Agreed, even as a “so bad it’s good” Manos: The Hands of Fate fails miserably.
This is a very fun watch and I think a rare moment where they really intended it to be a “real movie”, but ended up with a hilarious misfire. It’s so comedic, it could have been a straight comedy with 6 months more pre-production work and script tweaking.
I blame none of the actors, only the producers* and the obviously incompetent director, who was not ready for a movie of this size.
*I do think Travolta was a big part. Even his acting job, one of the funniest misfires I’ve seen, is probably the director’s fault as much as his.
I saw most of the Herschel Gordon Lewis “horror” films. They were bad, but served their purpose of putting money in the director’s pocket. I didn’t see them when they came out, but a friend and I watched them on VHS in the mid/late eighties.
I still have a disgusted loathing for, “Manchester by the Sea”, but the loathing part comes from the fact that Casey Affleck actually got the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was an unremarkable actor in an unremarkable movie. He’s so unremarkable, in fact, that I can’t name a single movie in which he was in other than that one.
Still like this is often cited, or the famously terrible Canadian horror movie “Things.”
Those are, however, not movies made by professionals, they’re amateur efforts - basically student films. They aren’t comparable to movies like Battlefield Earth that involved filmmaking professionals, Oscar-winning people and real budgets.
I thought he was excellent in Gone baby gone - 2007
My trinity of 0 star films:
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Showgirls
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
To be fair, I guess I’ll have to watch it. LOL
Three of the ‘bigger’ movies I simply can NOT watch without wanting to run screaming out of the room (just my own warped opinion):
Interiors - an Ingmar Bergman ripoff by Woody Allen.
Pulp Fiction. Appalling.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. HATE IT.
I also lack the female gene that should make me sit glued to the tv watching ‘Friends’ and anything on the Hallmark Channel.
There are many worthless movies that are not worth mentioning.
For me, Napoleon Dynamite stands out as a popular movie that doesn’t work at all for me.
Death Proof was another one. I just got so bored listening to the second group talking, that I wished they were dead. Then I realized that they were probably the heroes that win in end, so I walked out. That was after I’d already seen Planet Terror, which I enjoyed, so I was ready to go anyway.
Silent Running.
“I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”
Manos was literally the result of a bar bet between Harold Warren, a fertilizer salesman (apt!), and actual-talented-screenwriter Sterling Silliphant, over the idea that literally anyone could make a horror film, with zero film-making experience. Nobody involved worked in film before or after.
Fellow MST-alum Red Zone Cuba, on the other hand, was the third film made by Colman Francis, who was genuinely trying to make a career in Hollywood, and is easily as bad, if not actually worse, than Manos.
Especially funny because it’s not that far from the reality of the awful Fremont St casinos compared to the glitzy ones on the Strip.
“But did IT see YOU?”
That’s the funniest movie practically no one has heard of (is this a category?)
I kind of like Ghostbusters II. I really wanted to like the remake. I wanted to thumb my nose at the idiots review bombing the movie before it opened because they dared to make Ghostbusters with yucky girls. I even saw it in the theater. It was…not good. The funniest character was Chris Hemsworth so there goes the girl power. Probably the worst part of the movie were the forced fan service cameos that periodically ground the movie to a halt.
I 100% agree Red Zone Cuba is the worst film ever put on MST3k, I still don’t understand the plot.
“There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm.”
Parenthetically, I’ve seen the Cold Comfort farm house in several UK shows. The one I remember specifically was on a Midsummer Murders episode.
Well, he won the bet I guess. He didn’t bet that anyone could make a GOOD horror film.
The script was dumb and the direction (by a man, BTW - Paul Feig) really, really bad. The funniest cast on the planet could not have saved it.