Director Harold P. Warren
Starring Tom Neyman, John Reynolds, Diane Mahree, Hal Warren, Jackey Neyman
Score 0.5/6

A family gets lost on the road and stumbles upon a hidden, underground, devil-worshiping cult led by the fearsome Master and his servant Torgo.

Writer/director/producer/actor Harold P. Warren was an insurance salesman (later a fertilizer salesman) from El Paso. He made a bet with visiting location scout Stirling Silliphant (later an award-winning screenwriter) that he could make a popular horror film on an extremely minimal budget.
From what I have read Manos: The Hands of Fate was shot with a hand-held camera that could only record 32 seconds of film at a time. It was also shot without sound; all the lines were dubbed later.

I think that it is kind of interesting that there could be a question as if Manos: The Hands of Fate can be considered to be a feature length movie with a runtime of 70 minutes. According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, and the British Film Institute, a feature film runs for at least 40 minutes, while the Screen Actors Guild holds that it is 80 minutes or longer.

Manos: The Hands of Fate is one of those fabled bad movies. Now to be perfectly clear Manos is not just every garden variety bad movie, this is a legendary bad movie. Well, that’s the impression I have always gotten when I’ve heard friends talk about it. This movie has some serious problems odd acting choices, the emotionless delivery of dialogue by the voice over artists, to many cuts throughout the movie and the compositions of the shots throughout the movie left me thinking ‘you really did not need to do that’. Though I found myself liking the music throughout Manos and the character Torgo was kind of interesting. The character struck me as a combination of Igor, Gollum and the puppets from the original Thunderbirds series from the 60’s.

I’d like to be able to say Manos is just a bad movie and be done with it, because it would be easy. But here’s the thing, its not a garden variety Bad Bad movie. Manos is more of a boring bad movie and it is not painful to watch, this also could be a possible cure for insomnia. If this was a longer movie with the chance to cover up some of the glaring plot holes it could have been an ok. But all I can really say with any degree of certainty is this is a bad student movie.