A tale filmed by an idiot, full of badly post-synchronised sound and flagrant disregard for continuity cutting, signifying… fuck. “Shocking” barely begins to describe it. Reportedly director and star Hal Warren made this after a conversation with legendary Hollywood screenwriter Stirling Silliphant; Warren claimed it was easy to make a cheap horror film, Silliphant told him to go and make one then, and, well, Warren did just that. Fortunately for him he never specified the film had to actually be good as such, cos he failed brilliantly there. Manos is legendarily bad, its rediscovery on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ensuring its posthumous fame; there’s a particularly good review of it on Letterboxd calling it “not only an inscrutable piece of anti-cinema but also a glorious piece of accidental outsider art”, which is as accurate a description as any. In some respects, the unspeakable (if you’ll pardon the expression) dubbing is the real horror in this film—all the dialogue is post-synced and terribly; the young child actor apparently cried at the premiere when she heard the adult woman’s voice replacing hers—but honestly, apart from the fact that it’s mostly in focus, Manos is a wild catastrophe on almost every level, clearly made by people with only a minimal idea of what they were doing, and it would notably be the only film most of the participants ever made. The only thing it gets right, I think, is the Master’s costume, that black robe with the giant red hands on it, that looks kind of awesome. The thing is, this could actually have been decent; I have a sort of taxonomy of bad cinema where the worst sort of bad films are deeply flawed on some conceptual level that can’t be overcome, but there’s another level on which a bad film has an adequate idea behind it but lack of resources and other technical skill lets it down. Manos is one of those films; the whole demonic cult thing isn’t bad as a plot for a B horror, and in the right hands (ho ho) you could actually make something good from it… but that’s not what happened here, obviously; what we actually got was an amazing classic of crap (Warren was a fertiliser salesman by trade; this was a different kind of shit he was selling). This would’ve been amazing back in the good old days of Mu-Meson Archives with an alcohol-fuelled audience; I’m only sorry it’s taken me this long to see it, but it was exactly what I needed after In a Violent Nature to cleanse the palate…
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