Ah, it’s been awhile. If you don’t know who this happy little gent is, well…you’ve never seen Manos: the Hands of Fate. When I was in college, a friend brought a copy of this movie over one Friday night for us to watch. It had been given to him by his film professor as “a catalog of heinous mistakes.” We tried to sit through it. We really did.
In the years since, I’d largely buried the resulting psychological trauma under a thin veneer of denial and forgetfulness. Although I’d followed it casually, I’d been unaware that the good folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 had given Manos the full treatment. A friend mentioned it, and it turns out that this is one of the MST3K episodes Rhino’s released on DVD, so I picked up a copy.
This is an entirely different movie when Joel and the Bots do it. On its own, Manos is utterly unwatchable. Continued...