Manos: The Hands of Fate (

1966

)

You have to admire Harold P. Warren’s guts. There he was, having lunch with Stirling Silliphant (it’s odd between today’s film and The Creeping Terror (1964) just how many unfathomably awful 1960s horror movies Silliphant has an incidental connection to) where he not only claimed that making a horror movie would be easy but even wagered that he could throw one together himself. Keep in mind, at this point the closest thing he had to professional filmmaking experience was a walk-on role for the TV show Route 66. Were Warren to make that wager today, when the barrier to entry into filmmaking is lower than ever, it would still be a fool’s errand but in 1966 it was downright insane. Don’t get me wrong, making a feature-length movie today is a massive pain in the ass and even the worst film I’ve reviewed on this site (Red Christmas (2016) for those keeping score at home) probably consumed hundreds of man-hours between writing, setting up, filming, and editing. But shitty movies today are made with the aid of all the labor-saving devices and technological innovations of the past 60 years. Warren was trying to pull this stunt off in 1966 when there was no Kickstarter to drum up funding, no readily accessible tutorials on the basics of filming and recording sound, no consumer-grade video editing software, hell the first Super 8 Camera was only a year old at this time! Still, Warren pressed on with neither the relevant experience of an industry insider nor any of the helpful technology that we take for granted today. You have to admire his guts, even if the movie he made is fucking awful.

The film opens with an interminable driving sequence where a family of three departs from El Paso and heads into the surrounding desert for their “first vacation.” This sequence was originally supposed to serve as the film’s credits, but aside from the film’s title card (which bizarrely has Manos in quotation marks) none of these made it into the film’s final cut. At this point, I’m used to tedious credit scenes where the names of the cast and crew are overlaid over images of people driving and have grown to accept them as a necessary evil in the world of low-budget filmmaking. Not every movie can have a spectacular credits sequence along the lines of Berberian Sound Studio (2012), and if even The Shining (1980) can have driving credits then I guess they can’t be all bad. But when I’m entering the 8th minute of driving through blighted Texas desert waiting for the movie to start and I don’t even have the courtesy of a few names to read while the clock ticks away, I start to get annoyed. Not every film needs a hook to reel the audience in, but it doesn’t hurt, especially if you’re aiming to make a cheesy horror movie. Even utter crap like The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) has a better grasp of this than Manos.

The family is made up of the patriarch Michael, his much younger wife Margaret (who for some reason is wearing a tea-cozy on her head), their preschool-aged daughter Debbie, and their little yappy poodle: Pepe. This really must be their first vacation, like Michael explains to the cops who pull them over for a busted tail-light because within minutes they have gotten hopelessly lost to the point where they might as well be driving through the desert wilderness. As night starts to approach they stumble on a house in the middle of nowhere and are greeted by a strange, filthy man named Torgo who says he takes “care of the place while the Master is away.” Michael and his family seem oddly unconcerned that this place is owned by somebody called “The Master” and don’t even balk at the notion that The Master is dead but “Not dead the way you know it. He is with us always. Not dead the way you know it. He is with us always.” All this coming from a creepy weirdo like Torgo should be enough to send the family running for the hills but they decide hey, it’s getting dark we better stay the night.

They’ll come to regret that because Torgo’s master is a disciple of the dark god Manos, who has granted him immortal life. He spends his days snoozing in a death-like slumber only to awaken with the night to practice his satanic rituals along with his harem of negligee-clad wives. It seems like Michael and his family are not the first to stumble upon The Master’s home, because they have a standard operating procedure for how to deal with unwanted intruders: Sacrifice the men to Manos and brainwash the women until they are willing brides of the master. However, none of the other families brought any girls along with them which puts The Master and his wives at an impasse. Should they sacrifice Debbie to Manos with her father or induct her into the ranks of the master’s wives (as stomach-churning as the implications there are)? The Master never really expresses a preference but his wives quickly divide into camps and before long it comes to blows in an extremely long, extremely boring catfight that doesn’t even conclude with a decision. Amusingly, The Master’s indifference on the matter gives the impression that he’s a henpecked husband utterly at the mercy of the shifting fancies of his various wives. Still, whatever they eventually decided to do with Michael and his family, the three of them are in grave danger.

If this plot sounds familiar to you, then that’s because it seems like the plot has been lifted wholesale from Voodoo Man (1944), an old Poverty Row horror movie starring Bela Lugosi and John Carradine. Here The Master is Lugosi himself, assisted by a feeble-minded John Carradine as a sort of ersatz Torgo. Together they abduct a series of women and turn them into mindless zombies using the power of a voodoo God Romboona. Once deprived of free will, the women are promptly changed into a nightgown and left to stand around mindlessly in a corner somewhere. There’s even a scene where all the entranced women are standing around and Carradine’s character comes in to ostensibly molest them, a sequence that is repeated almost shot for shot with Torgo and The Master’s wives. Of course, these similarities could just be coincidental, but it seems a bit too close a resemblance to be pure chance. This begs the question though, if Voodoo man (1944) really is the spiritual precursor to Manos, why would Warren decide to base his movie off of a shitty old horror movie that nobody (not even the filmmakers themselves in all likelihood) remembered or cared about?

Despite my constant griping about how unfathomably boring this film is, the ending is worth some consideration. Most horror movies from this vintage and before, end with the supernatural/monstrous elements vanquished and the heroic characters making a return to normalcy. Even especially disturbing films from this period like Psycho (1960) and Targets (1968) have optimistic endings where their mundane villains are defeat/imprisoned. Yet in Manos, The Master and his cult are utterly triumphant at the film’s end, with Margaret and Debbie enslaved as The Master’s latest wives and Michael transformed into the next Torgo. Manos was obviously not the first horror film with a downer ending, arguably the ending of the first horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) has an ambiguous ending, but it is notable that such an amateur production so completely bucked the trend for its zeitgeist. Downer endings are especially effective and fitting for horror films and being as unusual as it was in the mid-60s, gives the conclusion to Manos a striking weight and menace. It doesn’t make the film preceding it any less inept, of course, but it does leave you with a slight feeling of unease.

The performances are all amateur work, but mostly unremarkable in their badness with one notable exception: John Reynolds as Torgo. Reynolds was high on LSD for pretty much the entire production, and his bizarre stuttering, twitching performance reflects that. The air of oddity surrounding him is only enhanced by what appears to be a prosthetic that he is wearing under his pants which gives the impression that he might be a satyr (an extremely odd choice of monster for a horror movie regardless of the time and budget). The prosthetics make it so he can barely walk and turns any scene where he is required to go from a sitting to standing position into an absurd comedy as he takes more than a full minute to struggle to his feet. It’s like watching a turtle on its back! In a just world, Reynolds would have gone on to a successful career and Manos would have emerged some years later as an embarrassing curiosity of his early days. Unfortunately, Reynolds killed himself shortly after the film’s release. Still, Torgo is far and away the most bizarre element of the movie but also the most memorable one and just about the only thing that makes Manos a candidate for “so bad it’s good.” The rest is bad, to be sure, but not really anything that could be considered “funny bad.”

Manos is positively riddled with technical errors throughout its entire runtime. There are a million little rules of filmmaking that the amateur production team on Manos simply weren’t aware of and boy does it ever show. There are scenes where bugs are flying up against the camera lens momentarily appearing like giant kaiju. Shots hold for awkward amounts of time, only giving the viewer the impression that the actors have all forgotten their lines. At times even things as basic as the camera focus is off, and since Warren opted to shoot night for night most of the scenes outside are a murky black mess. Most significantly though are the audio issues. Audio capturing has long been the bane of inexperienced and low-budget filmmakers who blew all their money on a decent camera and only realized later they needed quality microphones as well. It was not uncommon for films to need extensive redubbing in post-production, and in some especially bad cases, the audio was entirely unusable. In the most extreme circumstances, you get what are basically silent movies with a voiceover narrator explaining what is going on scene by scene, as was the case with The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), Red Zone Cuba (1966), and The Creeping Terror (1964). Manos is not as bad as some of these examples, having at least some audio that could be used, but huge swaths of the movie had to be redubbed later on. This at times rises to the level of unintentional hilarity, like when Debbie, the little girl, begins to speak with the voice of a husky middle-aged woman.

Beyond that, the most interesting thing about this film is the fact that it, like many low-budget independent films, prominently showcases the director’s fetishes. Though here it seems like Harold P. Warren was a bit more restrained than say Ed Wood or Jean Rollin, as the more perverted elements of Manos are all rather half-hearted and embarrassed. In the scene where Torgo peeks on Margaret as she changes Warren originally asked the actress to pull down her slip and show her breasts, which she refused to do. Warren, reportedly, played it off as a joke. Likewise, the master’s wives are all dressed in diaphanous nightgowns but rather than being nude underneath, they are all wearing unflattering bullet bras and grannie panties. Once again, the original plan was to have the girls be nude under their nighties, but that didn’t go over so well with the girls so they dressed in singularly unappealing lingerie instead. About the only parts of the director’s more perverted suggestions that made it into the film were the interminable catfights that dominate much of the second act. Given how fucking boring these fights are, I wish that the actresses had pushed back on this rather than the nudity.