Movieline would like to introduce The Player, a recurring feature in which we look at the crossroads where video games and moviemaking intersect. We’ll regularly be looking at games that inspire movies, movies that inspire games and a lot of fun stuff in between. For our first foray, Luke McKinley writes on Manos: The Hands of Fate, an excruciatingly bad 1965 micro-budget film that manages work well as a video game.
“The game of the movie” is a worse curse than Cruciatus, and usually causes more pain. It’s such a guarantee of failure that even the Street Fighter movie game sucked, and that started with one of the greatest games of all time.
They’re terrible because the studio has to acquire the license, and when any company spends most of its budget on lawyers, the lawyers are the only ones who get to have any fun. Once the rights are secured, there’s usually enough cash left in the kitty for a design team of two interns and a crayon.
FreakZone Games found a way around this: Start with the worst movie of all time. That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate. (To watch the entire movie, if you dare, scroll down to the YouTube video below). This abomination was made when an insurance and fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren bet that he could make a horror movie for less than $20,000. He failed spectacularly. The results would have less painful — and more coherent — if he’d filmed himself drinking $20,000 worth of tequila.
The actors are so bad that they can barely talk. One is so bad he can barely walk. John Reynolds, who played Torgo, handyman and henchman to the villainous “Master,” appeared to have taken his acting classes from electroshock…
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