1. Manos: The Hands Of Fate (episode 424)
THERE I SAID IT. Come at me, fandom. For many people, Manos is
the quintessential episode. The Master and Torgo are perhaps the most iconic of antagonists (if they can be called that) in all of the movies seen on the show. And who can forget the haunting Torgo theme? This movie would have faded gracefully into film obscurity if Best Brains hadn't gotten a hold of it. Now it's become a cult classic, a stage production, and a video game. A project borne out of a bet by fertilizer salesman Hal Warren, the movie clearly suffers from its amateur origins. The story, though mildly compelling in conception is utterly boring in execution, the acting is amateur, many of the shots are awkwardly framed and the actors all sound like they're speaking through a mouthful of cotton. And yet, Manos is so much more than that it is, more than any other episode, a movie to be experienced rather than described. The problem is, it's a pretty awful experience, and it's not one that jokes from Joel and the bots can salvage. In fact, the whole thing is so painfully amateur, you begin to feel bad bad because the movie is so terrible, then bad for laughing at the movie for being so terrible, bad for laughing at the jokes about the movie being terrible, and just plain bad. The movie-watching experience is so excruciating that it crowds out any memory of the jokes you might have otherwise formed. Unlike many of the other movies in the show, which were more or less Hollywood-produced time killers, Manos was the independent project of a true outsider, financed with his own money in a time when movie-making was relatively pricey venture, so even if you manage to enjoy any of the jokes, they're all accompanied by a heaping helping of guilt as you laugh at someone else's hard work (and financial black hole). To lift a gag from another, earlier episode: DEEP HURTING. DEEP. HURTING. Now that that's over, on to the good stuff...