I love me some bad movies. Give me your Wiseaus, Bolls, and Breens, and I’ll have a grand old time with their “art.” But, there is one particularly bad one I’ve been meaning to watch for quite some time. A terrible movie that fits the vibe for the month of spookin’. Over the weekend, I finally sat down and had a look. 

A family of 4 (mother Maggie, father Mike, daughter Debbie, and dog Peppy) decides to take a little vacation to a lodge out in scenic Wherever-The-Fuck, USA. But, they get lost on the way…or do they?! Because they do end up at a lodge. An eeeeeeevil lodge, where eeeeeeevil things happen.

Because Mike is a dumbass, he basically demands that the caretaker of the lodge, Torgo, let their family stay the night. Torgo advises against it, but then says, “Sure, why not?” and lets them in. Shit goes sideways very quickly, when something in the dark kills the dog, and Torgo starts creepily touching Maggie, saying he wants her, but so does the Master. The family then comes upon the starting of a ritual where the Master is on a dais surrounded by his many wives, all in a comatose state.

Despite them seeing that fuckshit, Maggie and Debbie go to bed, while Mike tries and fails to get the car started. Mike figures if they lock themselves inside, whatever killed Peppy won’t get them. But, that just means they are locked in with creep-ass Torgo, who knocks out Mike and pervs on Maggie.

A bit later, the ritual starts, the Master and his wives wake up, and they all argue over what to do. Some think they should kill the whole family to appease their god, Manos. Some think that the little girl should be spared and Maggie should join the harem. But, the Master decides to kill Torgo, for conspiring against him, and his oldest wife, who decided randomly that she wanted to conspire against him, too. The Master fucks off to confront Torgo while his wives all catfight in the sand.

The Master casts a spell on Torgo, making him sleepwalk (kinda?) to the sacrificial altar. The Master orders his wives to kill Torgo, then prep the insolent wife to go next. After the wives manhandle Torgo, the Master puts Torgo’s hand into the weird hand-shaped altar, which explodes it off at the wrist. The insolent wife points out that the Master’s control over everyone else is weakening, which earns her roughly two minutes of bitch-slapping before she is stripped and sacrificed.

Mike finally wakes up and goes to find Maggie and Debbie. For some reason, Mike doesn’t immediately say “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” and instead waits for Maggie to beg him to get them out. After a lot of fumbling and stumbling in the dark desert, the family decides to go back into the lodge, figuring they can hunker down somewhere with Mike’s pistol. But, the Master shows up and corners everyone after Mike ineffectually shoots him.

After a cut to black, we are shown two women who are heading up towards the lodge, looking to vacation with friends. When the women arrive, they are greeted by Mike at the door, saying he is the caretaker. Before the credits roll, we see the Master on the dais again, surrounded by his wives, with two new additions: Maggie and Debbie.

In the first two minutes of the movie, you see all the problems. 

All of the dialogue is ADR. Whoever was recording the dialogue for Debbie, a little girl, was clearly a grown woman who had something in her mouth the whole time. Torgo is supposed to be an Igor-like man, serving his master and being twitchy and creepy. But, the voiceover just makes him sound like Bill from Accounting. And of course, everyone’s voiceover doesn’t match the emotions or pace of what is happening on screen. At times, it looks like the footage was originally in another language, then given an English dub.

The soundtrack to the movie is mostly smooth jazz. An odd choice for a horror movie, but there is something unintentionally creepy about borderline porno music playing while someone creepily stands behind the female lead. There are parts where the music picks up and tries sounding suspenseful, but it just sounds like someone banging away on a piano while someone else does a sweet saxophone solo. But, there are points in the movie where the soundtrack just stops. Not fading out into quiet or even transitioning to ambient noise. Just stopping partway through the track. Sometimes the music stops for a few seconds just to restart the same song.

The editing and pacing of the movie is somehow on stimulants and depressants at the same time. The movie is only 69 minutes long (nice). But, many of the scenes take forever to end, holding on the camera and not stopping when someone should have said “Cut!” Scenes are cut out of order, or are repeated to focus on something that we saw happening in the same shot. During the ritual scene, we focus on a few women with makeup, who gain and lose their blush and lipstick between shots. The most egregious case is when the Master awakens his wives from their comas. There’s a hard cut to black, then everyone is just sitting in a circle, babbling to each other. We could have seen the women stepping away from their places in the pillars, but I guess they just forgot to film that.

Probably the “best” part of this movie is the action, if you can call it that. It seemed like no one had taken a course in physical acting, despite being a bunch of community theater actors. There’s a lot of bitch-slapping, but the slapper isn’t really committing to their action. The big catfight in the desert was mostly the women running around, rolling on each other, and doing that fake hair-pulling where you shake someone’s head back and forth. But the scene where the women “kill” Torgo tops any of the action scenes. The man is on the altar, completely helpless, and the women start putting their hands on him. Not strangling him or scratching his eyes out. They’re just petting him like a kitty. Then, when he is supposedly “dead,” the Master makes him stand up and put his hand in the altar thing. Then, he fucking sprints out of the movie with a flaming arm stump. It’s like the filmmakers forgot how death worked. 

Apparently, this movie came about after the director/dude who played Mike, made a bet with a screenwriter friend that he could easily make a horror movie. Unfortunately, he did this on the super cheap, using rented equipment that he didn’t renew the lease for and a shitty camera that only saved 30 seconds of footage at once. The director didn’t actually pay the actors, promising them all a cut of the movie’s profits. Suffice it to say, the only actors who were compensated were the little girl (who got a new bike) and the dogs who were in the movie (so much kibble).

Manos, the Hands of Fate is consistently on “Worst Movies EVER” lists, with a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 1.7/10 on IMDB. But, this movie is so egregiously bad, I couldn’t bring myself to make it into a “Good In Concept, Flawed in Execution” post. Other entries for those posts, like Omikron or Master of Disguise, have more than one redeeming quality. With Manos, nearly everything about it is objectively wrong. The only good or interesting thing is the ending, and even then, that is subjective. While there is potential for a good movie here based on the concept alone, it is buried under the quick-setting concrete that was Harold Warren’s incompetence. 

At least he won his bet with his friend.