Kojiro Abe

I understand that some of you, who have never seen the MST3K version and have apparently only seen the original Russian version of the film, are sticking up for this film. The reason most Americans hate it is because of two reasons. First, the US version is atrociously dubbed, more ridiculous and worse than any Godzilla or Hong Kong film. The plot makes very little sense and the voices coming out of the characters' mouthes are amoung the most ridiculous ever I have ever heard. And the second is the fact that it was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), a show where a guy and two robots sit through a film and crack jokes (this was actually their forth Russian fantasy movie), thus destroying any dignity the film may have had.

The plot, to an American anyway, seems like a bizarre mishmash of various fairy tales such as Cinderella (girl's life is mad miserable by evil stepsister and stepmother, she eventually meets a prince), Hansel and Gretal (an old witch tries to cook the prince) and Beauty and the Beast (the prince is cursed and turned into a bear), with a bit of Lord of the Rings thrown in (talking, walking trees, funny little dwarves). And then there's the title character, Jack Frost (called Father Frost in ths original version), a sort of Santa Clause-esque character who runs around frosting trees and doesn't appear until after 2/3 of this film is over. Apparently, however, this film is actually made up of Russian folklore elements, according to everyone who is into Russian culture and has seen the original version of this film (which explains some of the Tolkien-esque bits, since one of the places Professor Tolkien got his ideas for Middle Earth was Slavic folklore).

Since all I have seen is the MST3K version, I don't really think it's fair of me to judge this film. Yes, to me it seemed really bizarre and whacked, like the Brothers Grimm on LSD, but if I knew more about Russian folklore and could see a subtitled version of this film, I might understand and like it more.

This is a pretty darn creepy late 40s short taking place in the West (apparantly Texas) in the late 1940s. I'm really not sure if this is staged or faked, but a showing of it today would anger both animal and children's right activists. It begins with a couple of mischevious youngsters trying to prank a local psycho named Billy Slater by tying a tin can to his horse's tail. Billy catches them, lassos them, and is just about to hang them, but he has a last moment change of heart and decides to spare their lives and instead have them organize a junior rodeo, which is really far more sadistic. He has the kids make posters and then the whole town comes. It is a ghastly freakshow, as poor, innocent kids are thrown from the backs of raging broncos, trampled, maimed, and just plain humilated. It's just as bad for the poor animals as well, who are all humilated and tortured (especially the poor calves). Like Catching Trouble, another vaguely similar short (that also showed on MST3K) it was totally acceptable in it's time, but today would draw outraged crys from both the PETA and the children's rights groups. It was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and is lampooned quite hilariously. Along with Catching Trouble and Days of Our Years, this is one of the more disturbing of MST3K shorts.

This film is truly a murky mess, inept in every possible manner. The film has a very stereotypical plot common in pratically every other horror movie (including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which the plot is rather similar to). A young couple and their daughter get lost out in seedy country of El Paso Texas. So they stop at the nearest house to ask for directions. As you can guess, this is a big freaking mistake! They are met by Torgo, the wobbly, bizarre voiced handy-man, who tells them not to stay, because, as he says "The master would not approve". They beg him, and finally he caves, though he warns "The master will be very disturbed." Soon the "master", a Satan-like character bearing a resemblance to Frank Zappa, wakes up and all sorts of horrible things start to happen to family. The ending could be one of the most loathesome, downbeat endings ever.

There are many bad movies. But none of them have the all around ineptness of this (though Space Mutiny comes pretty close). Many films are really bad and cheap, but at least they often have some interesting camera angles and are often fun to watch. Manos has none of that. It's just 70 minutes of murky boredom. If it had beautiful photography, fine acting and the filmmakers tried to make the best of their budget (like many good independent films), it could have been a Night of the Living Dead-like classic. The photography is the definition of murkyness, it looks like an extremely faded Super 8 film and there is not one interesting, imaginative shot in the whole film, and combined with the content it end up looking exactly like a Satanist's home movies. And the sound quality is just as bad, perhaps even a bit worse. The camera the filmmakers used could not record sound (and they were obviously too stupid or too cheap to carry a sound recorder of some kind with them), so the whole film is dubbed, really, really badly. All the voices are done by two people, and they all sound exactly alike, and are so overracted it's downright asinine (especially poor Torgo). The actor's may have been good, but we don't know that. And I found it very sad (and at same time rather darky hilarious), that the man who played Torgo commited suicide shortly after this was released, just proving how much of a downer being in a mind numbingly bad movie can be. This whole mess of a film just proves that fertilizer salesmen aren't good filmmakers! Even watching your relatives home movies is far less boring than this. However, the film was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that episode is truly a hoot, a true MST3K classic.