We were really different and I was pretty much an oddity growing up. My family was educated, artistic and community minded and chose to buy a house in a poor but tight knit Hispanic neighborhood. I also went to school there for 1st and 2nd grade although we were not military. My mother was a schoolteacher and was working on Fort Bliss at the school in 19. My dad was involved in theater at the Festival which is now The El Paso Playhouse and looks almost exactly the same.Īfter a few years of acting and directing, he became Executive Director of the Theater and that’s about the time Hal Warren approached him to do Manos. My dad was Executive Director of the South El Paso Boys Club serving a deeply impoverished community directly on the banks of the Rio Grande River and across from Juarez, Mexico. I was born in Fort Worth but raised in El Paso. First, here is the testimony of Jackey Raye Neyman Jones, who played “little Debbie” in the film, and is also the daughter of Tom “The Master” Neyman. I interviewed three major players in the Manos pantheon. You’ll also get an advance glimpse of the bold Manos puppet-show adaptation entitled, yes indeed, Manos: The Hands Of Felt, running August 9-17 at Richard Hugo House. Jackey Jones, who played “little Debbie,” the young daughter in the film, will appear and give behind-the-scenes testimony. I find Manos most powerful, and most righteous, taken straight (although others will not agree, as shown below).Ī restored non-roboted version of Manos plays the SIFF Cinema Uptown this coming Wednesday, August 7th, at 9 pm. Of course, the show insisted on mediating the experience. Of course, Manos and “Manos” were not mocked they inflicted more pain on MST3K host Joel and his sidekick robots than almost any film before. Manos lay almost completely forgotten for many years after its release, until the japers at Mystery Science Theater 3000 picked it up for one of their conceptual turkey shoots. “Manos” finds its manifestation in the enormous hands on the robes of the Master-the Master who eventually Manifests, having returned from one step closer to Manos than allowed any other. This universe also contains rough magic and an all-present, never-seen deity called “Manos,” which can be invoked and beseeched, but will never materialize. A universe that compels us into a trance state, especially in the night-for-night shots which climax the film, where insects flying towards the camera wait to jerk us out of the trance, by reminding us that a few things in this universe move, after all, at “our” speeds. A universe of sloth, inertia, stochastic ooze, where we have to examine simple actions-such as moving from one side of an average-sized room to the other-in every aspect, simply because of this slowness. A universe containing many aspects of our own universe, but significantly different.
Manos the hands of fate movie#
This will have ramifications.īut soft, let me invoke the late Roger Ebert here: ““It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” Manos in this sense of “about”ness, then, is about a different kind of trip, one to an alternate universe. The Master is “not dead as you know it,” opines Torgo. Torgo takes care of the place “while the Master is away.” The Master appears in a painting in the house. Torgo is short, squat, clothed out of the Goodwill bin, and takes about 87 years to move from one side of an average-sized room to the other. They find an almost-deserted lodge inhabited only by Torgo. Like Don Henley, they have to stop for the night. Manos is visible from all vectors, all vantage points, and affects all.įor those of you who don’t know Manos, it is “about” a little family–mother, father and little girl–who get lost on a drive. Manos: The Hands Of Fate, released originally in 1966, sits comfortably and expansively at the center of the cinematic universe, much as the “boundless daemon sultan Azathoth” sits at the center of H.P.
“Worst” and “greatest” order chosen, for the paragraph above, arbitrarily by the toss of a coin. “Hal” Warren, is the greatest film in the history of civilization. Manos: The Hands Of Fate, produced, directed, written by and starring Harold P. “Hal” Warren, is the worst film in the history of civilization.
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