"Trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art" - --- Douglas Sirk
Some of us love 'bad' movies for different reasons than the hooting at it with an audience at midnight, or snarking over brewskis. We find joy in the aesthetic arrest of true myth. We love the vast gaps between normally filled brickwork that let us look into the depths of our own unconscious, where archetypal myth and drive-in movies collide. We get some of that with the appeal of Drunk History on Comedy Central. But mostly we get it in very intellectual Brechtian exercises (Godard, Resnais) or very agog accidental geniuses (Ed Wood, Luigi Cozzi). It's a matter of taste, and pretense, perhaps: would you rather be told a story by an excited ten year-old delinquent, so enthusiastic he can't keep his words straight, or some boring, well-rehearsed little mama's boy who delivers every line with emphases calculated for various emotional end points?
Yo, f--k those end points, man. In case you can't tell which side of that I fall under, rest assured I love the bad films, mainly the older ones, of course. I can't connect with the recent yen for vanity projects by people like Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen. They're too sad, and maybe hit a bit too close to home as far as my own amok egotism. Even the thing Gen-Y has for 80s VHS that makes fans of things like Miami Connection and Deadly Prey is lost to me - the 80s weren't an easy time for me as a sullen teen so the associations are of a depressive funk from watching too many movies, spending too much time mulling through rental aisles, instead of going outside to play or having a girlfriend. That's why I go for the stuff I saw on TV at 5 AM as a kid waiting for Saturday morning cartoons to start, sneaking around to not wake my parents, and finding my Rosebud in something awesome like Plan Nine from Outer Space, a film I could understand every word of, even at five years old, finally - an adult film that made sense!! I didn't care if it had mismatched shots or unconvincing doubles, I just loved it gave me both the classic horror pantheon (vampires staggering around pitch-black graveyards) and science fiction (UFOs and deflector guns, a strange UFO that's shiny and round from afar and black and square up close.) And no way to get lost as there's the trilling wonderment of Criswell's narration ("death the proud brother...")
It tapped into why I loved monster movies, and I still hunt that thrill, I find it mostly in little moments peppered throughout (older, from 30s-70s) bad movies, where sublime poetry and mythic realness is served, reminding us that before TV we stared hypnotized into the nighttime fire while stories were spun by elders, the radio, or our own imaginations. Without a nonstop barrage of images saturating the sponge of our brain, our imaginations were vivid, ready to fill in the blanks so we could be watching our own dreams while awake. Extreme-hunger-spiked paraedolia met the flicker of the fire, not unlike the flicker of a strip of film through the projector (with the shutter blacking out the transitional moments) creating the illusion of movement. Calling movies the flicks is no idle association with fire.
We don't realize it, perhaps, but bad films can bring us back to that, they strip away the illusory dross to get down to archetypal performative basics. They remind us that CGI and 3D are the bane of our imagination. Our unconscious archetypal energies, from which we are cut off from communicating directly with by waking consciousness, want desperately to reach us - and they always do so with images. Images are their flesh and blood, their voice and echo. Like Harpo doing his charades bit to get across some urgent plot point, they rely on 'sounds like' anagrams, and projection. These days it's only when we're insane, sleep-deprived, tripping, or enlightened, that the veil parts. The dream maker tendrils finally break up through the locked cellar door and go twisting out all over our tight-ship dinner party, clutching and coiling, breaking plates, and carrying on. My they are an unruly bunch!
But mostly, we only occasionally get a note or a postcard passed up through the floorboards. And then, since the unconscious can watch what we watch, we get a pure jolt of ecstatic delight when an archeytpal elelment below wants us to know they relate to something enough to project themselves onto it. Thus my heart soars every time I see George Barrows' post-swig shiver while they pass the bottle around in Mesa of Lost Women, or the strange nocturnal dance in Cat Women of the Moon, or Tor Johnson rising from the tomb in Plan Nine; or the titular Astounding She Monster jumping through Robert Clarke's cabin window like a big bodystocking-clad she cat; or Lou Ferigno and and Circe riding a rock-propelled chariot past the moon in the 1985 Cannon/Cozzi masterpiece Hercules, because all the elements are there. Arguine its unconvincing is like arguing against a Tarot reading for having dogeared cards. The reading is even more potent for the aging process... any sage projecting itself up onto a passing Yoda T-shirt knows that...
Something about these peak weird moments in the cheap, wild, meta-enriched films really speaks to a deep well in my soul, reflecting the cheap look of my b&w dreams. When these oasis moments happen, it's like finding a well-stocked bar on a seemingly deserted island.
Anyway, all that is the long way around to saying woe is he who comes to "Manos" The Hands of Fate (the quotation marks are part of the title), for such priceless whiskey womb moments. Do so and your happy place GPS might lead you all the way around the world rather than admit there is no "there" there. But it's so almost perfect that finding something to love within it becomes a challenge to every outsider film fan. It's a maze that promises all sorts of gifts, but leads you only to fever dream dead ends.
Maybe you know the fever dream I mean: where you hear a snatch of some song you heard in passing or while watching TV in your bed, and it just repeats over and over on a loop in your brain (2). You will get that with the score of "Manos" which means that if--even with that score--you can enjoy "Manos," you can enjoy hell itself. That means, to you, heaven is right here on earth.
But know ye this: the enlightened one asks for the dirtiest jobs, lives the most spartan of lives, gives up the endless chase for nirvana, even the pursuit of gettin' wasted, or living "the fine life, baby" as Snoop Dogg would say in those Corona ads. In doing so, pleasure chases him. Pain runs from him. Pain is scared, it has no power anymore. Free of all judgement, recused from the bench, such a man is to be feared only by fear itself. For him All is connection and bliss. He moves beyond duality. At last he is the one hand clapping. He is the noise of the tree falling in the woods when no ears are around.
"Manos" can deliver the final blow to the door betwixt duality and its transcendence, all you gotta do is walk on through the wall, headfirst.
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PS - SORRY FOR THE EXTREME LENGTH OF THIS PIECE. I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON IT FOR TOO LONG (and actually it used to be twice as long with a long preamble about surrealist art and the joy of paredolia and campfire stories as a kind of mental TV. - Some other time). As always, I'd suggest just scrolling around, reading any paragraph that starts interestingly, and stopping when it starts to get all Joycean. ) I'm working on it.
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People like Ed Wood are revered today because they put their heart and soul into their cheap-ass outsider films, and you can tell that they're weird people trying to make a normal, quality best film they can, but their fractured sense of reality shows through every armor chink. Ed proved he was perfectly capable of making a boring 'normal' if cheap B-movie, where the mise-en-scene could be threadbare without drawing attention to itself (as in Jail-Bait) but it was when he tried to make big personal statements while moving into horror to both help out and exploit Bela Lugosi that his imagination took wing, leaving his ability far in the dust and earning his place in the cult pantheon, making him the saint of all outsider or 'folk-art' filmmakers.
But when normal people make films that are intentionally trying to be weird or bad, it's only ever 'quirky' in that blando calrissian tradition.
"Manos" is a little different from both. Its director is a normal person but he isn't trying to be weird. He isn't trying period. First/last-time director, full-time Texas fertilizer salesman Hal Warren barely achieves the rudiments of what a feature film should be--but he won the bet he made with fellow Texan and renowned screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (it probably went along the lines of: " Making a film is easy, Stirling, slinging fertilizer is way harder." / "If it's so easy, Hal, I bet you can't make one!" / "Yer on!"). In the end, Warren proves himself a master of slinging fertilizer, no matter what he does.
Yessir, Hal Warren shows just how easy it can't be.
Being contemptuous of shit-slinging is one thing, but does contempt for the craft of filmmaking alone make a film interesting or rewarding? It depends, I guess, on who you invite over for your "beer and pizza night" to watch it. That's apparently the best way to enjoy "Manos" --with buds, brews, and pizzas, according to the comments on imdb. If you're sober and alone though, "Manos" is perfect for being tripped out on SSRIs, at 4 AM, alone, in the dark. Wondering if life in the simulation is really like this movie - a kind of fly in amber trap in which all movement circles back to itself.
What Warren hath wrought is as a God making a world in one night, only to later realize it doesn't revolve, and therefor has no gravity, so all the shit on it is just floating away. And mighty glad of it it is.
On the seventh day, Hal rested.
Looks like he rested the first six days, too.
Wake up, Hal!
But despite that whiskey womb happy place GPS pointing us far from "
Manos'" reach as we can get, there just might be a happy place gold mine in this thar abyss.
As
Teleport City says, "When you dedicate a portion of your life to the pursuit of obscure cinema existing beyond the limits of mainstream film, a movie like
"Manos" is both exactly what you’ve been looking for as well as the ultimate instrument of your destruction." Bill Gordon at
Worst Movies Ever Made summed up its (lack of) appeal thus: "Give it any amount of stars you wish, or don’t give any (...) they are all accurate."
Manos" lives on the tape splice of the bad movie Möbius strip, a zone where infinite plentitude and absolute absence connect. With "Manos," emptiness at last has a mirror to behold itself,
If you stare back at yourself through the mirror long enough, zooming right into your own pupils, you just may realize that, when the black of your pupils zooms in on the blackness of their reflection for long enough, you're gazing into two empty black holes through which you can peak into the abyss of non-being. Such is "Manos," an empty void, with some nice 16mm color photography now that it's been restored for Blu-ray.
The plot could not be simpler or more familiar: a family road trip gone awry. The difference: the car is lost in the empty scrubland of nowhere Texas instead of the usual Jason woods or Eyes-hilled desert. It seems easy and yet impossible to get lost out there, but with dad at the wheel, anything's not only possible but inevitable. His MILF wife riding shotgun; daughter (the only good actor) in the backseat, oblivious to the mounting tension, distracted continually by her doll and puppy They're driving around in circles, not thinking to ask directions from the cops they pass, or the couple making out by the side of the road. They eventually find a hand-made sign that points the way to a lodge where dad hopes they can stay the night. A sinister, obviously chemically impaired confederate uniform-sporting goatish caretaker named Torgo stands in front of the door (we never really see the building behind him), squinting and staggering under the magic hour glow. He tells them-- in a kind of drunken hiccup-style--and like all the voices, dubbed in after the fact, that they can't come in. The owner won't like it and they're closed. But the dad, afraid of driving under all that afternoon sun, bullies his way in.
Things are pretty weird in the lodge. It's not even a lodge. There is a room with a couch and a big wet painting and a small ratty bedroom--replete with double bed against a wall and a footlocker for furnishing--leading to a small ratty kitchen--replete with small ratty sink--leading to a giant back porch--replete with floodlights and yard spreading off into the open desert). After the wife pleads and nags for an hour or so and the child's dog is mysteriously killed (off camera), dad finally decides to leave. But they never do get to leave. Somehow, the car won't start. Or something. The dad can't fix it, nor make decent life decisions (at least he's armed, not that it will do much good). Though Torgo is apparently hobbled and suffering from St. Vitus's Dance, the hale and hearty dad keeps insisting the poor guy bring their bags in, then out, in, then out. It's pretty funny to imagine would it would be like if some random family barged into your small house and demanded you load and unload their luggage while complaining every minute about your furnishings.
And then, out back, night falls and... the 'Master' awakens. He's a pale ectomorph whose only masterful quality is a fierce stare and thick black eyebrows. He does a lot of standing, spreading out his crazy 'red hand on a black background' cape/shawl a lot--rightly proud of it. A thick black smoke, rising from a small fire pit at his feet, surrounds him, as if he's outlined in black sharpie drawn onto each frame. "Manos," he screeches, "must be served."
Just to be 'clear,' though he is the "Master" he serves "Manos." But what or who "Manos" is never does get explained. The difference between them seems uncertain from scene to scene. We do know this cult likes hand sculptures. And hand symbolism. Did you know manos means 'hands'? So the title translated is: "Hands: Hand of Fate?"
As the film spins on, Torgo has taken a shine to the wife after watching her undress in the mirror (down to her slip), and asks the Master if he can keep her for himself. But the Master wants her to join his own harem of undead-style brides, all of them wearing wayyy too much cheap make-up, and these iill-fitting diaphanous gowns. Most of the time, they're rolling around in the sand in endless catfights while the Master sits there, vexed... but obviously used to it.
Needless to say, things don't end well.
They didn't begin well either.
Still, all the elements for a
schlectesklassisch are there: the fractured pacing, the dream logic, the loopy editing; the canned post-sync dialogue seemingly beamed in from beyond the grave; the dead space before and after the lines (which should have been snipped off by an editor rather than someone who only knows how to tape strips of film together); the unhinged performances, the almost passive-aggressively threadbare sets. The actor who plays the dad. Oh wait, that's Hal himself! A real hack of all trades.
SCORING THE BARRELBut there is one very important element for successful bad film bliss missing though: a good
score. Post-sync sound cheapjack movies like "
Manos" usually have royalty-free music playing almost nonstop to help excuse the lack of dialogue and sound effects. BUT for that
not to suck (in a genuinely bad way) we need either the right (or totally wrong) kind of music-such as that ominous, bombastic library music used for
Astounding She-Monster, Plan Nine,
and Beast of Yucca Flats)- and/or totally crocked narration (Criswell being the ultimate example
). Warren waives both of these easily procured things, perhaps afraid of their power. He post-syncs the dialogue fairly well for such a cheap suit production...
But then, for music, we're treated to the magical lite jazz of Russ Huddleson and Robert Smith, Jr. (Soundtrack available on Spotify!) a duet of modern piano and flute (or sometimes alto sax) that is the height of mood-killer. Jazz is perfectly fine in its way, even elevator jazz like this, but no, no, no, not here. Imagine if Kenny G. did the score for Suspiria or Halloween! Think, Hal Warren! Think what "Manos" could have meant to the world had you pumped it up with low- end ominous dread or pounding bombast! Even those piano mashes and frenzied Spanish guitar moments in Mesa of Lost Women and Jail Bait would have been perfect.
Hal, come clean: did you just grab the closest, most royalty-free-looking stock jazz album from your grandma's attic?
Actually, the music is fine... for awhile. It casts a nice languid, slightly melancholy, almost romantic summer's idyll kind of mood when the family is just driving around, but then, when the menace should be building, ye olde flute keeps going. Songs and riffs repeat as if Warren merely started the record over again, utterly unaware it's permissible to actually edit to the music rather than just using it as wallpaper. Did he think that was cheating? As it is, the space between tracks on the album occur right in the middle of suspenseful actions, it doesn't bother old Hal.
But us? Oh yeah. Just try to hear the whole movie all the way through in one sitting and that recurring, melodic little refrain will drive you nuts. It repeats and repeats, goes away and comes back again, pausing only so Hal can flip the record over, and eventually grows so irritating it will make you either surrender to it or go totally insane. Things like that are what keep me disengaged from so many of those 1960s black-and-white nudist and softcore Wishman style movies touted by Something Weird / Vinegar Syndrome / AFGA. If the library music the editor uses is good, like the robust Germanic jazz of Horror of Spider Island, or the retro-futurist loungecore or Nude on the Moon, it's something to cherish in the bad/weird movie desert island collection, the 'falling asleep or coming down from panic' section. If it's bad, like the royalty-free Phillip Sousa marches and Joplin ragtime traditionals in things like The Monster of Camp Sunshine, it gets alarmingly tedious.
And yet. With some effort, can a happy place still be found in the hands of "Manos", lite jazz flute be damned? Or celebrated? Can we make a heaven out of muzak hell?
THE TEMPLE DRAKE OF TEXAS
Maybe. But succumbing to the anti-charms of "
Manos" requires an embrace of that eerie feeling of when you feel a banal dream slowly turns into a nightmare the harder you try to wake up and you realize you're catching the flu. You're trapped in some restaurant foyer, waiting for your parents to pick you up, but they never come. Eventually you get stuck to the floor, time stops. Resistance to the miasma just gets you more and more stuck, like a mammoth in a tar pit, or Miriam Hopkins stuck in a bootlegger's shack in
The Story of Temple Drake.
Actually you should see them both as a double feature as they're alike in weird refractive ways. While Drake is about a terrified rich girl trapped in a bootlegger's disheveled farmhouse in the middle of a swamp, unable to get a lift or walk thanks to the lateness of the hour, the pouring rain, and her date's drunken stupor; in "Manos" we have a mom trapped at a 'lodge' (i.e. three dog-eared rooms) in the middle of the Texas scrub, by the late afternoon sun and her husband's dim bulb thinking. Instead of the pull of dangerous roughie sexuality that is Jack La Rue's hooded eyes, it's the angular jet black eyebrows and furious glaring of Tom Neyman and his big black dog, enveloped by black smoke from a small fire pit. Instead of a well-meaning idiot man child handyman getting shot trying (and failing) to protect Temple Drake from being raped, in "Manos" we have an idiot man child having his hand burnt off for molesting the wives and ogling the mom. Instead of the Trigger bringing the in-shock Temple back with him and setting her up in a brothel, here we have the Master enfolding the wife and even daughter into his harem of sleeping undead. Instead of a solid eerie pre-code drama about deep south class prejudice and sexual violence, we have a shitty mid-60s 'horror' film endeavoring to be about the danger of letting your husband make important decisions. Both movies show how a probably smart, sexually alive, good, sexy woman might wind up trapped in no-exit patriarchal purgatory thanks to a dysfunctional male companion, become unsuccessfully protected by a useless idiot man-child handyman, and bent to the will of an unsavory dark-haired stranger with piercing eyes looking to expand his stable, so to speak. It's like a procession of male dysfunction, from the merely weak, to the mentally disabled, to the truly villainous.
Another saving grace of some other bad movies: charmingly bankrupt art direction. Outdoing them all to the point of absurdity are the weird random set decorations in "Manos," so spartan and run-down they become like a passive aggressive jab by or at the director (who, by all accounts, was an incompetent tyrant - but hey, it's for art). There are some cool "manos" sculptures and a painting of The Master and his dog that looks like it's still wet; there's a single empty beer bottle; a yard of rope hanging on the wall; a random white gown hung up like a curtain; a ratty trunk; a shitty couch; a small twin bed in the corner. We spend a lot of time looking at "all" these things, since nothing else is going on. We get to know them pretty well. It's not the kind of place anyone in their right mind would want to stay in. But what can you do? It's still light outside so dad is afraid to keep driving. And it's not like mom ever even tries to take over. Well, she could demand the keys and drive away with the child.... but not her. She's too conditioned by the mores of the day.
Yes,
"Manos" slides you a stealth-feminist critique of bland nuclear family patriarchy, maybe right in under Warren's own nose. Despite its worst efforts, a sub-basement subtext is there for the digging. While still in the car Margaret (Diane Adelson - who is quite lovely and well-photographed --
left) keeps insisting they don't stay, but it falls on husband's deaf ears:
Torgo: "You can't stay"
Mike: Well Torgo, are we coming in or not!?
Margaret: Mike! I don't want to stay here!
Torgo: You can't come in."
Mike: Well, Torgo? In or out?
Margaret: Mike!
Is that how you sell fertilizer, Hal?
I imagine the patented Hall Warren sales pitch goes something like this:
Hal: So what do ya think, I send over six bags of this fertilizer to start with?
Store owner: I don't think so, our shelves are already stocked.
Hal: Well, do we have a deal or not? The six?
Store Owner: I said NO.
Hal: Make up your mind, do I leave the six bags or not?
Store owner: Get out of here!
Hal: I have other places to be so please let me know about the six. I have them right here.
Store owner: Get out!
Hal: Come on, just make up your mind. You won't regret it.
Store owner: Ugh, fine! Just leave them and go.
Hal: OK, come get them out of my car.
There's a nice meta-parallel between Margaret's sense of futility--unable to prevent her own looming doom due to gender codes that require him to do the decision-making--mirrored in the anxiety an actress like Adelson might feel being in a film with a director like Warren. Here she is, finally landing a starring role in a film, only to discover it's being directed by an artistically-challenged 'idiot manchild' incompetent, who's sooner or later going to ask hwe to take her dress off. Whatever performance you turn in, his wrongheaded judgments are going to ensure your name is forever blighted (or, more usually, forgotten) as the film is either booed off the screen or shelved. Tainted by its bad rep, you'll never work again, or you will be back where you started, unknown.
Young married women of the era would find this same trap at home: totally dependent on some man to provide money and lodging from now until the end of time; a man she maybe barely knows, as it turns out, once the flower of love and sexual attraction begins to fade. (The moral codes of the day being what they were, you had to buy before you could try). Adelson, perhaps unknowingly, seems to tap into this frustration, she uses her actorly misgivings to convey the sense of "too-late" realization that her keen sense of danger--her feminine instinct--will always be dismissed as nonsense by the logical, blinders-on men around her.
Meanwhile dad is struggling in his own gender straitjacket--the awful responsibility of calling all the shots producing judgement-impairing stress--almost as much as she is from having none. He's conditioned to ignore her intuition and she's conditioned to only try and influence her husband's decisions, rather than taking the direct action herself, seizing the reins of her own destiny (i.e. leaving dad at the lodge if he so badly wants to stay and driving away without him).
Thus the subtext: adherence to outmoded gender norms expose the entire family to cult machinations. He's obligated to take charge whether he knows what to do or not; she's obligated to never take charge even though she does. She only has an "I told you so" locked and loaded in her heart by way of protection when the shit inevitably flies through the fan; but is it all the man's fault for being wishy-washy or hers for not being more assertive?
Blame their parents' parents' parents' parents'! They should have done more rebelling!
Considering the era this movie was made in, we can hardly be surprised at how much the patriarchy is creaking and groaning with the pressure that will soon explode it from within. Movies like
The Cracker Factory and
An Unmarried Woman were still a decade away, but their nucleus had been forming and throwing the horrors of this gender slavery into sharp relief/
This Temple Drake nightmare, this "the guy who brought you is passed out or otherwise unable to accurately assess the looming danger to your honor' sense of dread, the forlorn gender-specific nightmare endangerment that opens up the broken heteronormative pair bond to outside influences and makes these movies 'scary' on at least some horror movie level. So to escape the situation her husband has put her in, she has to change masters, so to speak. She latches onto the first strong male or group that comes along that offers security, and that's usually either the church, a cult, a commune or a pyramid scheme (and really, what's the difference?). It's all MANOS.
Aside from Adelson, feminist subtext continues into the date rapey accusations of the Master re: Torgo's presumable molesting of the Master's brides during the day while they are asleep / immobilized; ("The women remember everything you say to them, Torgo. And they remember everything you
do to them.").
Of course we only ever see them sleeping at night, which makes the 'dream logic' or 'inconsistency' even more palpable, since they presumably are awake at night but sleep in the day. (The whole movie goes down basically from dusk to dawn in a single nigh--at least that's in its favor). On the other hand, it's less spooky to imagine them all immobilized like dead statues all through the afternoon Texas sun, (what do the neighbors think? It's like if Karloff in The Black Cat kept all his dead wife trophy cases out by the mailbox) it makes sense on a tactile if not logical level that we only ever see them sleeping at night.
As for the brides of Manos, there is at least some unity going on with their embracing of new female blood--the argument being whether to kill the child or prep her for a life as a (hopefully future only) bride of the Master. They all agree the man should die. There is an "us" with the wives that speaks of a common consensus ("jealousy is not part of us.") On that level, at least, there is a strong matriarchal current. At most the "Master" seems rather fey kind of shrieking totem, a mix of Franklin Pangborn, Nick Cave, Tom Skerritt if he was playing the dept. store clerk on the Jack Benny Show (and drunk), and Lux Interior (from The Cramps).
MANOS AND MASTER
All that aside, there isn't anything compelling going on in "Manos": The Hands of Fate. There isn't a whole lot going on, period. And maybe that lack of things going on is, in the end, what is, in fact, going on. Like "the Black Lodge" in Twin Peaks, this Manos "lodge" is allegedly somewhere in a dirt road maze of Texas scrubland, probably where a nuclear test ripped a hole in the membrane that separates dream and reality. There is no sign-in desk here, no food or drink service, no keys, hallways, or more than one ratty looking twin bed. The expansive luxury of the columned back porch and its weird Giacometti ash tray-kind / brazier kind of thing for an open flame make a pointed and surreal contrast with the impoverished rooms of the lodge itself, as if a Gone with the Wind slave shack had the Tara's wraparound veranda.
Once it's so dark out it's time to wake, the Master (Tom Neyman) with his thick black eyebrows, groovy black mustache, pale skin, thin frame and ultra-groovy "Manos" cape/robe/gown/ outfit " must be served"! With toxic-looking black smoke enshrouding him, he lets loose with a lot of spontaneous praying and orating in the name of Manos. The black smoke is interesting as it's so dark it becomes like black magic marker rectangular halo, obscuring his pale face and those jet red fingers from us like he's being "X"-ed out with a black crayon by a frenzied ADD toddler. It accentuates his uncanny stare straight into--and through-- the camera, as if he's about to call you by name through the veil of time and meta-textual distance. In the one moment we know is supposed to be funny, his dozen wives awake and immediately start bickering about whether or not to kill both the man and the child or just the man, and of course to indoctrinate the wife as one of them of if there are already enough wives for the coven all while he sits on the slab, looking down at them balefully, used to it, like having a nagging wife x 12, am I right, fellas?
"Manos" may not be much but it is good for when you are really high or otherwise out of it, if you want to be totally confused and a little amused, made aware of the mechanics of film narrative now that they are not being obeyed. The usual signifier chains are disrupted, the cinematic language reduced to a cosmic slur pitched somewhere between the mescaline high notes of nightmare logic (part Bunuel / part Fulci) and the agape jaw/droopy eyelid/post-sync Remeron cushion lows (part Doris Wishman / part Coleman Francis). Actors stand around before going into action, as if waiting for a cue that never comes; 60s period photography (appreciable thanks to a recent upgrade) captures a nostalgia for your parent's (or grandparent's) home movies, vacations in purgatory; occasional bouts of intentional humor (the bickering, brawling brides, rolling around forever on white sand as swirling alto sax plays); constant surreal bits (the back and forth of the luggage); strange dead-end reaction shots, all cohere to get you past the first soothing, then irritating score, and the long driving scenes, pointless go-nowhere cuts. Nothing really connects or makes sense, but then again, neither do a lot of things in life, bro. Actions are repeated over and over as if the director is saying "again! again" to the actor without stopping the camera (the way directors sometimes do to save time, repeating a line or action inside a single take, planning to only use the best one and cut the rest out, but sometimes --as in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, keeping the repetitions). It's as if Warren shot ninety minutes of film and used it all, letting intentional and accidental comedic incompetency occur naturally. Since it's all post-synced it doesn't seem to matter as much. People make some some movement or say something as if presuming--not unreasonably perhaps-- the ends of their shot will be scissored, as they would be in normal hands. So we get moments of stillness before or after movements, the actor all but looking at the camera man after the action and waiting to hear 'cut.'
The only natural performance comes from the little daughter, who at least seems genuinely into her doggy and then her little doll. The rest of them seem like aliens from some drug-drenched cosmic waiting room, the kind of dead in-between zone that used to haunt my dreams when I had a bad fever as a child. Trapped in loops, groped by demonic giant mental patients and creepy old women while the parents dismissed my fears as nonsense. The actors feel trapped too, perhaps hoping, reel after reel, for something in the script to come along and give them a cue as to what to do with their hands (of fate) until it's finally time to go home.
TORGO NO GO
Special mention too to Reynolds, who was allegedly on acid throughout the shoot (this was 1966 when it was still quasi-legal). He seems legitimately out of it, but at least that's a direction. That's a choice. He reminds me of when I had the DTs, back in 2016, shaking and moving with a kind of panicky wobble to the ER or the liquor store, as if every time one of his feet left the ground his body tensed as if he was about to fly upwards or blow away. When he lands on the ground again he has to begin the whole process of re-balancing. Dude. Whether suffering from either alcoholic, opiate or methamphetamine withdrawal, or all three at once, Reynolds definitely has 'the look.' The legend goes his character was supposed to be half-goat at one point, so he put braces on his legs to give him a goat-like walk. Warren never asked him to do that, nor bothered to tell him the goat idea was nixed. In some scenes he even shows up with drawn-on angry eyebrows (
upper left), ala, an angry goat. What a character! In voice and manner he seems to be doing an impression of Dennis Weaver's "night man" in
Touch of Evil crossed with Walter Brennan's rummy in
To Have and Have Not.
I guess, in the end, we're all Torgos here, all the nightman for a party we can only paw ineffectually at the window while shivering outside. We can only endeavor to not have someone draw devilish eyebrows on us before someone burns off one of our hands and we exeunt into the desert night--an endeavor Reynolds' Torgo has clearly failed at. But that's OK Torgo, nothing to get hung about.
Poor Torgo is doomed for many reasons, but the most egregious sin, where he crosses the Torgo line even to us, his champions, is when it's revealed he's been molesting the wives while they sleep. Manos decrees his wives "Keel! Keel!" him, a long overdue revenge. This consists of kind of grabbing him around the shoulders and fake slapping him around 100 times. Not even worn out by his slapping, he finally has his hand held over the fire until it becomes a crispy skeleton hand, then he staggers out in the desert. Presumably never to return. But the Master doesn't need to worry, as he shouts to no one in particular, "I am permanent! Manos has made me permanent!"
Permanent
Over too quickly yet seeming to last years,
"Manos" has earned its wings in the long haul as some rare artifact both uncanny and tediously banal at the same time. And on a personal level, that sense of being trapped in the amber of strange nothing jibs perfectly with nightmares I remember from childhood, wherein my parents would leave me in a restaurant foyer, me unable to get through the revolving door, and being stuck waiting for them for years and years, in total isolation, to the point even an evil witch moving slowly towards me across the empty restaurant, was a welcome reprieve from the nothingness. Now that there's a nicely restored print with good colors, giving it all a home movie, Lana del Rey video vibe, there's a nice Lana Del Rey-ish tone of lost America, of an America that only ever existed in memory, in postcards, and in movies - and maybe not even then -
the America of Ghosts.
THE COUPLE of MUGS
Take for example the side plot with a harassed couple necking in a convertible, presumably nearby, hidden in the emptiness of the scrubland. The only car present besides the cops and the families. They just want to park and make out, no one around for miles and miles, but the cops have nothing better to do than drive all over a series of winding desert dirt paths in the middle of nowhere just to repeatedly harass them. Who was there to complain? A committee of jackrabbits? At least the cops don't even care that they've been drinking. How did the cops even find them? If there's nothing going out out there, why are the cops even patrolling? And just how did the cops know the family car had its tail light out, since it's the middle of the day?
You can ask these questions, but just like that fever dream, you're not going to get answers. Nothing adds up in the equation of the unconscious. It's there for its there-ness.
But even in dreams, alcohol and drugs can provide relief. The lovers have a pint of something or other, and--a big credit in my book--when they drink they wince and shiver like one does when actually drinking liquor straight from the bottle (but one seldom sees in films, Barrows' shiver in Mesa of Lost Women accepted). It's the sole moment of warmth, of recognizable humanity, outside of the puppy-girl relationship - doomed as it is.
OK - TIME TO TWIST AND UP OUT
Regardless of where you fall on the bad film lover matrix, Manos's strange mix of inconsistent logic and deep-rooted malaise keep it intriguing, revealing in their absence, the million common sense decisions most of us don't even notice have been made in the finishing of a feature film. Every edit, every line reading, every sound effect, every prop is off. The painting isn't even dry. And it's kinda weak.k The vintage metal hand sculptures are actually cool, they use one for a fire out on the back veranda, a kind of giant brazier/ash tray/sculpture, lit ablaze with a burning kinda Giacometti-esque man in the dead center, like a giant hardened slag icicle in reverse. Props to that... prop. But the rest is a bit like that random piece of rope on the wall, or the shirt. Why? This isn't a matter of Lynchian 'big fish' surrealism; this is a matter of incompetence and obliviousness finding grace in the randomness of life.
Hal Warren probably lifted the hackneyed 'twist' at the end from a stray copy DC's House of Secrets, sure. H had no idea how to stretch it out to feature length, granted. But like someone who needs fertilizer but doesn't know it, Warren won't get his foot out of your inner door. Determined to win his bet, to send Sterling Siliphant sailing home in shame, he came up with an economical solution to get to the needed minute count. Never say action. Never say cut. Just let it run and see if the actors realize it and decide to begin the scene rather than standing around waiting for direction. You can see the "oh are you filming now? Okay, I knew that," passing across every actor's face. That's fine. Keep all the dead moments before or after an action in the final cut. It's good enough for Warhol, it's good enough for Texas.
Manos writer-director-star Harold P. Warren may be guilty of a lot of things, but cheating with 'day-for-night' exposure tricks? Sometimes. Not even the script knows what time it is when the family first pulls up in front of the "lodge" (which we never see the front of). In the shots of Torgo swaying indecisively there in the doorway, decked out like a Confederate officer ghost haunting a Salvation Army, it's clearly twilight: the setting sun beams in his eyes, turning his face a healthy orange. Thus the needing to stay there rather than driving in circles makes some kind of sense. But in reverse shots of the family it's clearly mid-afternoon. A smart no-budget filmmaker gets around these types of issues by shooting mostly in-doors or by just moving the camera around in a single take, or just being real fast. Despite the ridiculous convention that it's too late to keep driving and they need to stop for the night even though it's clearly the middle of the afternoon, night does eventually come and to his credit it's real night, an inky all-consuming blackness that looks great in the new HD remastering.
And unlike Grefé's core competency with Tartu, Warren's Manos never exhibits for a moment anything that feels remotely conventional or coherent. It glides like an eagle straight through the sliding door of its own set of limitations, sending a whirl of glass and feathers and Zapruder-style early-60s home movie grain through the ratty living room of conceptual art. Come to it naked of expectations, alone, and thou wilt be astonished, mildly amused, maybe even relaxed. And Manos will be pleased you finally shuckered loose from your snarky robot pals (1) He'll be served either way, but he hates humor, and rightly. Evil thrives in its absence, unless its mirthless, like in the monologues of the overdubbed master of Manos... and the best manure in Texas.
NOTES:
1) I recently came around on MST3K after watching nearly all of the first ten seasons while recovering from shoulder surgery over Xmas. I was all delirious so was talking to the screen and robots too, making wry jabs even if there was no one but AI to hear, and rest assure it was listening.
2. On a tragic note, Reynolds killed himself a month after filming this, I hope not because of some weird acid-fueled voice in his head told him to. He should have tried alcohol first! That's what worked for me, for awhile. And in 1966 Prozac was still 22 years away. God knows how many poor souls that drug's saved. God bless you, Pfizer, god bless you, Eli Lilly.
