Manos: The Hands of Fate Review

Warren, an insurance and fertilizer salesman, bets a working screenwriter that anyone can make a horror film, sketches an outline in a coffee shop, and raises about nineteen thousand dollars from friends in El Paso. What that buys is a hand wound 16mm camera that runs roughly thirty two seconds at a time and cannot record sound, and almost everything wrong with Manos follows from those two facts.

Scenes are assembled from half minute fragments, so no performer can hold a beat and the cutting stutters constantly. Dialogue is dubbed afterward by a few people covering every part, which is why voices float free of mouths and why a family argument sounds like a phone call. The long drive through the desert before the story starts exists because there was footage and nothing else to do with it.

The premise is workable: a family gets lost, ends up at a lodge kept by a caretaker named Torgo, and finds a polygamous cult and its Master already in residence. It does not work here, because scene after scene stops rather than resolves, the wives wrestle in the sand for what feels like a full reel, and the ending closes a loop the film never opened.

The one element worth defending is John Reynolds as Torgo. He is doing something genuinely strange and committed, a nervous shuffling performance built around a real physical idea, and it is the only thing anyone remembers on purpose. Reynolds died a month before the El Paso premiere, at twenty five, and this was his only film. Mystery Science Theater 3000 pulled Manos out of obscurity in 1993 and made it a byword, a strange fate for a bet settled over coffee.