Midnight Picks

JUST WHAT WE NEED, MORE DOCS ON BAD MOVIES

But this one is truly special...a documentary almost as strange and quirky as its subject.

So here I am, at the outset of a summer already made hectic by new classes and odd jobs. This week brings a new hat -- watching the folks' house, making sure the plants are watered and the pets are let out in good 'nuff time so they don't go on pee parties or, worse, returning to the same primitive savagery as their ancestors. It's a job every teenager dreams of, and if this were sometime in '96 or '97, I'd surely be dancin' around the house in my skivvies to some Bob Seger action. But now I'm older, and I have my own house, so I can assure you I get my fill of that on a regular enough basis to not really make it special anymore.

But being trapped in the suburbs of my youth has its perks -- namely, the ole man has a porch, something I don't possess at my own place, so every night this week I've been spending smoking cheap cigars and watching bad movies. So in my nocturnal desperation, I stumbled upon this little gem; it's a short documentary about the infamous MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE -- short because the filmmakers had so little to work with it's a wonder they could scrounge up enough footage to make an intriguing trailer.

Lately the web's been lighting up with talk of BEST WORST MOVIE, concerning the making of TROLL 2, widely regarded to be the most infamous so bad it's good flick of all time. It's easy to see why this one would get overshadowed, but that's not to short sell it. Their knowledgeable subjects include a MANOS historian -- that's right, a guy who knows so much about this crappy little skid mark in the annals of film that he crafted an entire career out of it -- and the only surviving member of the MANOS cast and crew, who's so off his rocker he could possibly make Gary Busey look as collected as Charlie Manson.

So here's a link to it in three parts on Joe Bob's web site, and you can catch the MST3K take on it on youtube.