Manos:
The Hands of Fate is being restored and re-released thanks to generous
donations by the Something Awful Forums.
For those of you who have not seen the movie, consider yourself lucky: Manos is considered one of the worst
movies of all time. Filmed on a bet, the 1966 movie featured an unsuspecting
family getting lost and discovering a cult that sacrifices scantily clad women
lead by the Master and his surprisingly lovable satyr assistant named
Torgo. It had laughable directing
decisions, poor editing, and a strange subplot about a man making out with his
girlfriend in his car, so it’s no wonder that it flopped and faded into
obscurity. Well, until 1993, when it was featured on Mystery Science Theatre
3000 and became a cult classic.
The
restoration project began when Benjamin Solovey bought a collection of b-movie
film reels from an e-bay auction. Among them were The Atomic Brain, Hamlet,
and, of course, Manos: The Hands of Fate. When Solovey inspected the film reels and
discovered two things: 1) Manos’s
name was almost “The Fingers of Fate” 2) The workprint was clearer than any
other copy of Manos. It turns out the
popular version seen on MST3K is a copy of a copy, making it blurry and muddy. Though
his copy contained the raw footage before any editing had begun, he could use
his second copy of Manos to match the frames nearly perfectly, thus creating a
high definition version of the movie we all love to hate. Solovey decided take
his find to the Something Awful Forums and planned on doing the restoration as
a private project before the members pressured him to start Kickstarter to fund
it. Within one long weekend the Kickstarted hit its $10,000 goal and it
eventually reached over $48,000 before it ended on the 4th.
If you’d like to stay up to date
with the project, Solovey has a website dedicated to it: http://www.manosinhd.com/
-Mike
Kerstiens
Sources:
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