Well, Elaine, let’s examine thew word “Santa”, shall we? [ holds up board with “SANTA” spelled across it in removable letters ] Santa. Let’s see, what have we got here? We’ve got an S and an A, an N, a T, and another A. Hmm.. [ rearranges the letters ] Who could be causing all those laps to bounce up and down curiously? Who would help grown men peel the focus from the baby Jesus on his birthday? Who could it be, I just don’t know. Could it be.. [ echo ] Satan!! - The Church Lady, Saturday Night Live

Who’s Naughty? Who’s Nice? Who’s Next?

The truth about Santa Claus: he’s the son of Satan! And 1,000 years ago, he lost a bet with an angel. As a result, for 1,000 years he had to spread holiday cheer every Christmas. And now, the bet is over. It’s back to slayin’ time! That’s the idea behind Santa’s Slay, starring Bill Goldberg (WWE) as Santa, back to spread “a little holiday fear.”. He first dispatches a family of rich assholes consisting of Fran Drescher, Chris Kattan, Rebecca Gayheart, and an unbilled James Caan! Santa killing one of the Roxbury guys and the Nanny? So far, so good!

Nice!

Naughty!

Then it’s off to the strip club for more killin’ (”Naughty!” says Santa!) before going after 16 year old Nicholas, his girlfriend, and his grandpa (Robert Culp, from The Greatest American Hero!). Grandpa, it turns out, was the angel who won the bet. After 1,000 years of putting up with brats sending millions of letters to the North Pole and steaming over losing the bet, Santa’s a bit pissed. But he has funny one-liners while he’s killin both naughty and nice. “I’m Santa Claus, not fucking Dracula!” he shouts as someone shines a light into his eyes.

Santa knows where that pole has been!

Hot chicks!

Anyway, not to worry, grandpa comes back from the dead to replay the game they played the first time. It’s a curling match where the object is to get a stone as close as possible near a hole without going in. This time, the hole happens to lead into hell. Grandpa goes first and does a pretty good job. Instead of trying to knock grandpa’s stone in, Satan throws grandpa in. I think that would make Satan lose the bet. So anyway, grandpa hangs on and manages to get rescued before falling all the way to hell. Santa’s flying reindeer, or buffalo, or reindeer-buffalo, is finally taken down with a bazooka. Oh, and Ned from South Park even shows up to help!

The dangers of ice-fishing near hell-portals.

Hey, Ned - a flying reindeer! Look out, it’s comin’ right for us!

Satan, um, I mean, Santa, gets away, but, having lost all his powers, has turned back into WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg, and must now return to the North Pole the hard way - connecting through Winnipeg. Poor bastard - he’s probably riding coach!

Santa’s Slay is an amusing B-movie comedy, especially to holiday Scrooges. It’s better than Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Hell, it’s better than It’s A Wonderful Life, too. Stuff your frickin’ stocking with it.

Oh yeah - it’s hilarious to listen to director David Steiman talk about thinking up the Santa=Satan idea. Admitting that he loves Chris Kattan from Saturday Night Live, does he actually expect us to believe he doesn’t know about Dana Carvey? Yeah, try another one, Dave.

Oy, vey!

Don’t forget, kids - there is a Santa Claus. And he hates you!

Horror Fan Zine has a list of its top 10 horror flicks.

Click Here For the List

Great party, isn’t it?

Personally, we think Night of the Creeps is the greatest horror movie.

I mean, it’s got Tom Atkins in it! And weird space aliens! And killer slugs, zombies, and fraternity pranks!

Speaking of Tom Atkins, he was in Halloween III - Season Of The Witch, which is totally hilarious!

Go see it!

A Crater and Questions

On Saturday night, a fiery object fell from the sky in Carangas, located in the Puno province of Peru. Stunned residents said they tracked it to a fresh hole in the earth that was more than 60 feet wide, 15 feet deep, filled with boiling water and steaming with noxious fumes, according to a statement from the Health Ministry.

Beware of the Blob!

And then people started getting sick: more than 150 reported symptoms like dizziness, vomiting and skin lesions, according to a government statement quoted by Bloomberg News.

The Associated Press reports that a local official confirmed through tests that a “rocky meteorite” created the crater. But a meteorite expert at the Natural History Museum in London said that “increasingly we think that people witnessed a fireball,” which she said would not be uncommon, and that the hole in the ground was unrelated. After seeing the fire in the sky, the local people “went off to investigate, and found a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane-rich organic matter,” Dr. Caroline Smith suggested. “This has been mistaken for a crater.”

A well-informed blogger also raises the possibility of a mud volcano and voices more doubts that a meteor was responsible. The local official who confirmed the meteorite strike also said that the water in the crater was boiling for 10 minutes.

Pravda, Russia’s newspaper, brought up the idea that the crater was created when the United States Air Force shot down one of its own satellites. The satellite was spying on Iran, and destroying it helps the United States lay the groundwork for an invasion. Radiation from the supposed satellite’s fuel cell is what sickened all those people.

Personally, methinks it’s the BLOB.

I suppose I should thank Tarantino and Rodriguez for getting me interested in 70s grindhouse again.

( Read the Review of Grindhouse here at Horror-fan-zine)

Some of their faux-trailers are perfect

Take this gem: Hobo With a Shotgun
Made as part of a “Grindhouse Trailer” contest, it won and was shown in front of Grindhouse at Canadian theaters.

Perfect recreation of drive-in/grindhouse theater fare, right down to the grainy film stock.

In that spirit, let’s look at some trailers for films set in the “gritty city”
These trailers are real coming attractions from the grindhouse era.

We’ll start off with two winners from Duke Mitchell. Duke Mitchell was one half of a comedy team (the other being Sammy Petrillo) that were imitators of Martin and Lewis. In 1952 they did a movie called “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla”. (Mitchell being the “Dean Martin” type). That combination was short-lived, but Duke Mitchell would later surface in 1978 with the mafia cult item Massacre Mafia Style. I finally got my hands on a VHS copy of the film (retitled The Executioner). It’s a low-budget gritty mafia-type flick and it’s not very good, but the beginning sequence where two Mafia guys (one played by Mitchell) proceed to wipe out an entire office building is some kind of masterpiece. Fortunately, most of it shows up in the trailer:

Love that song!

Apparently, Mitchell was working on another film called “Gone With the Pope”, which was unfinished when Mitchell died of cancer in 1981. Fortunately, Grindhouse Releasing is reediting it. It’s got great music, it’s offensive, and it involves Catholicism. Unmistakably Duke Mitchell.

Here’s an infamous 70s slasher flick called The Toolbox Murders. A psycho in a ski mask kills off people living in an apartment complex with the contents of his toolbox. This is apparently based off of real life events that took place in 1967. Cameron Mitchell’s in it and it has a very Los Angeles gritty quality to it. It’s nasty, misogynistic, and exploitative - there’s one scene with a girl masterbating in the tub before getting nail gunned to death. But enough praises. Check the trailer:

If you like that kind of stuff, check out movies like Maniac (1980) (with the late Joe Spinell) and the late Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982).

You may or may not know Robert Ginty. The Mystery Science Theater guys referred to him as the “Paper Chase” guy. He also did a horrible (horribly funny) movie with Donald Pleasence called Warrior of the Lost World (worth seeing for the post-apocalyptic cheese). Well it so happens that Ginty did another movie called The Exterminator, which came out in 1980. Kind of a Death-Wish type flick where Ginty plays a Vietnam vet turned vigilante who goes to war against New York punks. Well, for some reason they decided to do a sequel four years later aptly named Exterminator 2. Brought to you by the Cannon Group, naturally!

yes, that’s Mario Van Peebles you saw in there.

Since we’re staying gritty in New York, here’s a winner for ya. It’s by Frank Henenlotter and it came out in 1982. A deranged dude carries his deformed twin brother around in a straw basket. And his brother is pissed! Techno artist Eon did a song about it. I remeember seeing it advertised at some NYC theaters for the midnight showing. Rex Reed called it “The sickest movie I have ever seen”. Sounds like a recommendation to me! Check out Basket Case:

I hate to return to the whole “Death Wish” and Cannon Group film-making style, but… who am I kidding? I love to return to it! In 1985 the Cannon Group released possibly the greatest cheese action movie of the 1980s (and trust me, there are a lot of contenders) - Charles Bronson in Death Wish 3 !!

Reader, I do not lie - Death Wish 3 is wonderous. I would be here all day telling you all the ways DW3 entertains, from the ridiculous dialogue to the amusing gang members to the guns to the outrageous neighborhood gun battles. But you must discover these for yourself.

Our last item for today is a film that lives in infamy. Extremely controversial, it had a well-remembered tagline (”Keep repeating… it’s only a movie…”). Sean Cunningham (the guy behind Friday the 13th) produced it and Wes Craven (the guy behind Nightmare on Elm Street) directed it. When The Last House on the Left came out in ‘72, Ebert raved about it (one of Ebert’s many displays of inconsistency) - the first time I saw it I had a hard time getting through the thing because it was so difficult to watch. Even Craven says the material is too grim for him today. This movie inspired a lot of “Last house…” imitators, at least in titling of movies (for example, Last House on Dead End Street was originally titled “Cuckoo Clocks of Hell” but they changed it, also see House on the Edge of the Park). Anyway, here it is:

Remember, it’s only a movie…

by Pat Ellis Taylor

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.

Other Articles related to Manos: The Hands of Fate

The Hand That Time Forgot by Richard Brandt

Growing Up Manos by Richard Brandt

Manos MST3K References - an excellent listing of all the references made by Joel and the bots during the MSTing of Manos: The Hands of Fate.

~Bill G