Posted on 12/12/2011 8:08:48 PM PST by struggle
Manos: The Hands of Fate doesn't deserve to be called the worst movie ever made. It may not deserve to be called a movie at all.
Manos is a weird blip in film culture, the closest thing that the B-movie world's ever had to its own butterfly effect. It was made on a bet by an El Paso insurance salesman with no filmmaking experience named Harold P. Warren, screened in a few West Texas theaters in 1966, and promptly forgotten for the better part of three decades.
Then, in 1992, a couple of yahoos with a show on Comedy Central stumbled across it in a public domain catalog.
That show was called Mystery Science Theater 3000, which for ten seasons mocked exceptionally bad movies. And if MST3K spent its run scaling mountains of awfulness to hit peaks of hilarity, Manos was its Everest.
"There's a very distinct feeling in the episode of, 'What is this movie that we've discovered?'" said Ben Solovey, a 26-year-old Florida State film school grad who's behind Manos: The Restoration, a project to repair an original 16mm workprint of Manos. "Even though there's these long stretches where they're not making jokes, it doesn't matter. It feels like you're watching a film from another planet."
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
I remember MST3K but never heard of Manos: The Hands of Fate. I watched it last night - OMG, I’ll never be the same!
“There is no way out of here. It’ll be dark soon. There is no way out of here.”
So what movie does, if this one doesn't? The greatest monsterpiece ever made, it set the bar so low, you have to to China to go under it.
Is that the one where it looks like they filmed two movies at once and spliced bits of them together? I never could tell who was whom except for Mitchell himself, and the plot line (as much as there was one), kept shifting randomly.
"Hot merging action!"
>>I remember MST3K but never heard of Manos: The Hands of Fate. I watched it last night - OMG, I’ll never be the same!
Yeah, I watched it almost 20 years ago. I used to have a Torgo screensaver for windows 3.1 in which Torgo hobbled around the screen and said things like: “He’s not dead the way you and I know it,” “The master does not approve of such devices!” and “The master wants you BUT HE CAN’T HAVE YOU!”
Nice to have someone else watch MST. I usually am watching the MST3K channel on justin.tv while I do other stuff.
When Joel does the skit wearing the Manos cloak, instead of giant hands the cloak has giant feet.
It’s on YouTube in 10 parts, in all its glory. I think I woke my husband up a few times, I was laughing so hard. And yet it was a disturbing movie.
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