Review: Manos: The Hands of Fate

A vacationing family (headed by Harold P. Warren) gets lost somewhere out in El Paso, Texas. They stop at an inn manned by an oddly misshapen creep named Torgo (an addled John Reynolds) who offers them a room for the night. Turns out that pervy Torgo serves a sinister fella named The Master (Tom Neyman, probably the best of a very bunch of actors) who is looking for a new addition to his harem of zombified women.

 

Every now and then someone seems to want to dethrone “Plan 9 From Outer Space” as the Worst Movie Ever Made. More often than not, the results are just tedious and annoying (“Showgirls” and “The Room” spring to mind), though “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”, “Terror of Tiny Town”, and “Troll 2” are at least viable contenders in my opinion. This 1966 low-budget oddity from writer/producer/director/star Harold P. Warren has been heralded as a bad movie classic by movie geeks for a couple of decades now. I first became aware of it on IMDb’s Bottom 100 list years ago. Having finally viewed it, I think it’s sadly in the tedious bad movie category and not remotely ‘special’ enough to be a true bad movie classic. The post-production dubbing is often hilariously inappropriate and the film is weird as hell. For the most part though, it’s a low entry on my Worst Films of All-Time list and has very little replay value.

 

The first thing one notices here is the awful post-production dubbing, which is appallingly sloppy. You just can’t get past it, it’s the worst dubbing/looping job you’ll see outside of a re-dubbed martial arts film or “Godzilla” movie. Sometimes you’ll get voice-over, sometimes it’ll be the post-production looping, and other times the music will just play over the dialogue scenes. None of the dialogue we hear was recorded while filming on location. Not one bit, and it’s blatantly obvious – just look at the inept dubbing of the little girl by someone who doesn’t sound remotely like a little girl. Almost as bad, the cheap-arse music score by Russ Huddleston & Robert Smith Jr is horrible and constantly intrusive.

 

Apparently actor John Reynolds was on LSD at the time of shooting and is supposedly playing a half-man half-goat Satyr named Torgo. All this results in is a gigantic knee-cap, a shitty beard, and presumably LSD-derived shakes. It’s a bizarre and somewhat fascinating, but dreadful performance from a man who sadly died by his own hand the same year the film was released. Honestly, Reynolds’ weird performance and visage, and the truly awesome cloak actor Tom Neyman wears are the only interest points in a weird, but fairly eventless film. Barely a damn thing happens throughout, very little of it remotely interesting. It’s not really about anything at all, and most scenes run a good goddamn five minutes too long. 75 minutes long and about 65 of those minutes are eventless padding.

 

I don’t regret seeing this infamous bad movie ‘classic’, but I must say it’s pretty uneventful and the guilty pleasures are minimal. It sure is weird, though and John Reynolds’ oddly affected performance might hold your interest for a few minutes. Otherwise, this is the wrong kind of bad movie, even if it ultimately gets the same rating as say “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (the right kind of bad movie). Cool cloak, though. Something tells me the inspiration for the entire film started with that cloak.

 

NB: Fans of “Troll 2” should listen out for a particular song being sung here, which also appears in that later film. Surely not a coincidence.

 

Rating: F