Into The Abyss: My Ten Worst Movies List Part 1

Into the Abyss: My Ten Worst Movies List

Most people who do worst movie lists are just screwing around. They’re not serious. They’ve never really plumbed the depths. They go snorkeling in shallow lagoons, feeling superior to misdemeanors like Ishtar and Battlefield Earth...in short, they’re pussies. I, on the other hand, bold soul that I am, want to descend into the Marianas Trench, go right to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. I don’t want to waste any more time on Ed Wood’s best movies, flicks like Plan Nine or Glen or Glenda or Bride of the Monster. I want to wallow in bad Ed Wood, descend into the murky darkness, where all sense is crushed out of a film, and form departs from prime matter, and movies teeter on the cusp of no longer being movies at all. If you don’t share this passion with me, now is the time for you to back off...closing the hatch now, clang...dogging the wheel real tight...

Downdowndowndown....

But...


While there’s still a little bit of light showing through the six-inch thick glass, a word of explanation...for the purposes of this very special list, I’m departing from my usual practice of arranging the movies chronologically. The entries here are ranked, best first, worst last. And believe me, ten is vastly less like a movie than one.

And speaking of number one...

1. Night of The Ghouls, 1959, Director, Edward D. Wood Jr.

This is the third part of what I call the Kelton Trilogy...I believe I coined the term a long time ago, although some other wags might’ve arrived at it independently, kind of a Darwin/Wallace sort of thing. Fact is, there’s a continuing thread between Bride of the Monster, Plan Nine, and Night of the Ghouls, and that’s Officer Kelton, a swishy idiot portrayed by the stupefying Paul Marco. His roles get bigger in each successive film, and he really comes to the fore in Night, with about as much screen time as anyone else, which is fine with me.

Another thing that's front and center is Ed Wood’s writing, which is the true glory of his films. Oh, yeah, you hear about crummy flying-saucer miniatures, and tiny little sets, and other production-value issues, but the dialogue, the use of language, is just the best...it’s as though Wood’s skull was entirely filled up with a damp moldy rag. And in Night, the words don’t have to compete with the visuals for the most part, because there practically aren’t any visuals. You get long stretches in which the action, what there is of it, is staged in front of completely black backgrounds. There aren’t any miniatures...the only FX at all are a floating trumpet and mute suspended on wires (ineptly) during one seance sequence. True, that scene is about the funniest thing in any of Wood’s movies, and there isn’t any dialogue, unless you want to count the word “mondo” repeated over and over. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Film begins with Wood’s psychic buddy Criswell rising from a coffin and informing us that “For years” he’s been “relating the unbelievable related to the unreal, and showing it to be more than fact!” Then he promises a tale of “the twilight people”so hideous that some of us might faint. After the credits, he treats us to a monologue about “the true horror of our time,” which is not , as some might think, juvenile delinquency (as illustrated by scenes cribbed from Wood’s The Sinister Urge), but supernatural ill-behavior, which, in Ed's neighborhood, is the province of a special police unit, some of whose activities “of the day and night” the cops are willing to admit to. In a mind-numbing single take, we get a bunch of  police-station comedy with a drunk and a hood, just before a weird old couple bursts in and vents about some spooky biz. The husband pronounces it a “nightmare of whore,” and his wife whines about “Long finngers! I’ll never forget it the longest day that I live!”

Seems they were driving around near the “Old Willows Place” from Bride of the Monster, and they saw a ghostly female apparition who came up to their car and wiggled those long finngers at them. Of course, that special supernatural unit springs into action...when the police captain is informed that Lt. Bradford  hasn’t arrived, he shouts, “I can see he’s not here, but when he gets here, send him in here!” When Bradford (bushy-eyebrowed, jut-jawed Duke Moore) does show up, he's told to check out the old house, and Kelton's assigned to accompany him. Most fruitily, Kelton complains, “Monsters, spooks, space people...why do I always get hooked up with these these screwy details! I ree-sign!" But he goes along anyway.

At the house, Bradford just goes right up to the door, barges in and is confronted by Dr. Acula (Kenne “Horsecock” Duncan), a phony medium who fleeces gullible old farts. Pretending to be a gullible old fart himself, Bradford is ushered deeper into the house, which is much bigger than the exterior shots would lead you to believe. After a lot of tramping about in front of those aforementioned nonexistent backgrounds, Acula brings Bradford to a chamber in which three skeletons, one with a blackbird on its head, are sitting at a table, and a rich old widow is expecting a seance...when Acula starts in with that, the screen just explodes in hilarity. As a trumpet drifts about blaring ( followed by its mute), a sheeted ghost wanders by sideways to the accompaniment of a slide whistle, and a disembodied Forrest-Whitaker head in a pith helmet intones ”mondo mondo mondo” while simultaneously licking his very considerable chops with a very long tongue.

Bradford, needless to say, is skeptical, and wanders off into unlit nowhere. In one of those odd genuinely effective moments that crop up in Wood’s movies from time to time (think of that one visual of Tor Johnson, lit from beneath, rising from his grave in P9), he encounters what he assumes (for no good reason) to be a mannikin or an embalmed corpse, only to have her grin at him...he gets very scared but draws no conclusions, and we learn that she's an actual an actual ghost later.

Meanwhile, Kelton’s been having kittens out in the patrol car...after plenty intercutting between his connniptions and Bradford’s probings-about, he calls the captain, who decides he'd better lead some reinforcements to the place, explaining, "I might as well go, I have to hang around here all night."

Not waiting for them to arrive, Kelton bucks up and penetrates the house, only to encounter lumbering fatty Lobo from Bride, (Tor Johnson) who’s got a burned face, and has been hanging about waiting for another evil genius to replace Bela Lugosi. Lobo knocks Kelton out and sticks him in a coffin, whereupon Bradford frees Kelton, and the two of them enjoy a chat in a cozy little room nearby, which my friend Joe Serrada dubbed “the Monster Lounge.” Feeling better, Kelton expresses the thought that he’s “the whipping boy of the whole department,” bringing immediately to mind the image of doughy quivering Paul Marco buttocks pinkened by the lash. Bradford doesn’t deny the charge, says, “we’ll get into that later,” and leaves him smoking comfortably in a big stuffed chair.

We get another, shorter, seance, and the “White Ghost,” that woman with the long finngers, Acula’s girlfriend, who runs around outside scaring unwanted guests off, swears that she’s been seeing a real ghost, a scary woman in black. Soon afterwards, the captain and his boys rush in, Lobo’s shot dead, and Dr. Acula flees, only to be blocked by a gaggle of old portly dead guys, led by Criswell, who explains that Acula’s a genuine medium, whether he realizes it or not, and that he’s actually been raising old portly dead guys from the grave. The corpses take Acula down, whereupon Criswell, with an elegant gesture, indicates a coffin that they might stick him in...in the film’s second effective bit, we see the lid coming down on Acula’s face.

The cops burst in to find a bunch of skeletons...the White Ghost meets the Black Ghost and becomes a real ghost herself...The End...Made in Hollywood, USA.

Even though Wood finished this cheapie, he didn't have the bucks to get it back from the lab, which held onto it for quite some time, until Wade Williams, the Baptist dude who financed P9, got it out of hock and brought it out on videotape. Having seen the other parts of the trilogy, and Glenn or Glenda, I was thrilled to learn the thing existed...just watched it again and laughed my ass off, preparatory to writing this piece. But let me tell you folks, this is the best movie on this list. And we’ve got a long way down to go yet...

2. The Wizard of Gore, 1970, Director: Hershell Gordon Lewis

Hershell Gordon Lewis was a malignant idiot who disposed of even less cinematic ability than Ed Wood, and his skills seemed to deteriorate steadily with practice; when you factor in the likelihood that the guy was a genuine sicko, you’ve got a truly noxious mix. People talk about pornographically violent movies, but Lewis actually made them; if the risible special effects in his epics had been any better, I think he might have found himself in a mental institution. There’s this very weird vibe that his films give off, a combination of profound alienation and ritualistic acting-out...it’s like you’re watching some sort of ceremony, and you get the impression that Lewis had a hardon every minute. The Gore Gore Girls, one of his very lousiest efforts, begins with a woman combing her hair as a psycho sneaks up on her...the killer smashes her face endlessly into the mirror until her features are shredded by the broken glass, then bashes her head interminably in close up with a claw-hammer, then fishes out her eyeballs and squishes them lovingly and lingeringly a couple inches from the camera lens. It’s just hateful. Even something as gory as Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive seems like good clean fun by comparison.

Lewis made a lot of money making shit like this for the Southern drive-in circuit. He followed Blood Feast with A Thousand Maniacs (also known as Blood Feast of a Thousand Maniacs) and just kept rolling on. Wizard of Gore was maybe his most technically primitive opus, and also his most pretentious; its villain/protagonist Montag the Magician (Ray Sager) precedes all his atrocities with bellowed lamebrained monologues about appearance and reality...hahahahaha! He delivers one of these rants before the credits, then chops his own fake head off with a guillotine.

After the titles, he vents the same monologue again, then saws a woman in half with a chainsaw and roots around in her guts, hahahaha. She appears to recover from this, although later on, she’s found bisected. A plucky female reporter attends Montag’s next show and watches him drive a big spike into a woman’s head and fiddle with her brains for a while before he gouges out her eyes and squishes them at length. Once again, the woman seems to be okay afterwards, although she’s later found with her brains fiddled about in and her eyes gouged out...Montag sneaks into the morgue and gets her body and puts it somewhere else.

You’d think by this time that people would’ve shut Mr. Montag’s act down, but no...he kills another victim with a punch press (she’s discovered, actually punch-pressed, some time later), and then he shoves swords down the throats of another two bimbos. Whenever all this carnage happens, you have these extremely puzzling shots in which things go back to normal, and the women haven’t been mutilated yet, and then he mutilates them again, and then things go back to normal, all of this intercut with shots of people in the audience either staring like zombies, or nodding their heads with slight sick smiles on their faces.

Ultimately, Montag goes on TV and tries to burn everybody at the TV station up, including our plucky heroine, but he gets burned up himself! Afterwards, she retires to her apartment with her boyfriend, only to discover that he’s...

Montag!

He rants some more about appearance and reality, then rips her guts open, but she doesn’t seem to mind, and she laughs hahaha and informs him that she’s mastered appearance and reality just like he has, hahahha, and suddenly he finds himself back on stage, utterly befuddled, wondering about appearance and reality...

This thing sure challenged my sanity, let me tell you. When it was over I doubted my own reality for...at least several seconds, and found myself wishing that that I’d never existed, because then I’d never have seen Wizard of Gore. I think I’ll go in the bathroom and root around in my own guts...or will I be going into your bathroom, and rooting around in your guts, and looking in your medecine cabinet? Or will you be in my bathroom, rooting in my guts and checking out my meds? Food for thought, yes?

Hahahaha...

Mr. Lewis, by the way, financed a string of abortion mills with the proceeds from these awful shitfests of his.

So I say we’d better slide on down to another level quick, where he’s no longer an issue...

3. Birdemic: Shock and Terror, 2008, Director: James Nguyen

It’s been a while since a truly classic bad movie impinged itself upon my consciousness...before Birdemic I guess the last really amazing one was Manos, the Hands of Fate, back in in 1966, but more about that one later. Fact is, it’s just gotten easier to churn out passable cheapos these days...you can shoot ‘em on a tiny video camera, edit ‘em on your PC, and do visual effects on the same. Given the advent of shaky-cam (which I really hate), you can get by with being a shitty photographer. Even so, with all of today’s affordable digital wizardry, it’s still possible for someone to make something side-splittingly awful...

And that someone is the fabulous James Nguyen.

He’s a big fan of Hitchcock, and he likes to think of himself as a “master of the romantic thriller.” But I bet Hitchcock, moldering in his grave, could still make a better movie than Birdemic. Hell, Ed Wood could. In short, locate this thing just as soon as you can, and watch it repeatedly.

Accompanying the credits (one reads “casts”) is a dreary little imitation Bernard Herrman tune playing over and over again, and we see Rod (the dreadful Alan Bagh) driving and driving and driving out north of Frisco. He goes uphill, he goes downhill. He gets on entrance ramps, he gets on exit ramps. He's caught in traffic. We see a lot of pull-offs. It's similar to some of the driving stuff at the beginning of Manos, but it doesn’t go on quite so long.

Finally he arrives in a town and parks and wanders off, feet clumping and slapping, to get some lunch, managing to look remarkably awkward when he’s simply walking. All the sound is very badly recorded and edited....there’s this kind of a plunk and hiss every time the movie goes from having no soundtrack at all to some bit of dialogue or sound effect. After placing an order with a weird waitress with gapped teeth and a strange accent, he spots pretty blonde Nathalie (she really is cute and might actually have a future as an actress), who’s just leaving the restaurant. He clumps on out after her, and introduces himself in an excrutiatingly awkward scene...they exchange cards, then go their separate ways for the time being.

The following day, he watches some global warming news over breakfast, in the first of a whole slew of moronic eco-lectures. He heads off to work...we see him gas up...he gets to his desk and makes a million dollar deal, which he closes by offering a fifty percent discount. You’re wondering when the shock and terror is going to start, but there isn’t the slightest hint that you’re watching a horror movie, unless you want to count stuff about poor polar bears on the TV. Rod wanders about, goes to work, eats some more breakfast, drives around, is offered a big discount on some solar panels, and plunks twenty thousand dollars right down. He has a date with Nathalie...as mysterious-east music plays in the background, they go to a big Vietnamese restaurant, the camera slowly panning over huge incompetent murals of rice-paddies. He and Nathalie see some improbable CG birds (they appear to be some sort of parrot) landing in a tree. Soon afterwards, the couple go to a pumpkin festival. After that, they dance at a cavernous road-house where a black dude is singing a song about “Hanging With my Family.” Still no shock and terror, though, and we’re forty-five minutes in...Rod and Nathalie go to a hotel and screw...you do see her in her underwear. That’s swell, but...

The next day dawns. We get a series of random exteriors, the most notable being a road-shoulder with a bunch of horses parked on it, their asses to the camera, and fifteen-foot long urine-stains trailing away from them on the asphalt...most Hitchcockian, exactly the sort of thing you would’ve seen in in Rear Window, although in this case, it’s horse-rears.

Then, all of a sudden---

Birdemic!

Shock and terror at last!

Driven mad by global warming, flocks of eagles descend on the town. Characterized by egregious problems with scale and spatial relations, the digital FX are mind-boggingly bad...I’d have to say they’re the worst visual effects I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been watching grade-z horror crap my whole life long. Birds drop from the sky and explode like bombs, and fly way off without shrinking with distance, the visual implication being that they’re getting immensely bigger. Rod and Nathalie wake up and see a flock of them outside their window...the birds hover most peculiarly in odd symmetrical formations, flapping double-jointed wings in a wraparound way that indicates they’re getting longer. Our protags put a mattress against the window, then fall asleep. The birds leave. Throughout the whole film, the birds come, the birds go. It turns out that a birdemic is just that terrifyingly, shockingly simple.

Waking up, Rod and Nathalie run around outside, then come to a door at random and knock. The couple inside let them in, and offer to drive them around in a van. You never get the slightest sense of where anyone is going, or why. The guy who owns the van has an assault rifle and pistol, and he and Rod shoot at birds out the window of the car. Other drivers—and there are a lot of them on the road—seem unaware there’s a birdemic going on.

We stop to pick up some kids whose parents have been birded, then go to a convenience store and get food and water. We see James Nguyen lying dead on the floor with his eyes pecked out. We drive around some more and go to a state beach to have a picnic. A batty (birdy?) academic delivers a rambling disquisition on avians and the environment. We go to a gas station and get hundred dollar a gallon gas from some greedy Eastern European. Later on, a redneck tries to steal the gas, but an eagle gets him. We go into another state park to get some water from a stream, even though we just bought a huge bunch of water at that first convenience store. A crazy tree-hugger pops out and delivers another eco-lecture, then is frightened off by an offscreen mountain lion, and everyone runs back to the car through the redwood forest, which has been lit on fire (in a few small spots) by global warming. Eventually we reach another state park, where Rod decides he’d better do some fishing, even though they picked up plenty of food at both convenience stores...birds attack...some get shot...the rest leave, while Rod, Nathalie and the kids, totally and peculiarly motionless, watch. Out over the ocean, the birds never seem to get any smaller. The end.

My daughter Soph saw this wonder a while back and told me I’d better check it out...it’s gotten quite a reputation for itself, receiving well-deserved write-ups in The Village and The New York Times. It’s actually been in theatres, and a second installment Birdemic: The Resurrection, is in the pipeline. I will drive some distance to see it...those FX could only look lousier on a big screen, the bigger the better. Hell, I hope the movie’s released in IMAX. It would take my mind off just about everything.

4. Orgy of the Dead, 1965, director:Stephen C. Apostolof

Yeah, Ed Wood isn’t credited as the director on this monster-nudie classic, but he’s the presiding spirit, without a doubt. The movie is based on a Wood novel (what must that have been like?), and he did the adaptation. Here we see the inevitable logic of Wood’s cinematic odyssey working itself out. He started with sleaze right from the gitgo, with Glen or Glenda, and even though he tried to rise above it with classier material like Bride of the Monster and P9, his perverted hormones kept drawing him back into the gutter, resulting in stuff like his searing porno expose, The Sinister Urge. He had, of course, been penning all sorts of porn himself, and I guess  Orgy's source material must’ve been some of that. At any rate, he finally got to have some of his nudiest fantasies up on the screen, in color that’s actually not too bad for a cheapo from that period. But if anyone ever got a libidinal uptick from this stultifying titty tableau, I’d be very much surprised.

We start with a lot of Plan Ninish confusion about whether or not it's day or night, only this time it’s in color...horror writer Bob (William Bates, possibly the worst actor ever to appear in a Wood film), and his girlfriend Shirley (the genuinely hot Pat Barrington) are driving around looking for a cemetery...when they’re in the car, the backgrounds are totally black, a la that stuff in Night of the Ghouls, although the exterior shots, on some California mountain road, are in blazing daylight. I suppose the exterior shots were done through a filter, and look lighter than they would otherwise on an active light source like a TV screen, but the effect must’ve been pretty jarring, even in the movies.

Spouting some of Wood’s choicest dialogue ever, Bob explains how he wants to go to the cemetery to be inspired, although I presume he would’ve already explained this. For no apparent reason, he drives the car off the road...the crash is off-screen...he and Shirley wake up on the ground with no car in sight. They find the cemetery and hide as strange doings unfold. Presiding is a Satanic figure who is either "The Emperor,” or, “The Lord of the Dead,” played by Criswell, his face a florid drunkard pink, hair a whitish yellow, looking like nothing so much as a cresting wave of 100% ancient Brylcream with a little precious curlicue off to one side. Assisting him is Ghoulita (Fawn Silver), also known as “The Black Ghoul,” whose getup seems to have been the original inspiration for Elvira’s...Cris engages her in sparkling infernal repartee between bouts of stripping by damned women from hell.

Some of these babes are well, really babes, but some are pretty damn skanky, and all of the routines go on way too long, leavened occasionally by a shot of Cris’s boozy devil-face...many big tits are shaken for his satanic delight, although he's placated by none of them. Even spectacular Pat Barrington (in a second role as an avaricious bitch) is condemned...because she loved gold in real life, Criswell orders his Egyptian slaves to “Throw gold on her! More gold! More gold!” and they respond by showering handfuls of bright yellow plastic poker chips on her. Ultimately, she gets dipped in gold paint and turns out like Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. Criswell rollicks and jiggles on his stygian throne, as black-lipped Ghoulita gloats sadistically.

Meanwhile, Bob and Shirley are still watching...they’re seized by a werewolf, and a mummy with giant sweat-stains in his bandages, and are forced to watch some more. One of the strippers wears leopard skin jammies with holes cut out for her boobs and ass, and hops around felinely to Alley Cat...after that, there’s a Fluff Dance, and a Mexican Dance, and most soporific of all, a Zombie Dance. When the dancing concludes, Cris gives Ghoulita permission to indulge in “her pleasures” and she produces a big knife with the clear intention of doing some lesbianistic surgery on Shirley, but the sun comes up suddenly and reduces Ghoulita and her boss to dust.

In the final analysis, this film is definitive proof that nudity never solves anything...it’s worse than war. After watching it again, I even flirted with the idea that nudity should simply be banned, even for animals. I’d say that fully 80 % of the film is nekkid women, but it’s impossible to care. Someone should come up with a heavily edited version, with primary emphasis on the dialogue...it would still be on this list, only it would be more sufferable.

5.Manos, The Hands of Fate, Director: Hal Warren

This movie got a lot of attention after it was resurrected by Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and while we really owe those guys a debt of gratitude for bringing it back into the light, I can’t say I ever cared for their basic approach...when you’re showing something like Manos, you don’t need anybody to comment on it. Manos-level crap speaks for itself. I suppose I’m leaving myself open to the charge that this list isn’t really very different from MST3K, but I’m only trying to get you to look these things up and see them for yourself, and maybe even discover loads of flaws that I didn’t even notice. If you laugh a whole lot, fine. If you really hate the experience, well...so much the better.

There’s a lot you might hate about Manos. It comes up whenever anyone is discussing seriously rotten movies, as a close competitor to Plan Nine...but I think it’s well south of that. It was made by an El Paso fertilizer salesman who ran into screenwriter Sterling Silliphant (whose brother wrote the Creeping Terror) and bet him that he could just throw together a movie on his own...well, I guess technically he won the bet, but I don’t know whether or not Mr. Silliphant considered himself defeated, given how minimally Manos resembles your usual movie. I certainly would’ve welshed.

We open with Michael (played by the director) and Margaret (Diane Mahree) driving around with their daughter and little dog Peppy, looking for the “Valley Lodge.” They drive and drive and drive. They must drive around for a good ten minutes, and there isn’t any dialogue at all...the camera just looks out the window of the car, and there aren’t even any reaction shots. The takes all last about sixteen seconds, because the camera Hal Warren was using could hold that much film. We get a shot of this stretch of road for sixteen seconds, then a shot of that stretch for sixteen seconds, and so on. It goes on way longer than all the stupid driving shit in Birdemic.

Eventually, as the sun’s going down, our little family goes way off road into the desert, coming finally to a remote house. They're confronted by Torgo (John Reynolds), who’s watching the house while “The Master” is away. Torgo is a twitchy sweaty little fellow in a rumpled hat, and he can’t walk very well because he has inexplicably enormous knees...apparently, he was meant to be satyr, but that’s never made clear, and so we’re just left perplexed by all his strange jittery motions. He seems constantly on the verge of falling over. He doesn’t want to let the family stay the night, but they pressure him...he gets kind of horny for the wife, and he lets them in.

The interior of the house is one of the most depressing and dingy sets I’ve ever seen in a movie...Michael and Margaret and their kid sit on the couch, try to decide their next move, and bicker with Torgo. He peeks at Margaret through the window. There’s a bust on the mantelpiece that resembles H.P.Lovecraft, and a sinister hand-statue thing. Torgo hints that the master might be dead, but not as “You might think.”

Later on that night, the kid sneaks out and the wife follows...they come upon an inexpensive pagan amphitheatre where the Master and a number of his bimbo brides are sleeping on slabs. Wearing a robe with big red hands on huge draggy sleeves, the Master wake up...his wives do too. He harangues them about his god Manos, and what unsatisfactory wives they’ve been ...they berate him right back, then start arguing with each other about whether "The Child" should be killed, then fall to vigorous catfighting in their filmy white garments. There's a great deal of catfighting in the movie, and it illustrates most vividly the sheer evil of the cult.

Margaret and the kid hotfoot it back to the cabin and tell Michael...Torgo, head over swollen knees in love with Margaret, confronts Manos and tell him that he shouldn’t add Margaret to his wife collection, because it’s so big already...Torgo wants her for his own. The Master responds by summoning his brides to sacrifice Torgo, who's laid on a slab and massaged half to death. Then the Master holds Torgo’s hand in a fire, rips it blazing off its wrist, and waves it around laughing, as Torgo, stump flaming, stumbles off into the night and is never seen again.

The Master gets into a fight with his first wife, who thinks he’s gone real bad, and he sacrifices her...Michael and Margaret and the daughter try to escape, but come back to the house, thinking it’s the last place the Master will look. But oh hell, he does think of that, and Michael shoots at him a bunch of times, but it doesn't take...

Cut to a couple of ladies going on vacation. They drive and drive and drive. Finally they wind up at the Master’s house, and are greeted by his new caretaker...

Michael!

And over in the ampitheatre, the Master’s got a couple of new wives---Margaret and her little daughter!

Yucch.

This stinkbomb received a limited release in El Paso, and even though it was a local effort, the audience wasn’t in a very supportive mood, and started laughing so hard that Warren and company skeedaddled from the theatre about midway through. Contrary to some reports, Warren wasn’t so overcome with despair that he shot himself...he tried to make a biker flick shortly afterwards, but no one who knew anything about Manos would front him the money. John Reynolds, the guy who played Torgo, had blown his head off with a shotgun about a month before the film premiered, but it didn’t have anything to do with the film, apparently. He does make an impression in Manos, however...Torgo is like Renfield reimagined by an idiot, and I’m not at all sure if I’d rather watch Dwight Frye. His knees are just nowhere near as big....

Wow, this descent is going slower than I thought it would...think I'll break it into two parts, right---

Here.