Sometime soon I want to do a feature where I review movies that I think are actual contenders for the worst ever made. Previously I was under the impression that the list wasn't long enough for it to justify its own column. I see now I was wrong.
Manos: The Hands of Fate is pretty good, though. I say that as if it isn't the movie I've watched more than any other. Even more than Don't Go in the Woods! I have seen Manos...forty times? Fifty? Does it matter? The only other movies I've watched more are probably some old Winnie the Pooh episodes or Yellow Submarine or the 1966 Batman movie or the various things I forced my parents to rewind countless times when I was a kid. Manos has a special place in my heart, as the quintessential "bad" movie--thanks as always, MST3K. I even had a chance to see it on the big screen, after a fashion--thanks as always, RiffTrax! Manos has entered trash's closest thing to a mainstream canon alongside Troll 2 and Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 and Birdemic and all the rest. The only reason why I've hesitated on reviewing it so far is because I wanted to wait till I could get the HD remastered version, which, ironically, I can't get screencaps from because my computer is as cheap as Manos itself was. You can read about the backstory of this so-called "worst film ever made" on your own time--its birth from a bet with Stirling Silliphant, its director's humble origins as a manure salesman, its collapse into thirty-year obscurity after a disastrous one-night showing in El Paso. A Wikipedia or TV Tropes page could sate your thirst for knowledge. Done? Okay! Let's begin our road trip to the place called the Lodge of Sins...
A man named Mike (played by director Hal Warren), with his wife Margaret, daughter Debbie, and dog Peppy, are on a trip to the vacation locale called Valley Lodge. They get lost after a long driving sequence and one of several jarring narrative detours into the exploits of some cops who continually chase a pair of necking "teenagers." They eventually find a mysterious house where an incredibly strange twitchy man named Torgo lives. Torgo warns them that "the Master" wouldn't approve of their presence, nor of their suggestion to spend the night when it becomes clear that they won't find Valley Lodge before nightfall. All the same he relents when Mike keeps pushing the issue, escorting them into the house, where they are greeted by a portrait of the Master himself, a mustachioed man wearing black robes with red hands on them. He is accompanied by a devilish-looking dog, and worsening things is the fact that Torgo insists the Master is "not dead the way you know it." It isn't long before the Master's dog brings about the death of Peppy, and the family finds the Master's outdoor tomb, where the Master lies not dead but dreaming with his six thin-gowned wives. Torgo begins to desire Margaret for his own, despite the Master feeling she'd fit in better as his seventh wife. When the Master awakens, he invokes Manos, "God of Primal Darkness," to wake up his wives also. When his wives do end their slumber, they begin fighting over whether or not they should spare Debbie, because while she is a child she will one day grow up to be a woman, and "Manos love women" (despite the fact that his cult is headed by a man). All of this culminates in the bizarre massage-torture of Torgo, who gets his hand burned off, and an archetypical downer ending.
For twenty years, the grungy print of Manos that showed up on MST3K was the definitive version, and let me tell you, there is a massive difference between the two editions. The first and simplest matter is that of tone. Manos: The Original looks like a snuff film. Manos: The Remaster is a bright, sunny, floral masterpiece, with people sporting entirely different hair colors, clothes, and facial blemishes from what they had before. I was hoping that this general brightening would help reveal a lot more about the world we're seeing, and it most assuredly does. While it can't make the movie good--Manos will eternally be too awkward for that--it's interesting to see how these improvements can change your perception of Warren's vision.
First of all, there's the matter of Torgo's appearance. Torgo is defined by his beaten-up fedora, his greasy beard, his gray coats, and his enormous knees. Some sources say that his shoes had cloven grooves in them to make them look like hooves, because he was supposed to be a satyr (which is why he has his trademark oversized knees). Other people have speculated to me that his clothes are supposed to look like a Confederate uniform, and Torgo has been forced to serve the Master for over a hundred years. Well, nix to both of those. Torgo is not a satyr even if he was intended to be one. His shoes don't look like hooves and they never did. Similarly, his "Confederate uniform" is a lot cheaper and weirder than that. He's actually wearing some sort of auto garage jumpsuit--you can even see the white label under his shirt pocket which may or may not read "Jiffy Lube"--and the coat draped around this is just an old oversized sport coat left over from a garage sale. So...Torgo's a grease monkey who borrowed his dad's clothes for prom, then? Torgo is easily the most interesting part of the movie, but now his role and our sense of how Warren came up with the idea for him is made even odder. Which is saying something.
Torgo is made simultaneously more and less repulsive. Fans of the MST3K version will know that Torgo is one of the show's top tier uglies, but in some of the early shots of him, you can clearly see that John Reynolds, his actor, was not a bad looking guy. He has nice eyes and his beard is remarkably well-groomed (for Torgo, or what we expect of Torgo). Sometimes it can be seen that they did put dirt or some light makeup on his face to make him look grungier but it's inconsistent. We also get a glimpse of that room which I assume is supposed to be his living quarters, and we can see that he keeps a number of suspicious items there. One of the wives' gowns is hanging on the wall, probably off the real article, and the table he sleeps next to seems to have both a bottle of beer and some porno mags on it (we can't see the covers, and it probably really isn't porn, but what sort of magazines do you think Torgo keeps?). But most importantly, we can now see that the man literally sleeps in dirt. Seriously, there are trails on the floor from where they carried it in. Torgo's bed is an actual pile of dirt. That is amazing.
People like to harp on the "Lodge of Sins" itself. It does look like a real shithole in the original version, but here, it's actually pretty clean! Since most of the idols and fetishes dedicated to Manos are basically just pop art sculptures of hands, and the painting of the Master isn't that bad, this would be a pretty chill place to hang out. The couch looks ratty, but I've been through college. I've seen worse. I just wish I knew what books Warren used for the ones kept in the two rooms of the Lodge. I'm sure they're just only dictionaries or encyclopedias. Hal P. Warren doesn't seem like he was the most interesting fellow, but man, maybe he had the one real copy of the Necronomicon or something. Just imagine.
The brightness of the Lodge, contrasting with its tightness and imposing decorations, make it seem even more like an otherworldly place. Hell, it even seems strange in a weird meta sort of way. They keep talking about "the kitchen" but we never see it. Can the characters see the kitchen? Do they remember it when they leave it? Similarly, how or why is the Master's "tomb" outside? Why haven't more people noticed this weird Mario-lookalike sleeping on a wooden block in the middle of the desert? There's just one throwaway line ("Where'd this place came from? It wasn't here a minute ago!") that suggests that the Master's lair is in a different world from ours, but when Mike fires gunshots in the proximity of the Lodge, the police in what should be the outside world hear them. Unlike the Torgo stuff these questions come from laziness (and my over-watching the film), rather than an unnecessarily withheld mythology.
The shot we see that best sums up the fun of watching the newer edition is that following the Master's severance of Torgo's hand. There's blood dripping down from the hand! Bright red H.G. Lewis paint blood! Incredible. And there's continuity with it, too: the Master's hands stay covered in blood in all the shots he appears in for the rest of the movie! This is a minor thing but it blew me away. That hand-blowing-off scene doesn't look at all realistic, but the burning hand looks cool, and now is even cooler with that blood dripping off it.
The best part of the Synapse Films Blu Ray is that it includes what they deem the original "grindhouse" edition, so you can see the differences back to back. If you haven't seen Manos: The Hands of Fate by 2017 Current Era, you're missing out. It is as essential to film history as Citizen Kane and The Shawshank Redemption. Now, you get a chance to see it as it was intended, in all its shambling, worst-movie-ever glory.
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