The Best Worst Movies By Decade

The Best Worst Movie of the '60s: Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

This redundantly titled movie ("manos" means "hands" in Spanish) was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and if not for that, no one would probably even know it exists. It begins with an agonisingly long car drive where nothing at all happens or is said.

It was supposed to be the opening credits sequence, but the director/producer ran out of money by the time the movie was completed, and unwisely decided to leave the scene in anyway without credits. The entire movie uses ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording), so that it looks like the actors are lip syncing their lines (in a way, they are). Their mouths are always just a little off from what they're actually saying, and sometimes they're just completely wrong.

Manos himself is the leader of a strange, devilish cult in the middle of nowhere, worshipped by a bunch of busty, toga-wearing broads. A married couple and their young daughter accidentally stumble upon his clan, and the rest is cinematic history. Perhaps the most memorable character (and for all the wrong reasons) is Torgo, the hapless, bow-legged companion/assistant of Manos, who slurs, hunches, and stumbles about drunkenly in every scene (the actor was high/drunk in real life and later committed suicide, but not because of his participation in this movie.)

Torgo comes complete with his own squeaking, annoying theme music, and my favorite scene by far is when it takes him a whole minute just to get up from a chair. That's literally the whole scene: Torgo trying to get up from the chair (I don't think he was acting). The most disturbing thing about this "film", if you can call it that, is by the end, the 6-year-old daughter becomes a toga-wearing slave/Manos worshipper herself. Ill.