Manos: The Hands of Fate
On October 19th, 2013 I saw the film Manos: The Hands of Fate. This film is directed by Harold P. Warren. The film is about a family that gets lost while looking for their hotel. They come across a house where they meet Torgo, an older man who is the masters “helper”. Eventually the family tries to escape the cult that they have been brought in by, but they fail to do so. Then family becomes part of the cult.
To me the purpose of this play was to show the audience that the “master” is always in charger whether he has people helping him or not. I can also see that this film is showing us that we should not trust people who we don't know. It was a very strange film therefore I was a little confused on exactly what the creative team was trying to accomplish.
My personal reactions to the play were that this was the worst play that I have ever seen in my life. I say this because the film quality was just terrible. I don't go out and watch a lot of movies but when I do I expect the movie to be worth the money that I paid for it. There were times in this movie where you know it is exposed to be scary but I would just laugh due to the camera angles because it would make it not scary at all. The way that the movie started off by just driving for 10 minutes looking for the hotel was boring. It took the audience attention away because after about three minutes of driving you could hear the audience talking in the background not paying attention to the movie. I mean it really just made the audience laugh and cut up. I believe that the director should of grabbed the audience attention better than driving around for 10 minutes. Eventually out of nowhere they found a house and was greeted by the man named Torgo. Torgo was the worst acting I have ever seen from someone. The audience thought that it was funny the way that he would walk and how the camera would focus on everything that he did.
An example that I have of how terrible the camera shot are comes from when the parents loose the little girl but clearly the camera caught her walking out the door and the parents really didn’t know where she went. I thought that the costumes were very original. An example for the costumes would be the “masters” costume. It was just hands “hint the name of the film”. I thought that this was something that the designer's could have worked better toward. This film just really made me feel like I wasted my ten dollars. I do understand that this film was produced in 1966 and it is the year 2013, but there are plenty of films that are better than that and produced in that time period. It was a film that would just make me laugh at different things than actually pay attention. An example that I have from this film that just would make me laugh would be when the police officers would stop the two young people from kissing and make them go somewhere else. What was the point of that? I mean really, what good did those scenes serve the audience?
After I watched the film, I went home and looked up the film. It did tell me that it was one of the worst films ever made. I wasn’t in shocked at all. I really thought that it was bad myself. I really think the director tried to make a movie the cheapest way that anyone could do so. You can tell that not a lot of money was spent on producing this film and it showed. It just was just terrible and I am sure other people didn't like it either. Overall like I have mentioned throughout this paper, this film was hands down the worst film I have ever seen. It made me feel this way from the directing to the acting to the effects. I was happy to get out of there after I saw that movie, even though I did have some good laughs.