The Goon Who Saved 'Manos'!

A common refrain I've heard is that without Joel and the Bots, the movie is "unwatchable," but I suspect a big part of that is the bad visual presentation that the movie has always had. When you divest Manos of its grimy, unpleasant patina, you are still left with an amateurish, weirdly edited, small-town horror film. But with a clearer view of the production design (paintings, metalwork, and stone sculptures by Tom Neyman, a local artist who played The Master), the off-kilter handmade world the film presents, and the shaggy but poppy Ektachrome photography by Robert Guidry, 45 years later Manos assumes a different identity as a fascinating bit of 1966 ephemera.

Here is a truly independent horror film from the '60s, a contemporary of 1962's Carnival of Souls and 1968's Night of the Living Dead. The main difference being, of course, that those movies came from career filmmakers Herk Harvey and George Romero, who had already made commercials and industrials and knew how a set should be run. Hal Warren, director of Manos, did not have that sort of experience, and the deck was truly stacked against him. Although he had not yet infamously sold fertilizer- that would come later- he was a good salesman and was able to rustle up a reported budget of $19,000 (over $132,000 in today's money) to get his script made. His cast and crew worked for a "percentage" that never materialized.

If you yourself have ever been involved in an independent movie, Manos becomes somewhat poignant as you see evidence of the problems that have arisen and have been worked around or willfully ignored. Actors dropping in and out of the production, a broken leg that stranded two in a car for their entire screen time...

A lack of reliable electricity, which creates a murky, crudely lit effect at night and forces your photographer to spring-wind the camera when the motor can't be powered...

Animals that were unwisely written into the movie and refuse to cooperate...

...It's all very relatable stuff. And because this is a movie where the artifices of filmmaking are constantly crumbling and being rebuilt, a little shakier every time, it holds a certain fascination to film buffs that places it above worse and more boring films (of which there is no shortage, then or now). Simply put, it's memorable. If you've seen it, you'll remember Torgo and the Master. You'll remember the interminable driving that opens the movie, the weird squabbling of the Wives, the loungey soundtrack, the unconvincing dubbing, the Scorpio Rising-esque invocation of Manos, God Of Primal Darkness. All this in a film that's only 70 minutes and change.

So rather than have Manos fade away as a footnote with only a cruddy video transfer to remember it by, I've resolved to make it a personal project to restore it.