Growing Up with Manos: The Hands of Fate
By Jackey Neyman Jones with Laura Mazzuca Toops
Published by BearManor Media, 2016. 138 pages
Any serious fan of horror, cult and exploitation films, not to mention Mystery Science Theater 3000, knows of the film Manos: The Hands of Fate. Known to the world as the worst movie ever made, even beating out anything that Ed Wood Jr. ever created is a tough race to win, but it has. A film made by a bunch of locals in the small town of El Paso, Texas, all with dreams of stardom in their eyes, created a film that still lives on to this day, something that has gone farther than any of the ones involved ever thought possible. Maybe not in the way they all hoped, but none the less it has.
Jackey Neyman Jones appeared in the film as little Debbie, but also had a greater connection besides her little part. Her father not only appears in the film as the infamous The Master, but also did the makeup, was the set designer, and quite a bit more. Her mother also worked on the movie, making quite a few of the costumes in the film. There were promises of payment and percentages, but we all know those how those go, even the movie making state of California. But instead of payment, what Tom Neyman and his daughter got was immortality because of their connection and appearances in Manos. Sometimes it makes you wonder what is better.
If you’re a collector of film reference books, you just might recognize the name Philip J. Riley. He was a man that was determined to help keep the facts and memories of old classic monster films alive and well by releasing some amazing books over the last few decades. Starting in the late ’80s, he started to release the Universal Filmscripts Series Classic Horror Films, which he edited. Along with the help of such scholars as Gregory William Mank and Forrest J. Ackerman, fans got to not only read the original shooting script, but see original newspaper clippings, different news stories, and a ton of other info about the making of the film. He went through most all the Universal Classics and then started a different sereies on films that never came to be, based on original scripts that were found, such as Robert Florey’s version of Frankenstein.
As horror fans, we all know just how crazy some of these films can be. Hell, the ’80s alone had some of the most crazy-ass, rubber monsters, doing in their victims in all sorts of bizarre ways. That was one of the things that made some of those films so much fun, always looking for what we called a good “quality kill”, which meant a death scene like something we’d never seen before. For example, while the rest of Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend is a sheer waste of time, the “basketball to the head” is legendary!
We all have our favorite “bad” movies that we enjoy. Hell, I hold two events a year dedicated to these kind of movies. For years, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space was regarded as the worst film ever made, but I know from personally experiences that not to be true. But there is one title that seems to have risen to the top and is one that is brought up the most when talking about the top turkey! And that film would be Harold P. Warren’s 1966 epic film Manos: The Hands of Fate. A film of this caliper has to have its stories and now you can learn more about this film than you probably ever wanted to!
kitleyskrypt.com 