by Pat Ellis Taylor

* Cross-posted from oddculture.com

Notes from Bill Gordon:

Pat Ellis Taylor is known today as Pat LittleDog, who as far as I can tell lives in Austin, Texas. I reproduce her article here from 1981 in the interests of posterity, because I feel that the story behind Manos, the Hands of Fate, possibly one of the worst movies ever made, is too important to film history to fall into the memory hole. Enjoy!

*

Fifteen years ago, in the middle of the El Paso sand-dunes, a remarkable movie was made about vampire wives and desert horror, written, directed and produced by a man named Harold P. Warren, who was a chemical fertilizer salesman at the time. This El Paso original has been all but forgotten because others who were connected with it have had both the good taste and restraint not to talk about it too much. But I, who have little of either, feel that it is time El Paso be given its due as the city which spawned the first full-length third-rate drive-in gothic horror in the state and that Hal Warren be given credit where credit is due.

The movie, called “Manos: Hands of Fate,” was later dubbed “Mangoes: Cans of Fruit” by its loved ones, and still later sank into absolute obscurity, a quick check of the library file under “Films made in El Paso” not giving its name at all.

When it was in production in 1966, it seemed as its half of El Paso was backing the movie. True to his profession, Hal Warren managed to sell shares in the everyone-actors and actresses, camera-men, production crew and all * into working long hours for nothing but these speculative shares. Don’t we all want to be part of the movies? Of course we do! At the time of “Manos,” I was married to Bob Guidry, a television news-man for KROD before Doubleday took over and changed the letters to KDBC. His official title in Hal Warren’s lexicon was “Director of Cinematography,” and any time Bob’s faith began to Wobble once the shooting began, he closed his eyes and tried to envision his name in black letters appearing over a fade shot of the desert sunset at the movie’s end.

A set of Vampire Wives in the movie was played by the then-current stock of of Mannequin Manor models who looked wonderful but whose acting skills were somewhat below pal. Before the shooting would start at night, they would sit in their flimsy little costumes, beautifully made up, talking modeling school gossip to each other while tracing out anecdotes in the air with graceful gestures and lithesome wrists. Then the cameras would turn on, and that would all freeze in position like a game of statues. It was an incredible transformation, as if the set had been invaded by a gang of Barbie dolls. Then there was a Vampire Master, a part for which Tom Neyman donated his services; a misshapen dwarf called Igor* [sic], played by the now deceased John Reynolds; and Hal Warren himself playing the male lead. I don’t believe anyone came from outside the city limits of El Paso except a young Allied German soldier from Fort Bliss who copious photographs of everyone, disappeared shortly after the premiere, then resurfaced again as the man responsible for the photographic success of Susan Blakely (who unfortunately was not a part of our movie) and a photographer for Vogue.

The “Manos” story began when a Young Couple took a ride across Scenic Drive. Before they found Alabama street, they became lost in the wilds of Ysleta, ultimately getting their car stuck in a sand dune on ( the ex-El Paso County Judge) Colbert Coldwell’s Ranch. When they went knocking on the nearest door, however, rather than Coldwell, it was Igor the Ugly, leering at the Young Wife and telling the Young Husband that his “Maahhs-ter” was away but would be coming home. From then on there were breast-clutchings, sobs, and moans, as the Young Wife was absconded with into the night and the scene shifted from cabin to desert. There the Vampire Wives were writhing in a circle of pillars surrounding a large cement slab with an altar stone set in the middle. Don’t ask me what this monolithic desert Stonehenge was doing out there. It was just there. And every night we stumbled out into the sand with our camera equipment and boxes, costumes and make-up and slate-boards, to frolic under the spotlights like a camp of druids while Hall Warren paced, cigar in mouth, and shouted out directions.

Before the shooting was halfway through, we all felt the film wasn’t going as well as could be expected. But by then a laboratory myth had begun to grow which we all believed. In Dallas, the myth said, there was a magical place where scenes got mixed together with just the right lighting, sound and background; if something looked wrong, the away a bucket of out-takes and leave the nugget of a perfect movie which lay at the heart of all of that moonlight footage.

The expensive camera equipment had only been rented for a period a period of 30 days, so the final scenes were shot at break-neck pace, plopped down one after the other like so many dominoes. Mannequin Manor models got their directions confused, cameras were for lightning and fire in the background wasn’t even shot-maybe the laboratory could add something to simulate it. A few months after our nighttime trips into Lower Valley ended, an ad appeared in the entertainment section of both the Times and the Herald Post : WORLD PREMIER ***** OF***** MANOS *** HANDS OF FATE. Beneath that was a large photograph of the Young Wife with her blouse half off her shoulder, her hand clutching her breast, gazing upward at Tom Neyman in his black cape. Behind them was a photo montage of the Vampire Wives writhing around Judge Coldwell’s cement blocks. Incredible! Hal sent tickets to the press, to the television stations, to all the aldermen and the mayor of El Paso (who accepted with pleasure), to the state legislators (who congressman (who sent his best wishes for such a marvelous beginning of a film industry in El Paso). The premiere was scheduled for the Capri Theater, and Hal even took turns being loaded from the alley in back of the Cortez Hotel and handed out of at the red carpet in front of the theater just a block away. Sometimes I’ve wished I had a white ermine to swish around my shoulders, five inches more in height and a silky Pekingese on a diamond lease. But just at that moment I had it all.

However, when the Capri lights dimmed and the movie began, we all began slinking low in our seats. The voices were strange-floating above the action-the camera quality wavering, the cuts abrupt and hard to adjust to . The villainous swishes of Tom Neyman, which at midnight on the desert had seemed ominous, on the wide screen of the Capri looked melodramatic. The scene calculated to show the hands of the Vampire Wives tearing Igor to pieces on the cement slab before his eventual incineration, appeared to be well-manicured fingers massaging air. (”Hero Massaged To Death,” the Herald-Post” would headline its review of the film the next day, the reviewer whimsically taking Igor to be the true Existential Hero of the story.)

Bob and I made our way up the aisle when it was still dark, before “Director of Cinematography” had even had a chance to start its climb above the sunset over Price’s Dairy.

If the movie ever made any money, only Hal Warren ever knew. After its premiere, it disappeared although rumors of it cropped up from time to time: Someone saw it once on a triple bill in Las Cruces, it appeared once on Channel 13, and once I saw it listed at the bottom of a page in a film catalogue for rent for $20.00

About a year later Hal approached Bob again with a script called “Wild Desert Bikers.” It was about a Young School Teacher who is kidnapped by a Teenage Biker in her English Class and who is submitted to all sorts of vile behavior at the shack (on Judge Coldwell’s ranch) where the rest of the bikers hang out. Bob refused with grace, and I’ve never seen Hal since. But I think of him often: Harold P. Warren-the man who brought gothic horror to the Great Southwest and who certainly deserves a place in the history of El Paso film.

*

Pat Taylor (’69, M.A. ‘76) lives in Edgewood, Texas. The Herald-Post review she mentions-”Hero Massaged to Death in ‘Manos, The Hands of Fate’”-was written by Betty Pierce and appeared in the paper on November 16, 1966, and is one of the funniest movie reviews we’ve ever read. “For an amateur production, ” Betty wrote, “the color came out very well, however, and perhaps by scrapping the soundtrack and running it with subtitles or dubbing in Esperanto, it could be promoted as a foreign art film of some sort or other.”

* Note that the name Igor (the John Reynolds character) was later changed to the immortal Torgo.

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~Bill G