A candidate for the most unwatchable movie ever, Manos looks like it began as a bet and it did. When Hal P Warren, a fertilizer salesman from El Paso, told Stirling Silliphant, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, that any fool could make a movie, Silliphant said it sounded like a wager. Warren eventually won the bet its just the viewer who loses. From an opening travel montage over which the filmmakers forgot to add a credits sequence, through the blurry cinematography and horribly dubbed dialogue to the sleepwalking performers, Manos is the ultimate monument to incompetence. Warren began shooting with a 16mm camera that could only capture 32 seconds of film, so that was the maximum length of any shot. The clapperboard is visible in one sequence, while a night scene has two police officers conduct a search by taking three steps back as far as the lights would illuminate. Which films do you believe should be considered the worst of all time?
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
