Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Hey, I'm all for independent film-making; it's the backbone of the entertainment industry and a lot of good movies can be discovered from such efforts. And nowhere else can you find a fount of fresh talent headed for the proverbial "bigger and better things" (Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez and Paul Thomas Anderson are only a few examples of such).

So many more times however, it turns out that independent films are made because NO MAJOR STUDIO WANTS THEM. You have exploitation films, sleazy little one-reelers and grungy grindhouse trash-o-ramas, all of which may be our bread and butter, brothers and sisters, but you most likely won't see them at your friendly neighborhood Regal Cinemas.

They do get out there, however. How? Mom and Pop theaters, little neighborhood movie palaces, even-smaller backroom cinemas that consist of a few rows of chairs, a bed sheet and a projector. They get these movies somehow, they in turn get shown to an audience, some kind of profit is turned and the producers are happy. Well, usually they're happy; that is, the producers are happy when they make more money than it takes to get their little project up there on the screen (or bed sheet, whichever). Sometimes it happens, a lot of times it doesn't - it's a lot easier to spend money than it is to make it in the world of motion pictures...even in cheap little exploitative dealies.

Then again, how hard can it be to make a movie?

If you have a story, a camera, some actors, places to film inside of and in front of, making a film would be a snap. Then just get it shown, hope for positive audience reaction and you're off and running in the film world. One step closer to being another Erich Von Stroheim, as it were.

You have to think that was exactly what Harold P. Warren was thinking back in the early Sixties. One of El Paso, Texas' premier fertilizer salesmen, Warren had the happenstance to be prevalent in El Paso's live theater scene and, as a result of such, also had a chance to get a small part in the locally-filmed TV show "Route 66", where he met show writer/screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. Stirling, who would be famous for writing such films as Village Of The Damned, In The Heat Of The Night, Charly and some Irwin Allen disaster flicks, spoke with Warren in a coffee shop one day and their conversation turned to films.

Apparently during the course of the confab, Silliphant said words to the effect that it takes a special kind of person to make a movie. Well, this seemed to be all Warren needed to hear because he was more than just a fertilizer salesman - he was an auteur-in-training. When Silliphant said that Warren could not, in fact, write, cast, film, produce and release a really-and-truly motion picture, bets were made, hands were shook and Warren started outlining a script on a napkin right then and there.

From all of this, Warren undertook what would become not only his (and El Paso's) most famous undertaking, but also would create a film that would forever challenge the world's pre-conceived notions on what film was - here was a motion picture reaching for greatness, not just your hard-earned money - but GREATNESS.

After all, were talking about cults, demonic leaders, cursed servants, terrified families, ineffective policemen, amorous couples, doomed poodles and swollen knees.

This is the world of Manos: The Hands Of Fate, which may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is the worst movie ever made in El Paso.

Before I go any further, I must comment on the title. Manos is Spanish for "hands". So this title is actually Hands: The Hands of Fate. Redundant, ain't it? It's like calling your movie Muertos Gatos: Killer Cats or Pollo Grande: Big Chicken. It's nice that Warren thought of the Spanish-speaking contingent in El Paso (who would no doubt come flocking to the theater to see a film so obviously patterned after their own language) but hey - he was busy achieving screen greatness - he couldn't think of everything.

Now, allow me to manos over some plot to you: A typical American family consisting of grouchy dad Mike (Harold P. Warren, thus cementing his auteur status), complaining wife Margaret (Diane Mahree) and whiny daughter Debbie (Jackey Neyman), are taking a very long road trip and manage to get lost while trying to find the Valley Lodge and end up in a small dusty desert town, finding themselves having to stay the night in a grimy backwoods shack/lodge managed by a small, hobbling caretaker named Torgo (John Reynolds), who oversees the domicile while The Master (Tom Neyman) is away.

During the night, Debbie gets lost, the family's pet poodle Peppy (most likely playing himself) is killed and replaced with a Doberman Pinscher, Torgo tries to touch Margaret's hair, policemen wander around to no avail, a parked couple make out and get chased away only to park and make out again, The Master's many chiffon-gowned wives argue and wrestle in the sand with one another, Mike gets tied to a pole, Margaret looks right into the camera, and a twist ending that isn't really all that unexpected appears, all scored to a jazzy piano and lilting clarinet. Oh, and hands are featured more than once, oddly enough.

So, not only did our buddy Warren write, direct and probably brew coffee on the set but also starred as dad Mike - one of the most self-centered, bossy, grumpy, incompetent and ill-fitted parents ever committed to film since Jim Backus in Rebel Without A Cause. But at least Backus could act. Warren may look like a cross between Walter Matthau and Ed Asner, but only shares their grumpiness and not their talent. He's impatient with his daughter, argues with his wife with little provocation and bosses around poor staggering Torgo like a jerk.

And how could a total lout like Mike rate a hot wife like Mahree's Margaret? I know there's a suspension of disbelief here, but come on. I think that Margaret has such low self-esteem she feels she can't do any better than Mike. Maybe this whole trip was just her way of forgetting the misery of her life.

Still, her life has to be better than daughter Debbie's. Jackie Neyman may or may not be a good actress but because of the three or four people who dubbed all of the voices herein, it's really hard to tell. It sounds for everything like she's a forty year-old circus midget with adenoids, so when you hear a voice like that saying "daddy" and "mommy" and whining for her puppy, it's like listening to a really bad episode of Midget Addict Theater. Really bad.

Then we have Torgo. John Reynolds may have been the most ambitious actor here, going whole hog with the disheveled caretaker look, wearing prosthetic satyr legs beneath his pants that we never really get a good look at and twitching and shuddering all about with every step, every line and every involuntary body motion. Maybe because he had to take various pain medications so as to relieve himself from the fact that the coat hangar and foam satyr legs he wore were put on backwards and no one even noticed until after the fact.

It's pretty bad when you have a character quirk that no one even cares about enough to notice if it looks screwed-up.

Tom Neyman, as The Master, at least wears his caftan nicely, with hands well-placed on either side and twitches his moustache on cue. As far as menace, he at least glowers. Which is more than I can say for his wives.

The Master's wives - well, all I can say is when you hire models, you get models. Enough said.

There isn't really a whole lot I can say about a movie where the director had to rent his cameras and make with quick takes of each scene before they were due back. There also isn't a lot to say about night scenes that were lit so poorly and incompetently that the actors couldn't stray far from their lights source (and the moths attracted therein) to do anything like search for people or run from their captors. Even the rent-a-cops only take a few steps in front of their rent-a-cop-car to check out gunshots they heard then walk back and drive off. Forget day-for-night: this is night-for-nothing.

And as far as the story goes, any story can be either very good or very bad, depending on how it's approached. This is approached so badly that no amount of re-dubbing, scene additions, extended versions, commentary or Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque adulation could redeem the status of Manos: The Hands Of Fate from the noose which it tied around its own neck.

First of all, Harold P. Warren may have known how to sell fertilizer, but he was NO director. Granted, having a hand-wound camera that only shot less-than-a-minute takes would have crippled even Hitchcock, but at least Hitchcock would have used his sense of style and irony to make it palatable. Warren...well...his sense of style seems to consist of being choppy and uneven. And poorly lit. And using unwarranted Disney footage.

I'm dead serious: at one point while Mike and his illogical brood are running through the desert, Mike brandishes his gun and, seeing a snake, shoots a couple of times at it. This snake, it would seem, was lifted from a Walt Disney True-Life Adventure...and rather than a desert floor, it was reclining on a purple velvet cloth of some sort. Unless Vera Wang dropped a dress somewhere in the El Paso desert, there's no explanation (nor excuse) for this. Also, the snake footage is the most sharp, most focused, best lit and most colorful part of the entire running time of Manos: The Hands Of Fate. And it lasts two seconds, tops. Too bad all that Warren can take credit for is lifting it from somewhere else.

And another scene near the end has a confrontation between Mike and The Master, where Mike brandishes his gun and shoots at our red-handed caftan wearer. But their juxtaposition between Mike and Master shows that while Mike seems to be a relatively-focused shot - The Master is all blurry, as if they used too much Vaseline on the lens to give him softer features...hey, it works for Streisand. Either way it wouldn't bother me too much...if both characters weren't in the same room at the same time! And don't give me "artistic conceit"; to Harold P. Warren, "artistic conceit" was winding up his camera.

Word has it that at its premiere, with city officials and everything, a few minutes in there were enough laughs, howls and talking back to the screen that if Warren had a sensitive soul it would have been crushed beyond repair from that moment on. I'm sure the cast and crew remembered important business elsewhere at that point and snuck out of the nearest exit at both sides of the front of the theater - I would have considered that an emergency situation.

I seriously cannot single out one person in this disaster who turns in a good performance. No, not even Reynolds as Torgo - the main thing he has going for him is being twitchy. Heck, I was twitchy in Death 4 Told and Hollywood never beat down my door, either!

You want to know the only thing Manos: The Hands Of Fate has going for it? Derision.

Yep, this was a film that, while initially meant to be a cultural stepping stone and full-scale revelation of motion pictures as an art form, no doubt, ended up as something to point and laugh at. This is something so slipshod, so amateurish and so ridiculous in its end result that even if it were rushed through faster and given less attention to during the creation process, would still be no better nor worse than it is right now. In short, there is no way to improve Manos: The Hands Of Fate.

This was probably a project doomed from the outset because of Harold P. Warren's insistence that he could do anything Hollywood could do, only with a minuscule budget, mediocre-at-best actors, sub-standard equipment and little-to-no budget. You just can't do that - unless, of course, you have a sky-high talent and ambition, a clear-cut vision of what you want to convey and a knowledge of what looks good and how to get it up there onscreen.

Or on the bed sheet, whichever.

The very fact that I have a DVD of Manos: The Hands Of Fate would have been impossible were it not for the inestimable intuition of Frank Conniff to pick it up and feature it on the best TV show in the known world, "Mystery Science Theater 3000", giving it new life and a whole new generation to ridicule the efforts of Warren and company. Websites, movie festivals, little action figures, black caftans with red hands on them, a stage rock musical and a drive to make a sequel now reverberate like echoes of the damned through the width and breadth of the land, letting every innocent bystander know just what a bad movie is.

I can't believe this movie turned a profit, even if it were made for $5.50, much less its original budget of $19,000. No actor involved went on to any "bigger and better things", poor Reynolds even committed suicide due to a combination of drug-addiction and despondence over the poor reception of the film. Warren himself struggled to emerge from beneath the long, dark shadow cast by Manos: The Hands Of Fate after convincing at least ONE distributor to run his masterwork for short period of time in West Texas drive-ins. He died in 1985, long before television and some crazy nuts from Minnesota breathed new life into this dead horse.

All I can honestly say about this movie is that, while unarguably bad, it at least had the convictions of its writer/director/star to see it through to the (bitter) end. Even if everyone else around him called it Mangos: The Cans Of Fruit.

One last thing; in spite of everything else that happened, at least Harold P. Warren won his bet with Silliphant. He got his film made and shown.

Gotta manos it to him on that one.