In the Clutches of "Manos"
Oct. 10th, 2019 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile I first thought to check the Blu-Ray and DVD section at my city library with an eye for “newish” movies as an alternative to signing up for yet more streaming or video-on-demand services (although there is an independant video rental store still open not that far away from me, which means going to the library had something to do with being cheap in addition to “the rental chains have gone away”), there are other discs available there too. It just so happened I managed to see a Blu-Ray of the infamous “Manos” The Hands of Fate, and remembered seeing reports someone had found original film elements of the movie and raised crowd-funded money to fix them up. I usually don’t have enough courage to watch the movies of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon “raw” (beyond getting a DVD of Space Mutiny years ago), but it didn’t seem to take too much bracing myself to borrow the disc and see just what the movie looked like restored.
The “every frame of this movie looks like someone’s last known photograph” feeling was much diminished, but after a while I did start thinking the movie still didn’t look that great; it had only been filmed in 16mm, and of course there were all the focus problems. The poorly lit night scenes were another matter, but some of them did have a sort of “stage play” feeling to them. Dropping the name of a respectable feature in among a reprehensible one, I did get to remembering that when watching Lawrence of Arabia some of its “day for night” scenes had looked about as fake as any other filtered scenes from back then.
I was watching with half an eye for the rumoured scene where “Torgo’s satyr hooves” could be seen not covered by “shadowramma,” but couldn’t seem to spot anything other than shoes. On the other hand, I did notice Texas state flag stickers in the corners of car windshields near the bottom of the frames; it took me a while to remember El Paso is in Texas rather than over the state border in New Mexico. Certainly, some “riffs” came back to mind and I wasn’t bored to tears or just plain repelled, even if there was a scene “cut for content” from Mystery Science Theater that got a bit nasty. As much as “unhappy endings” need as much setting up as happy ones to not feel contrived in a different way, I suppose that “Manos” just congeals to an unappealing halt helps it stick in the mind; I went looking up someone who, in producing sometimes bristling commentary on the movies of the MST3K canon, managed to write five parts about this film.
The disc included a documentary about the movie (describing the camera used and its focus problems), produced by the company that had made the documentaries in the Shout! Factory Mystery Science Theater collections; that did give that much more of a sense of “a solid, well-funded effort.” There was also a short piece about a puppet version of the movie, if just enough to make me start looking for more information.
The “every frame of this movie looks like someone’s last known photograph” feeling was much diminished, but after a while I did start thinking the movie still didn’t look that great; it had only been filmed in 16mm, and of course there were all the focus problems. The poorly lit night scenes were another matter, but some of them did have a sort of “stage play” feeling to them. Dropping the name of a respectable feature in among a reprehensible one, I did get to remembering that when watching Lawrence of Arabia some of its “day for night” scenes had looked about as fake as any other filtered scenes from back then.
I was watching with half an eye for the rumoured scene where “Torgo’s satyr hooves” could be seen not covered by “shadowramma,” but couldn’t seem to spot anything other than shoes. On the other hand, I did notice Texas state flag stickers in the corners of car windshields near the bottom of the frames; it took me a while to remember El Paso is in Texas rather than over the state border in New Mexico. Certainly, some “riffs” came back to mind and I wasn’t bored to tears or just plain repelled, even if there was a scene “cut for content” from Mystery Science Theater that got a bit nasty. As much as “unhappy endings” need as much setting up as happy ones to not feel contrived in a different way, I suppose that “Manos” just congeals to an unappealing halt helps it stick in the mind; I went looking up someone who, in producing sometimes bristling commentary on the movies of the MST3K canon, managed to write five parts about this film.
The disc included a documentary about the movie (describing the camera used and its focus problems), produced by the company that had made the documentaries in the Shout! Factory Mystery Science Theater collections; that did give that much more of a sense of “a solid, well-funded effort.” There was also a short piece about a puppet version of the movie, if just enough to make me start looking for more information.