YAKMALA!

I first saw Manos: The Hands of Fate back when I worked at the L.A. Weekly. One of my co-workers brought it in and we watched the whole thing over lunch. Needless to say, I’ve never been the same. Considered by many as the worst movie ever made, it seemed a logical movie to start to my series on Yakmala films.

Tagline: It’s Shocking! It’s Beyond Your Imagination!

More Accurate Tagline: I’m the Master, and I Approved This Message!

Guilty Party: Harold P. “Hal” Warren, who wrote, directed, produced, starred as Michael and overdubbed several other actors in post-production. A good deal gets made of his being a fertilizer salesman, like it’s ironic somehow.

Synopsis: Michael, his wife Margaret and daughter Debbie go on a car trip. After taking a wrong turn, they wind up in a hotel that would be seedy even if it were located in the Red Light District in Tijuana during a smallpox outbreak. The caretaker, a creepy guy named Torgo who suffers from elephantitis of the knees and is really worried about what the unseen “Master” will and won’t approve of, greets them. As it turns out, the Master is a guy that vaguely looks like John Wilkes Booth, wanders around in a graduation robe with big red hands on the front and is married to a pack of nightgown clad women who really enjoy a good catfight. The women can’t decide how many of the family they want dead, but the Master really wants to add Margaret to his harem. After Torgo and the Master have a falling out over who gets Margaret, the Master’s wives (who’ve just finished a ten minute catfight) massage Torgo to death. Michael gets clubbed, tied to a stake and made out with. Margaret and Debbie just disappear. The end is a twist: as a new family arrives at Hotel Torgo, a hypnotized Michael, the Master’s new caretaker, greets them. Fortunately, he’s allowed to keep his normal-sized knees.

Life-Changing Subtext: Be the best Torgo you can be.

Defining Quote: “The woman is all we want! The others must die! They all must die! We do not even want the woman!” It’s the stream-of-consciousness quality of this line that marks it as Manos’s special brand of “say what now?” In the beginning of the line, the Master’s wife really wanted the woman, but halfway through, nah, she changed her mind. A lot can happen in two seconds. The best misheard line is “You’ve failed at Torgo!” I’ve officially added the occupation of “Torgo” to my resume. 2001-2004, Torgo, Master Inc. Responsibilities include severely dilating one’s pupils, staggering around aimlessly and giving objects and people the Master’s approval. (The actual line is “You’ve failed us, Torgo!” which isn’t nearly as funny.)

Standout Performance: John Reynolds as the big-kneed Torgo is the standard to which all Yakmala performances must be compared. By all accounts, Reynolds was a respected stage actor, but he spent Manos baked out of his mind, and like all the performances, his voice was dubbed over in post-production. It’s the former that really propels Torgo into the stratosphere. Every action, no matter how minor, looks like it causes him very real physical pain as he carefully waddles his way into cinematic legend. In another fun fact, Reynolds did his own Torgo makeup, which basically consists of gigantic knees. It’s never made clear why this makes him a monster. Supposedly, the scene in which Margaret glances down at Torgo’s feet (but the way it’s shot, she could just be looking at his knees, or God forbid his crotch) and gasps was to indicate that Torgo had cloven hooves, however, in every long shot, Torgo has normal feet. Torgo also has his own theme music, which sounds sort of like a dyslexic calliope trying to wheeze out the opening from Jaws.

What’s Wrong:Everything. Entire scenes are shot out of focus, there’s no sense of geography to the Master’s compound, there’s an eight minute driving sequence in the beginning that accomplishes nothing, there’s a subplot about teenagers making out that has nothing to do with what could loosely be called the plot, the script is nearly nonexistent, and the monster is a monster because he has big knees. Big knees, people. Manos makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Pulp Fiction.

Flash of Competence: What marks Manos as so singular is that there is nothing that can be singled out as being at all well done. However, everything is so bad and the run time is a lean 69 minutes that you never get bored.

Best Jokes: Manos is actually very hard to mock because it is such an easy target. There’s just not a lot of sport in hitting a beached whale with a wall safe. That’s not to say the Yakmala gang didn’t get a couple of good ones off, but oftentimes merely describing what the hell was going on was enough. We got a lot of mileage out of the Master’s wives’ granny panties as well as remarking on what the Master would not approve of (pretty much anything that was in eye line).

Best Scenes: Any scene in which the Master stretches out his arms to show off the giant hands on his robe. These get especially good when he flashes the hands to Torgo, who, as I said is very obviously on some mind-expanding substance and probably peed his pants.

Transcendent Moment: Early on, Torgo and Margaret are alone together, and Torgo really wants to stroke Margaret’s hair. It’s unclear if he’s not aware of how close the hair is, or if he thinks it’s a nest of writhing snakes, but he acts accordingly, putting a hand out, testing range, trying to fake the hair out. All in all, it takes Torgo about five minutes to do this, all while Margaret is standing perfectly still, facing away from him. It’s a nice glimpse at Planet Torgo.

In summary, Manos is an amazing piece of outsider art that proves once and for all that not everyone can make a movie.