Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Oh-ho boy. This is one of the big motherfuckers of bad movies. Manos: The Hands of Fate - literally a product of a bet that anyone can make a movie. I genuinely thought about holding off on covering this. There are a couple of movies I've skipped over in my chronology that I am holding back on, and this almost, very nearly joined that list, but I felt it was time. Hands down in the Top 5 of worst movies ever made. I am, honestly, really looking forward to watching this. Hence the reason why I decided not to wait. I've never watched MST3K, but I'm aware of the parallels between it and my project, and I know they have a special place reserved just for this movie. It's arguably the biggest of the baddest I've covered yet seconded by Glen or Glenda, another notoriously shocking production.

After an opening gambit that featured parents singing "Row Row Your Boat" one line out of sync with each other, honestly the most unsettling thing I've covered on here yet, and I covered a film that featured underage grooming... Michael (Harold P. Warren) and Margaret (Diane Mahree) together with their child Debbie (Jackey Newman) - who appears to be voiced by a man trying very hard to sound like a little girl... and the dog get lost trying to find Valley Lodge (isn't that from Jaws?) and end up arriving at a lodge that literally appears out of nowhere, looked after by Torgo (John Reynolds), a man appearing to suffer from severe motor-neurone issues, who watches the place whilst "the Master" is away. Regrettably having no place to go before it gets too dark, the family end up deciding to stay and after walking in are immediately creeped out by a strange painting of a man with a moustache and a very black dog. After they learn that "the Master" is "not dead, but with us always" from Torgo, they are just about to go to their room when the howling of a wolf outside startles them. Opening the door, the dog, Pepe I think they called it, bolts out and Michael finds him dead further up the track. Deciding that this is no place they want to stay, the family tries to leave but as Michael struggles to get the car started, Torgo puts the moves on Margaret, claiming that "the Master" wants her to be his wife and that he "loves beautiful women." and that he fancies himself a bit as well, but Margaret is having none of it. Stranded at the lodge, the family are forced to stay the night, and when they turn their back for five minutes, Debbie runs away and they find her outside holding a huge Doberman Pincher on a lead that Margaret calls "the dog from the portrait." After first scalding Debbie for running away she leads them back outside to where she found the dog to a campfire where a man dressed in ceremonial robes is sleeping on a stone tablet, surrounded by women in white dresses, all sleeping, standing up... who we later learn is "the Master" (Tom Neyman) and his wives (<ctrl+c> Stephanie Nielson, Sherry Proctor, Robin Redd, Jay Hall, Bettie Burns, and Lelaine Hansard<ctrl+v>). Despite seemingly sleeping, Torgo rants at "the Master" about wanting Margaret for himself and that "the Master" has enough wives before sort of creepily stroking one of them and then that scene is over... Back inside the house, Margaret proceeds to get undressed for the night, as Torgo perves on her through the window, and as Michael runs around outside looking for him, Torgo somehow gets the drop on him and strikes him from behind with his weird staff thing he's carrying around, and ties his unconscious body to - I think - a tree with his own trouser belt. Back at the campsite, the Master suddenly wakes up and sits with his dog, they make sure to flashback to a shot of the painting just in case the visual metaphor wasn't subtle enough, and after ensuring the dog is securely fastened to the uh... rock... he proceeds to chant a prayer to Manos, calling him his God, and awakening his wives who appear to be pretty pissed off about there being a child; "a female child at that" in the house. As the Master gets fed up with their bickering and leaves to punish Torgo, the other wives argue amongst themselves as to whether or not they should sacrifice the child to Manos or if she should be left to grow up into a woman, and as opinion between the six is split 50/50 a fight between them breaks out and... I'm not sure if this is supposed to be erotic or not... Back inside, the Master finds and wakes Torgo and tells him that he has "failed" and "that he must die" before staring at him menacingly, laughing pathetically and saying that "the hands of fate have doomed this man, my will is done." Back with Michael and one of the wives finds him tied up and proceeds to just sort of smooch his head a shoulders all over... before trying to slap him into consciousness but when that doesn't work she just sort of leaves indignantly... ok... and we are back with the wives wrestling each other until the Master arrives and demands they stop, this scene interspersed with a scene of Michelle cradling Debbie on a bed and crooning for Michael to come back, when the Master pops up in her window - a scene that genuinely made me snort with laughter and I don't think it was meant to be funny... The Master decrees that after they have "finished with Torgo" they will sacrifice the oldest of his wives, who he denounces as the troublemaker and she is tied to a concrete pillar, and 2 of the other wives just sort of, rub Torgo alot as the Master cries "Kill! Kill!" at them, until he gets fed up and uses some weird burning staff to literally burn Torgo's hand straight off his arm, and Torgo runs away to presumably die. Back inside the house, Michael has somehow managed to free himself off camera and after battering down the door to get back inside, he takes Margaret and Debbie and the family flee into the desert as the Master proceeds to slap his first wife around a bit and pull her dress apart first... before then setting off with the rest of his wives to find the family before they escape. Meanwhile the family are having a pretty hard time escaping, seemingly falling over invisible objects in their path and it all gets a bit too much for Margaret who pleads with Michael to just take Debbie and go, but Michael refuses to leave her behind and for some reason they decide the safest place to go is back into the house?! And so; back inside the house the family enter, only to watch as the Master emerges into the... living room?... with his dog and after a protracted out of focus shot of the dog clearly being quite uncomfortable about the whole thing, we switch to a very out of focus shot of the Master, who stares at the family as Michael pulls a gun on him and shoots him. The following morning two women on their way to Valley Lodge stop at house where the caretaker introduces himself as Michael who "takes care of the place whilst the Master is away..."

After the credits, we get a post credits scene where "The End?" flashes up and boy, I sure hope it is the end. Because we absolutely do not need any more of that (*there was a prequel and a sequel both produced in 2018) because this was fucking horrendous and I fucking loved it. In my opening gambit I said this was one of the most notorious movies in the bad movie catalogue and I can tell you now that I have watched far, far worse movies for the blog in comparison with this one. Make no mistake, this was terrible. But The Beast of Yucca Flats, The Creeping Terror, Almighty Thor, they were all worse than this. Maniac, Terror of Tiny Town, they were offensively bad, this was just poor. It was amateur.  But those aforementioned movies were much, much harder to sit through than this was. Creeping Terror felt like torture. This at least had a plot, had a storyline, and was actually a movie.

For a start, the most glaringly obvious giveaway that you are watching something... a bit special is that you immediately realise the voices of all the characters on screen have been dubbed in post production. This sometimes works better than others depending on how well the scene was shot. Most of the time it was shot terribly, but there are occasional moments when the vocal track is almost in sync with the lip movements of the actors but almost virtually never. At first it feels really discombobulating. Not helped by the fact that the voice of a small girl is quite obviously a much older man trying to sound like a small girl but I'll be honest with you after the first 20 - 30 minutes you sort of adapt to it and I started to stop noticing. Does that make alright? Well, err, no not really. It's absolutely not how you should produce an entire film and it destroyed any kind of immersion whatsoever, but I honestly got used to it after I got about half way in.

Secondly, the cinematography was bloody atrocious. More than half the movie was shot out of focus and there are parts where it's so bloody obvious that I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't done intentionally? The bit at the end with the Master, he is so obviously not in focus (but the doorway behind him is pin sharp!) that you couldn't have missed that. You couldn't have not realised! And there is almost zero scene framing going on here; bits with actors disproportioned in scene, bits where the Masters hands go out of shot when he's doing all the chanting bollocks because they incorrectly composed the shot, lots and lots of shots of the back of peoples heads, there was a fair old sprinkling of jerky, lo-fi transitions as well, as if the film had been trimmed with a pair of blunt nail scissors, in the dark, whilst wearing mittens, although to be honest I was kinda getting into the jerky transitions. It had a very 1930's art house cinema feel about it! Like they took that from those old films and applied it to a modern day colour production. Probably entirely accidentally, but in a way it worked!

It's sort of difficult to comment on the acting. One the one hand the entire movie was acted out without dialogue so do you factor in the dialogue to how the characters are acting on screen? And then on the other hand some of the dialogue was pissing atrocious. Margaret's dialogue was so over dramatic it bordered on parody, and Michael was so painfully bland that I couldn't tell you a single defining character trait. The Masters dialogue was pretty corny and cheesy and he wasn't the least bit intimidating with his Freddie Mercury moustache and his black and red pyjamas. It was theatre - intentionally over the top, intentionally over-stereotypical, and it just did not suit the low budget, low detail grittiness that the movie might have been trying to achieve. It looked like a live action production of a theatre play. An amateur, weekend theatre group play.

One positive the movie does have going for it is that the whole thing was soundtracked by this smooth, coffee shop jazz music that often decided to take over the entire movie and drown out what the actors were actually saying. And let's keep in mind that the vocal track was added post production here... but genuinely, some of the musical numbers were actually decent. Almost entirely ill fitting for whatever was being portrayed on screen most of the time, but in occasional moments the visual and the musical section actually coupled together nicely and it had an kind of kitschy appeal: "the music of Manos: The Hands of Fate!" I'd listen to that record at least once.

There is not a chance that this is the worst movie I've ever watched. Not a chance. It might not even be the most poorly produced when I think about it, I think Incredibly Strange Creatures has it beat in that department, and I don't think anything will ever be as bad as THAT movie... but it is the perfect cocktail of just everything done really poorly but with one exception: it tells a story. It's not a very good story, granted, but something happens and I was interested. Just that in of itself immediately puts it just above some of the absolute bollocks that I've covered on this blog, and although I can't in good conscience award this with a star, I can safely say that I have had much more traumatic experiences with movies than I just did with this one. Strong Zero.