"Manos" the Sands of Wait

Watching "Manos" the Hands of Fate is like being stuck in bed with the stomach flu. It's nauseating, yet mind-numbingly boring.

This was the worst, and, thankfully, the only feature film out of El Paso in 1966. For a B-movie, it is unusually bad, but not in an interesting way. It would be easy to list hundreds of technical problems with this movie, but that would just obscure the real issue. These people had no idea what they were doing. There was no justification for making this movie.

The inclusion of a ten-minute catfight between undead women in see-through nighties points to a salacious motive. However, since the Production Code was still in effect in 1966, and the film was actually screened in an El Paso movie theater, the voyeur in us is treated only to glimpses of undergarments only your grandma might wear.

According to IMDb and popular legend, four cast members committed suicide only weeks after shooting wrapped. Obviously not a coincidence, the question is whether the results of the production removed their will to live, or was it that the pre-existing downward spiral of their lives simply included the penultimate step of making a low-budget horror movie. My guess is the latter.