Shocktober: Day 11

The story behind this horrendous horror flick starts in 1966 when theater actor/fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren made a bet with future oscar winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a successful independent horror movie. So he assembled a crew and cast of people and with little to no film experience made what’s probably one of the worst films ever to be seen by man. I’ll admit that the first twenty minutes are pretty funny but after awhile I found myself slowly slipping into a state of severe depression as the film got more and more out of hand.

Two years ago on this blog I picked this film as my number one least favorite horror film of all time. Since then I’ve probably seen a few films worse but this is still one helluva suckfest. Out of all the film’s I watched for this series this is maybe the worse in regards to the film’s technical aspects. The image quality is scratchy at best and the additional audio recording all seems to be a beat off. Its just hilarious how the score seems to hit all the wrong cues, they couldn’t of messed up any harder if they tried.

Briefly recapping the plot Manos: The Hands of Fate is about a a family of three (Harold P. Warren is the father) that take a road trip through Texas but end up becoming the victims of a Polygamous Pagan cult. The first cult member we are introduced to is Torgo (John Reynolds) a satyr-like servant of “The Master” who takes care of a house in the middle of nowhere. Torgo is easily my favorite character as he gets the most laughs for his many moments of creepy awkwardness while around the family. To play Torgo actor John Reynolds wore prosthetics to create the illusion of satyr legs. Unfortunately he wore them backwards while filming and caused permanent damage to his knees which led to an addiction to painkillers until his tragic suicide a month before the film’s premiere, damn that’s sad. Back to the movie it more or less descends into nonsense once we are introduced to the “Master” and his crazy cult and the family “Spolier Alert” eventually joins the cult as we are eventually left with the words “The End?” Yeah I’m serious, they just made all the right moves didn’t they? If you’re gonna check this one just check out the first 15 minutes, the rest is more or less the equivalent of going to hell.