A Movie Review for Manos: Hands of Fate

Recorded as perhaps the worst movie ever made, Manos: Hands of Fate truly lives up to its earned title. And this fact is not to be taken lightly. After hearing so much about it in the past year, I eventually allowed my own curiosity to take the best of me and, without even giving a second thought, I decided to watch it. Boy, was that a mistake.

Filmed in 1966, this movie focuses on a family who find themselves lost in the middle of New Mexico, while on a trip for vacation. In their wandering, they end up taking a wrong turn and find themselves in the menacing grip of a strange cult ruled by a mysterious man known only as "The Master". From there, all hell breaks loose.

Now at this point, I'll just be plain honest-watching this movie was a sheer an act of endurance. From beginning to end, this movie goes wrong on almost every level from wooden acting to nonsensical dialogue that causes the viewer to feel awkward and violated at the same time. All this, doesn't even include the fact that the movie's opening sequence was nearly ten straight minutes of pointless driving that kept recycling the same footage over and over again. And all this doesn't even include the fact that a good portion of the movie's "action" scenes involved a bunch of pajama clad zombie women wrestling each other on the ground to the tune of piano jazz. I could go on and on. Overall, from this movie, the viewer learns a few things:

- Apparently teenage couples go out to deserted locations off the highway to make-out days at a time.

- When police go to "check things out" after hearing a gun-shot, it only involves walking five feet from their car before giving up.

- When evil zombie women are ordered to kill someone, they always resort to "massaging" them to death.

- Kids get over the death of their family pet in a snap!

- When your young daughter suddenly disappears in a house, ran by an evil looking "Master" and a creepy caretaker, after your pet dog has been viciously killed, you should always casually assume that she's just playing "hide-and-seek".

One interesting thing that I would like to note about this movie was that it was written, directed, and produced by a fertilizer salesman, who also starred in it as well. In addition to that, the entire movie was shot with a handheld camera that could only take thirty seconds of footage at a time, with no sound. As a result, the voices of the entire cast had to be later dubbed in by three people in "post-production". So, as you can imagine, there were several parts in the movie where the dubbing resembled a kung-fu movie without the kung-fu (or the effective story or the decent acting).

Fortunately, for those brave enough to explore this work, there is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this movie (which was the one I watched) that helped most of the experience move along like a soothing laxative helps along rancid Chinese take out. But if you happen to be a sincere glutton of pain and emotional mutilation, the regular version of this film would be perfect for you. All in all, being a definite half a star out of 5, this movie is almost so bad that it might be worth watching. But then again, some people do stupid stunts just to show they could do them, which doesn't exactly make the stunts any less stupid.