knsjstudiomanager Literally if you track down the short documentary "Hotel Torgo" and the sci-fi fanzine "Mimosa" which did two articles of interviews with surviving cast and crew, that stuff is more interesting than the actual film, even the new HD version of the final 16mm Ektachrome workprint (because the movie was blown up to full-screen 35mm for theatrical showings) which is sharp and good looking.In short, this film is a spiritual predecessor of all the '70s horror films where a group of teens go out to a place away from society and get killed by a monster or a cult. In "Manos" it's a family (mother, father, small daughter, her poodle) trying to find a hotel called "The Valley Lodge"; they get lost in their black '65 Ford convertable and instead find a smallish house off a dirt road with a caretaker who might be a Satyr who is named Torgo. He is the servant to an undead magician/cult leader called The Master who worships a god named Manos, and his cult are his undead brides, all dressed in goofy white robes. The Master wears a black robe with the outline of red hands and his facial hair makes him resemble Bill Buckner. The "plot" is the family finding out just how crazy the situation is, and trying to get away. Unlike most horror films of the mid-1960s, it has a downbeat ending.Why I gave the film four stars was that they shot it on 16mm home movie cameras, on their own time, and it took SIX MONTHS to make a 60-plus minute film. That's dedication. "Manos" had a shadowy run on the Southern drive-in circuit, joined the raft of B-movies sold to independent UHF TV stations in the 1970s, and would have been utterly obscure had not Frank Conniff of "Mystery Science Theater" not found it. "Manos" is the perfect example of the self-financed, independent regional film (El Paso, Tx.), and should be shown in film schools for how not to make those sorts of pictures.

jamesgandrew Manos: The Hands of Fate is quite possibly the worst movie of all time… no hyperbole. Everything from its technical issues, pacing, story and acting shows no redeeming value whatsoever. However, like most bad movies it fascinates you in to what went behind this monstrosity of a film.The movie was shot on a camera that could only record approximately thirty-two seconds of footage, explaining the overly long takes used in the film. The whole movie was also dubbed since the filmmakers had no sound equipment.Actor John Reynolds, who plays Torgo, was reportedly high on LSD while filming and his performance consists of him displaying confusion, twitching and other strange mannerisms.Manos has gone into infamy as one of the all-time bad movies and it's no wonder why...

feodoric I'm not kidding: watching this thing, if you can endure it without injuries (I did it the easiest way: I watched the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of it...), teaches you quite a few things. Ergo, it has "value", albeit in a very broad sense. More like a function, really. First, one can use it to calibrate one's rating scale. This is as close as a standard 1 as you'll ever get. I won't repeat all the previous comments about the movie: every reasonable or even average-minded person will agree on the absolute nullity of this full nadir in the history of cinema: so, it is very useful to set your scale to zero (that is, 1 by definition at IMDb). As a corollary, which may be construed as its second function, "Manos..." is thus the perfect universal ground zero on which every other movie suddenly takes a contour and perspective, including famous "worst ever-s" that abound in opinions that cluster around titles such as the inevitable "Plan 9 from Outer Space", which, thanks to Manos, gives a novel elegance to the Art of Ed Wood. Such an important role for Manos cannot be overestimated: force every IMDb under 18 to watch Manos (there are ways to check if they did their homework!!! 😂) and I'm sure we won't read reviews with that dreaded condemnation: this is the worst movie EVER! Anymore because everybody knows it's Manos.In summary, we must thank Harold P. Warren for rallying all the critics around his Bizarro world masterpiece, where antiactors play antiroles with an antiscript and move along through a hostile environment of floating antimatter, risking dramatic annihilation at every antimoment until the very end, where they finally dissolve in a cosmic explosion when all that antimatter hits true matter, and the viewer reads the word DNE EHT on the last frame of Manos.What a great experience it was!

connorbbalboa Weird and annoying big-kneed servant to the evil Master. Poor acting from everyone. Vague plot. Makes you wonder why the traveling family doesn't just get out of the house despite the weird stuff and the dead dog. Looks like it was made for $50. Despicable screenplay. Useless police. Dreadful pace. Made on a bet. That should tell you everything. It sucks. Next.