Manos: The Hands of Fate

While on vacation near El Paso, Texas, Michael, Margaret, their young daughter Debbie, and their dog, Peppy, drive through the desert in search of the Valley Lodge. Margaret insists they are lost, and Michael claims they are not. They are stopped by a local deputy for a broken taillight, and released because Michael asks him for mercy on their "first vacation". After driving through farmland and the desert, the family reaches a house. The satyr-like Torgo is caretaker "while the Master is away". Michael and Margaret ask Torgo for directions to the Valley Lodge, which Torgo denies knowing. Frustrated, Michael asks Torgo to let him and his family stay the night, despite objections from both Torgo and Margaret. Inside the house, Michael and Margaret find a painting of the Master and a dog with glowing eyes. A howl frightens Margaret; Peppy breaks away from Debbie and runs outside. Michael investigates with a flashlight and revolver from his car and finds Peppy lying dead on the ground. Michael buries the dog in the desert and returns to the house. Meanwhile, Torgo reveals his attraction to Margaret and wants to keep her, defying the Master's desire to marry her. Margaret threatens to tell Michael of Torgo's advances. However, Torgo convinces Margaret not to say anything by promising to protect her. Michael cannot start the car. Torgo tells them there is no phone in the house, so the family decides to stay the night. Torgo secretly watches Margaret changing her clothes. Michael and Margaret find Debbie is gone and start looking for her, going outside and shouting Debbie’s name. Debbie returns, holding the leash of the dog from the painting. Following Debbie, Michael and Margaret stumble upon the Master and his wives, sleeping around a blazing fire. The wives are dressed in nightgowns, the Master in a robe with two red hands on it. Margaret and Debbie run back to the house to get their things and escape. As Michael runs behind them, Torgo uses a stick to knock him out and then ties him to a pole. The Master awakens and summons his wives, announcing that Michael must be sacrificed to the deity Manos, and that Margaret and Debbie will become his new wives. He leaves. The wives argue with each other about whether Debbie should become one of them or also be sacrificed. This turns into a catfight, where the wives tumble around in the dirt. The Master returns, breaks up the fight and decides to sacrifice Torgo and his first wife instead. Meanwhile, Michael wakes up, unties himself and returns to the house to collect Margaret and Debbie. The family runs off into the desert to escape. The Master summons Torgo and hypnotizes him, ordering the wives to kill him. Two of the wives attack Torgo with their hands, causing him to fall to the ground, seemingly dead. However, he later regains consciousness and stands up. The Master severs and burns Torgo's left hand. Torgo runs off into the darkness with his stump of a wrist in flames, and the Master sacrifices his first wife. As Michael, Margaret and Debbie run through the desert, Margaret falls and says she cannot go any farther. A rattlesnake appears and Michael shoots it, the noise attracting the attention of the deputies, who assume the noises came from Mexico due to the large desert echoes and leave it at that. Margaret convinces Michael to return to the house, as the cult would never think to look for them there. They go back and find the Master and his dog waiting for them. The Master steps towards them, and Michael fires his gun in shock, to no effect. Some time later, two women starting their vacation drive through a rainstorm, searching for shelter. When they find the Master's house, the entranced Michael greets them, saying "I am Michael, I take care of the place while The Master is away." Margaret and Debbie have become wives of the Master, and all are asleep. ==Cast==

• Harold P. Warren as Michael • John Reynolds as Torgo • Diane Mahree as Margaret • Jackey Neyman as Debbie • Tom Neyman as The Master • Stephanie Nielson, Sherry Proctor, Robin Redd, Pat Coburn, Bettie Burns, and Pat Sullivan as the Master's wives • Bernie Rosenblum as teenage boy • Joyce Molleur as teenage girl • William Bryan Jennings and George Cavender as police officers • Jared Jensen as boy in convertible • Lelaine Hansard as girl in convertible ==History==

Production -like features Warren was very active in the theater scene in El Paso, Texas, and he once appeared as a walk-on for the television series Route 66, where he met screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. While chatting with Silliphant in a local coffee shop, Warren claimed that it was not difficult to make a horror film, and he bet Silliphant that he could make an entire film on his own. After placing the bet, Warren began the first outline of his script on a napkin, right inside the coffee shop. In mid-1966, it was filmed with the working titles The Lodge of Sins and Fingers of Fate. It was shot mainly on the ranch of Colbert Coldwell, a lawyer who shared an office floor with Warren and who later became a judge in El Paso County. Most equipment was rented, so Warren hurriedly maximized the number of shots before the rental deadline. The 16 mm Bell & Howell camera is wound by hand with up to 32 seconds of footage, Rather than using location sync sound recording, all sound effects and dialogue were overdubbed in post-production by few people, including Warren, Tom Neyman, Reynolds, Jennings, and Warren's wife, Norma. Later during production, Warren renamed the film Manos: The Hands of Fate. During filming, Warren said that presenting Diane Mahree as the Texas Beauty Queen would generate good publicity for his movie. He signed her to a regional West Texas beauty pageant that would lead to Miss Texas and then to the Miss America pageant, but he neglected to tell her about it until she was accepted as an entrant. She complied and appeared onstage as a finalist. Warren contracted with a modeling agency to provide the actresses who would play the Master's wives, including Joyce Molleur. She broke her foot early in production, so Warren retained her by rewriting the script to include a young couple kissing in a car on the side of the road, who are otherwise unconnected to the plot. For example, the clapperboard is momentarily visible. The entire nine-minute opening sequence, which consists of the main characters driving around looking for their hotel with minimal dialogue or plot, was the result of such neglect. Warren had likely intended to include opening credits over these shots, but either forgot or lacked the post-production budget. John Reynolds, who played Torgo, committed suicide with a shotgun on October 16, 1966, one month before the premiere. Release The film premiered at the Capri Theater in Warren's hometown of El Paso, Texas on November 15, 1966, as a benefit for the local cerebral palsy fund. Warren rented a searchlight Jackey Neyman-Jones, the seven-year-old who played Debbie, wept in disappointment at the premiere, particularly when hearing a woman's dubbed voice instead of her own. Warren pitched another script he had written called Wild Desert Bikers, and then pitched its novelization, but with the failure of Manos, there was no interest. The film re-surfaced through a 16 mm print, presumably from this television package, which was introduced into the home video collecting market by a number of public domain film suppliers. One of these suppliers was ultimately the one that offered the film to Comedy Central. It was in a box of films sent to Frank Conniff in 1992, when he chose Manos as one of the films to be shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. ==Reception==

The day after premiere, Betty Pierce, the film reviewer of the El Paso Herald-Post described it as a "brave experiment". She criticized some elements, such as the "hero" Torgo being "massaged to death" by the Master's wives and Margaret's claim of "it's getting dark" with a bright midday sun. Manos buff Bobby Thompson said, "It's like a train wreck; you just can't take your eyes off it." The book ''Hollywood's Most Wanted lists Manos as the #2 in the list of "The Worst Movies Ever Made", following Plan 9 from Outer Space. Entertainment Weekly proclaimed Manos'' "The Worst Movie Ever Made". ==Legacy==

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax chose Manos to be featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1992. On January 30, 1993, the film was featured on the fourth season finale of the Comedy Central series Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show about a crew held captive in outer space by two mad scientists, and forced to watch bad movies. Manos was far worse than the usual fare, with the long uneventful drive used by the hosts to sarcastically repeat its title numerous times, in lieu of any action to heckle. The host robots eventually sobbed at the film defeating even their attempts at making it interesting, with one of them saying "can you believe this?" at one point. The mad scientists apologized and admitted the film was abysmal beyond their limits for torture. Torgo (played by Michael J. Nelson) made a cameo in later episodes. Selection of Manos for the show is credited to Frank Conniff, who also played TV's Frank. Conniff was generally in charge of pre-screening and selecting films sent to them by Comedy Central, the show's network at the time, and Manos was a random tape that he had pulled from a recent batch they had been sent. He felt the movie "seemed like it was maybe a crime against humanity, but you couldn't be sure" and "has an atmosphere, a vibe" that made it appropriate for the show. The Manos episode has been described as one of the best of the MST3K series by Entertainment Weekly and CraveOnline, and the MST3K episode is credited with bringing to light the otherwise obscure film, even though it led to the film being considered one of the worst films made at user polls at the Internet Movie Database. Kevin Murphy later declared, "I hate this movie. I think I hate this movie more than any other film we ever did at RiffTrax or Mystery Science Theater. Even more than the Coleman Francis movies. There's something about this movie that just makes my skin crawl." During a Q&A session at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, a question was put to the cast and writers of MST3K about any film they passed on that was worse than Manos, and many cited the film Child Bride. Manos has also been riffed on by RiffTrax, a later project of MST3K alumni Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, during a live show on August 16, 2012, a live event that was simulcast in film theaters across the United States. While Nelson and Murphy were part of the cast when MST3K riffed on Manos, neither their fellow RiffTrax star Bill Corbett nor their writers were involved in the original episode; the riffing was all new jokes, using a cleaner print of the original Manos, allowing them to joke about things not obvious in the original television episode. Cult following The MST3K episode featuring the film was released on DVD in 2001, and in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Essentials collection in 2004. Four comedy stage adaptations of the film have been made. The first was given in Portland, Oregon in early 2006. The second, a musical titled Manos: Rock Opera of Fate, was launched in October 2007. The third, a puppet musical titled Manos – The Hands of Felt, was performed by Puppet This in Seattle in April 2011. After raising funds with a Kickstarter campaign in May 2013, Manos – The Hands of Felt was performed again in Seattle by Vox Fabuli Puppets in August 2013 and filmed for DVD release. The fourth was in Portland, Oregon in April 2013. In March 2015, the murderers on the Elementary episode "T-Bone And The Iceman" used the physical features of Torgo (portrayed by John Reynolds) to compose a fake facial composite to get the NYPD off their trail. It worked until they were caught, due to the character of Dr. Joan Watson having recognized Torgo's features from the film. The film's editor, James Sullivan, is the namesake of one of the characters in the episode. ==Restoration==

In 2011, the original 16mm workprint of Manos: The Hands of Fate was discovered by Ben Solovey, a Florida State film school graduate, in a collection of 16 mm films. Solovey announced his intention to preserve and restore Manos for a Blu-ray release. His Kickstarter campaign raised $48,000, nearly five times the initial goal. A 90% finished print was premiered at the El Paso Plaza Theatre, near the original premiere in 1966. The new restoration premiered on Blu-ray on October 13, 2015, with an unrestored version ("Grindhouse") as one of the bonus features. Copyright dispute In general, any work first published in the United States before March 1989 required a copyright notice, or the work was not copyrighted. Manos: The Hands of Fate is in the public domain because director Harold Warren failed to include a copyright notice in the film. When news broke of Solovey's restoration, the son of Harold Warren, Joe Warren, started exploring the possibility that the film was not in the public domain, seeking to prevent others from profiting from his father's work. Warren discovered in 2013 that the script had been copyrighted and registered in the Library of Congress, and he believes that this copyright also applies to the film. No precedent exists for this case so the legal status of the film is uncertain. Solovey applied copyright on his restored version, an action that Warren believes is unenforceable, though has not sought any legal action against Solovey. Warren obtained pending publication of a trademark on the phrase Manos: The Hands of Fate, which could have impacted the various fanworks if the United States Patent and Trademark Office finalized approval. However, the trademark filing has since been abandoned as of December 6, 2018, for a "failure to respond or late response". ==Home media==

Shout Factory released a special edition with both the MST3K and uncut versions called Manos y Manos. A DVD of the original was published by Alpha Video, which also released original versions of other MST3K films such as Teenagers from Outer Space and Eegah. ==Sequels==

Manos: The Search for Valley Lodge In 2010, writer and director Rupert Talbot Munch, Sr. began work on Manos: The Search for Valley Lodge. Tom Neyman (in a cameo reprising his role as the Master), his daughter Jackey Neyman-Jones (reprising her role as Debbie), Diane Mahree (reprising the role of Margaret), and Bernie Rosenblum (who played a teenage boy in the original film) were involved in initial filming. Others engaged to appear included World Wrestling Entertainment star Gene Snitsky, former WWE diva and Playboy centerfold Maria Kanellis, and UFC fighter Ryan "Big Deal" Jimmo. Munch was to play Torgo. In 2013, Neyman-Jones left the project after disagreements with Munch, and by the end of 2014, the project was reportedly canceled. Manos: The Rise of Torgo In 2013, a project began for a prequel titled Manos: The Rise of Torgo. David Roy (producer of the 2014 film Cheeseballs) was announced as the writer and director, and cast members were to include Neyman-Jones (playing Manos, the evil deity). It was released on Amazon Prime streaming in 2018. Manos Returns Jackey Neyman-Jones, who played Debbie in the original film, launched a Kickstarter campaign in February 2016 to make a sequel titled Manos Returns. According to Neyman-Jones, the sequel was not to be a recreation of Manos but instead a "tongue-in-cheek" setting within the Manos storyline; Neyman-Jones described the planned product as being both funny and scary, similar to The Cabin in the Woods or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The Kickstarter goal of $24,000 was reached on February 24, 2016. It stars Neyman-Jones, reprising her role as Debbie; her father Tom Neyman, reprising his role as the Master; and Diane Mahree reprising her role as Margaret. Neyman-Jones and director Tonjia Atomic shot the film in western Oregon in the summer of 2016. The film had its world premiere screening at Crypticon Seattle on May 4, 2018. Manos Returns was published on Amazon Prime in May 2020. The Manos Chronicles A 4-episodes TV series titled The Manos Chronicles has been distributed in 2023 on Amazon Prime. It stars Jackey Neyman reprising her role as Debbie. ==Video game==

A video game based on the film for iOS was released in 2012 by FreakZone Games. A Microsoft Windows port and an Android port were later released. ==See also==