Filmic Friday 218: MANOS the Hands of Fate

Many, many years ago, Z & I heard rumors of "The Worst Movie Ever Made." There have been many films to wear that title, including Tommy Wiseau's magnum opus The Room, but one has long stood out as king among awful movies:

Yes, this is the soundtrack. It has a freaking cool cover, man.

Manos is poorly shot on bad film. The script is often nonsensical. None of the actors are audible on the film, so they've all been re-dubbed as badly as possible. I think even the dogs have been dubbed. To quote the MST3K riff, "this looks like everyone's last known photograph".

So what's the story, Wishbone?

Yes, there's a sequel, somewhat, and...
This is the only thing I've seen from it.
An obviously screen-printed canvas in a frame from Target.
Yes :)

A family is trying to get to their vacation at a place called Valley Lodge. They get lost and badger a creepy guy in a shack to let them stay in the house against his will. Needless to say, things go very wrong. There's occult stuff, there's multiple wives, and there's an evil pupper.

You can't quite see one of the only surviving cast members in this shot.
This is the most wretched nuclear family I've seen in a movie where neither of the parents is secretly a killer.
Seriously.
They're not meant for movies.

It's such a simple story, and it's such a short movie (only 70 minutes), but it feeeeeels sooooooo lonnnnnngggg....

It's so slow-paced that it's like if someone took the story of the three brothers & the well and just... made it 500 pages long.

I might have to do that some day...

Anywho, the best character in the movie is Torgo, who watches over the house while the Master is away. If you watch this movie, you'll know why I wrote it that way. Torgo is a 10000% certifiable creeper. He's constantly trying to touch the mom, he's infinitely creepy, he looks drugged out of his gourd, and he has put the weird satyr prostheses on his legs backwards so he has lumpy thighs.

Seriously, he's a creeper. -10/10 would avoid.

Torgo watches over the place while the "Master" is away. I wrote that twice on purpose, because this script boosts its word-count by repeating itself. It boosts its word-count by repeating itself!

A portrait of the Master with his hound.
I kinda want a print of this, actually. It's really well done!
It's the most competent part of the movie!

So eventually, Torgo beefs it big time and the Master is called back from wherever he was (Hell?). He wakes up his wives, who are all in gauzy white nightgowns and standing up against pillars. To be honest, this movie kinda predicts a lot of 1980s Music Video tropes...

The Master wakes his wives and they squabble among themselves as to what they should do with the family. They're all 100% for killing Mike, the dad who looks old enough to be Grandpa and who (I think is the director...), they don't want yet another new Wife, so they're also down with killing the mom, but half of them draw the line at the little girl. They "cannot kill a child". The other half are all "Yo, the girl's going to grow up into a woman, and our idiot monster husband can't turn down free wives, so she's going to be a problem some day, we should totes kill her" (and a better writer would have one of them say that it would be kinder to kill her now so she avoids their fate...)

And Torgo is there.
The wives are not pleased with Torgo at all.
Also, I keep expecting someone to come out and talk about mythology...

Eventually the wives pass judgment on Torgo and The Master agrees to kill him. The wives murderize him with modern dance for a while, but the The Master whacks off his hand and sets it on fire. Apparently this kills him, though he runs off in the background, making it seem like he was supposed to be reduced to a burning hand, but we're seeing the actor leave the set... oopsies. Even worse, I think it's on purpose!

And to be honest, I have put this out of sequence - the Torgo Death comes after the Wives have a big fight.

The wives have already had kind of a war over whether or not to kill Debbie, the daughter. I mean, The Master's hound has already killed Debbie's doggo (which they reveal early on using what looks like a bad wig...), so they're not too squeamish about ending innocent lives.

The Master loves killing.

The real centerpiece of this madness is a desert rumble in the California countryside with all of the nightie-ladies brawling over the issue of whether or not to murder a child just because their evil husband wants them to. Also jealousy?

Eventually, though, the movie ends, leaving us with no Torgo, all the women back on their posts, and a pair of twists you'll see coming from a million miles away. Yeah.

While, yes, Manos: The Hands of Fate is a very short movie that feels like watching the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy back-to-back-to-back, it's still a good time, especially with a riff, and the best part about Manos is that it's in the Public Domain, which means that you have nearly infinite riffs to choose from! It's that or gather a large group of good friends together to rip the movie apart for just over an hour of "fun". I honestly can go either way on this movie. I've watched it unriffed in a chatroom with other bad movie aficionados, I've watched the MST3K episode multiple times (it never gets old for me), I've watched it on my own (not recommended, to be honest), I've seen it on bluray. It's infinitely enjoyable if you're in the right mindset.

Do any of you guys have a Best Bad Movie? I mean, who can resist Miami Connection, or Manos, or The Room?!

I think that'll about do it for me, today!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC