie. It's more about childhood trauma and human perception than about the scary things that may or may not have happened at the Amityville house.

If you're looking for a good ghost story or spectacular new revelations you're going to be disappointed. My Amityville horror asks more questions than it answers and does it in a fascinating way.

Daniel Lutz is obviously scarred by everything that took place and uses the opportunity to exorcise some demons of his own. Does that make him a reliable witness? That's up to the viewer.

Highly recommended.

Fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren had a dream. He decided to invest $19.000 of his own money in making one of the scariest ever to hit the big screen. Except, Harold knew nothing about making movies, he had no professional actors and only had one hand-held camera that could film for only 32 seconds at a time. Without sound.

It's the story about a family who get stranded in the middle of nowhere and look for help in an old scary house. The only one who's there to welcome them is the creepy servant Torgo. Before the night is over they find themselves at the mercy of The Master and his evil cult.

Placed at a #4 spot on the IMDb bottom 100, this has got to be one of the worst movies of all time, right?

I think it depends on how you define a bad movie.

I've seen plenty of million dollar Hollywood movies that bored me to death. And Manos didn't. In fact, I loved it. Warren's pure lack of cinematic vision and experience is what gives this movie its unique atmosphere. The recurring library music, the choppy editing, the weird sound loops all contribute to the movie's surreal qualities. For instance the scene where Torgo (in my opinion, one of the most enigmatic heroes in B-movie history) tries to touch the face of Margaret goes on and on. In and out of focus. Nothing's really happening, but still you can't look away. It could have come straight out of a David Lynch movie. The fact that Warren probably didn't mean this scene to be weird and surreal doesn't mean that it's not working on a whole different level. It is what it is, intended or not.

I've never seen the MST version and I'm not going to. It's like kicking a dog when it's already down. Watch the great documentary Hotel Torgo instead to learn something about the movie's interesting and often hilarious background. And watch the normal version of the film. You might see Harold P. Warren's dream of making his masterpiece. He invested his money, wrote a script and made his damn horror movie. He followed his passion and the fact that he failed completely is utterly irrelevant. 47 years later, people still watch it. They love it or hate it, but they'll never forget it.

Now does that sound like one of the worst movies ever?