Manos Returns?

As if the release of Manos: The Hands of Fate from a newly restored master on blu-ray weren't enough, we just got word that original Manos cast member Jackey Raye Neyman Jones is launching a KickStarter campaign to fund a sequel, Manos Returns.

Here's the skinny from the press release:

Jackey Raye Neyman Jones, who played the little girl “Debbie” in the classic B-movie “MANOS - The Hands of Fate” is launching a Kickstarter campaign January 30th to fund filming of a sequel: MANOS Returns. To receive funding, the project must reach its goal of $20,000 by March 1st. 

MANOS Returns is a tongue-in-cheek return to Valley Lodge. It follows a group of young would-be filmmakers who learn their favorite movie, “MANOS - The Hands of Fate,” was based on a true story. They set out to visit the site of the events that inspired the original and of course they find more than they bargained for. 

Jones is producing the project, which will be directed by award-winning Seattle filmmaker Tonjia Atomic (Plain Devil, Hobo with a Trashcan). If the Kickstarter campaign is successful, MANOS Returns will be finished in time for the 50th anniversary of MANOS, November 15, 2016. The bulk of filming will take place in Oregon this summer. 

Cult classic film “MANOS - The Hands of Fate” was immortalized by Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and is considered by many to be the worst movie of all time. The Kickstarter launch date for MANOS Returns is the same date MANOS premiered on MST3K: January 30th. 

Fundraising for MANOS Returns began with a successful t-shirt campaign last October, aimed at procuring start up costs and, most importantly, funds to film scenes with Tom Neyman, The Master from the original MANOS, and Jones’ father. 

“The 50th anniversary is coming up this year and that milestone was both a spur and a warning,” said Jones. “We’re none of us getting any younger. If any of the principle players from the original production are going to get a chance to enjoy the incredible pop culture phenomenon this has turned into, and I think they deserve to, it needs to happen now.” 

The production aims to involve as many people from the original movie as possible: Jones and Neyman; Diane Mahree, who played Maggie; and Nicki Mathis, the vocalist from the MANOS soundtrack. 

“The soundtrack is many people’s favorite part of MANOS. So, I feel really lucky that we found Nicki and that she wanted to come onboard,” said Jones. “MANOS has a way of bringing the right people together.” 

Project backers pledging at the very accessible $5 level will be treated to a digital download of a brand new recording of “Forgetting You” by Mathis.  Backers also have the opportunity to simply pre-order a digital download or DVD of MANOS Returns. Or they can donate at higher levels for a variety of other perks, including a walk-on part in MANOS Returns and dinner with Jones and Atomic. 

Other core MANOS Returns staff are talented B-movie crew veterans: Tallahassee-based writer/editor Steve Foley, and DP Joe Sherlock of Oregon’s Skullface Astronaut. Cult-movie favorite George Stover (Female Trouble, Alien Factor) and puppeteer Rachel Jackson of MANOS - The Hands of Felt fame will also have small roles.

Speaking of Hands of Felt, the puppets-only retelling of Manos was released on DVD and via digital download back in 2014.

Trailer of the Week: Zontar: The Thing From Venus

Fred Olen Ray has dug into his vault and made another 50 or so copies of his RetroMedia Beast Collection DVD set available on Amazon (get 'em while you can). The set is a cornucopia of regional horror flicks, including Ed Adlum's Shriek of the Mutilated, Bill Rebane's Capture of Bigfoot, Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, Larry Buchanan's The Eye Creatures, and the subject of our trailer of the week, Zontar: The Thing From Venus. Since Zontar was originally a made for TV project, we've posted a series of homemade trailers below that range from sublime to ridiculous.

Trailer of the Week: Nail Gun Massacre (1985)

Terry Lofton's ridiculous The Nail Gun Massacre is out as a limited edition Blu-ray from Code Red. My review of it will be in the next issue of SCREEM magazine.

Trailer of the Week: Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

 Happy 40th anniversary (holy cow!) to this groundbreaking Texas classic.

The Brain That Couldn't Keep Its Shirt On

Shout! Factory continues to impress with its unending deluge of genre titles. This summer saw the release of Charles B. Pierce's The Town that Dreaded Sundown (featuring an essay by yours truly as a bonus feature) along with The Evictors.


In September, the label is releasing two budget multi-film packs under the "Movies 4 You - Sci-Fi Classics," which will include eight titles. Some of these were previously released under the "Midnight Movies" banner, but a few are new to disc.

But the biggest news regarding these collections is that the second volume will not only include the New York schlock classic The Brain that Wouldn't Die, but also that film's long-rumored (and long-missing) racy "international" footage featuring actress Adele Lamont with slightly less clothing than in the U.S. version. According to Shout!'s own Cliff MacMillan that footage will be included as an extra (it's also missing its soundtrack).

Volume 1 includes Beyond the Time Barrier (a low-budget film shot in Texas), The Angry Red Planet, The Man From Planet X, and The Time Travelers; volume two also has another Texas film, The Amazing Transparent Man, along with Reptilicus and The Neanderthal Man.

In August, Shout!'s Scream Factory imprint will release another four pack, the "All Night Horror Marathon," which includes The Outing (1987), yet another Texas film, and The Vagrant (1992), which was written by Scarecrows (1988) scribe Richard Jeffries.

Trailer of the Week: Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

Low-budget Texas sci-fi, from the same folks who brought you The Amazing Transparent Man.

Trailer of the Week: Dungeon of Harrow (1962)

This isn't an original trailer, mind you, but we had to post this preview of Vinegar Syndrome's upcoming release of Pat Boyette's Texas-lensed Dungeon of Harrow (out on a double feature disc with Death By Invitation). The film has been restored, and looks better than it has in decades -- probably since its original release.

Revenge of the Creeping Unknowns

By far, the most popular post I've ever written for this blog was the Creeping Unknowns list of rare and lost regional horror films. Since those original posts (here and here), a handful of the films have turned up for either legit DVD releases or at least a screening or two.

In the meantime, tips from readers and my own research have led me to a few more obscure treasures. A couple of these are fairly easy to see, although most people have never heard of them, and a few are truly MIA.

As always, if you have any additional information or images related to these films, feel free to pass them along!

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Southern Shockers (1985): I've written extensively about this Mississippi shot-on-video anthology, which was only released on tape in Spain. It's since gotten some press in Tape Mold, and there is still hope that producer David Hopper can pull together the English-language elements so someone other than this writer can watch it. 

The Black River Monster (1986): We discussed The Hackers (1988) in the last "Creeping Unknowns" post, even though the film had, by that point, been released onDVD by original production company Camelot Studios. We were so excited about that DVD that we completely overlooked the company's other horror DVD, The Black River Monster. This one was made at the Black River Farm and Ranch (a local summer camp), and features a bigfoot-style creature. It's part kiddie flick, part promotional film, and all weird. 

Satan Place: A Soap Opera From Hell (1990): Directed by comic book artist Alfred Ramirez (who also published a comic of the same name), this cheapo, Florida-lensed anthology hasn't completely slipped through the cracks. As I noted in previous posts, Joe Bob Briggs reviewed it, and it has turned up on some torrent sites. Still, this one remains unknown to most fans. 

Blood of the Wolf Girl (1989): When director Harry Preston (Harry Pimm) passed away in 2009, his only horror credit as far as most regional horror fans were concerned was the goofy Texas slasher film Honeymoon Horror (1982). But he made one other fright flick, the unreleased Blood of the Wolf Girl (1989) about a stripper who transforms into a werewolf, which he would occasionally screen for friends and visitors. 

Road Meat (1987): Shot in Ohio by Bill Bragg, this features an early credit by director Jay Woelfel (Beyond Dream's Door) as director of photography. And that's about all I know of it. Copies of the apparently unfinished film do allegedly exist. (Thanks to Adam Jeffers at Trashnite.com for bringing this one to our attention.)

The Men in Black (1990): Another lost Ohio film, this one shot in Columbus and Sandusky. OSU grad Bradley Lee directed the 16mm film (Walt Burbach produced), which is about MIBs trying to intimidate a UFO witness. It had a single screening in Mansfield in 1992. Excerpts from it wound up in a comedy called Films That Suck: The Movies of Read Ridley, in 1999. There was a VHS release at some point, and that tape is listed in the holdings of some local libraries here in Columbus, although so far the actual tape has yet to turn up. I found some information on the film here. (Thanks to Timothy L. Mayer for pointing this one out.)

 

 

Trailer of the Week, Reboot Edition: Texas Chain Saw Massacre vs. Texas Chainsaw 3D

We were as surprised as anyone to see that the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre "sequel" debuted at #1 this weekend, bumping off both Django Unchained and The Hobbit. Designed as a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper's original, the film picks up with a local posse taking down the original Saw clan, then jumps to the present, with a young woman (Alexandra Daddario) heading to Texas to claim an inheritance and running into a still-spry Leatherface. Word is it's not very good, and plays pretty fast and loose with the timeline (for the plot to work, 26-year-old Daddario would need to be about 13 years old or so). On the upside, you get cameos by original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen and by Bill Moseley, here recreating the role of the "Gas Man" (Jim Siedow) from Hooper's original. (Moseley co-starred with Siedow in Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2).

So here, for comparison's sake, are the trailer's for the original, and both direct sequels.

Trailer of the Week: Bloodsuckers From Outer Space (1984)

 A cheap horror comedy that's actually pretty funny. And it has a great theme song!

Trailer of the Week: The Yesterday Machine (1966)

There's no trailer for this Texas time-travel obscurity made by writer/actor Russ Marker, so I've posted a brief clip instead (featuring Marker's brother, James Britton). You can read my interview with Marker in the upcoming Regional Horror Films book, due out in early November.

Trailer of the Week: The Outing/The Lamp (1987)

A night at the museum, Texas-style!

You Say Horror, I Say Harrow

One thing I noticed when researching my regional horror films book was that there wasn't a lot of paper available promoting the works of Texas filmmaker and comic book legend Pat Boyette. Although there are a few copies of the poster for his lost film The Weird Ones floating around, I had never seen any sort of posters or stills for Dungeon of Harrow/Dungeon of Horror, which has become something of a public domain DVD staple the past few years. Thanks to AV Maniacs member D.Wilt of the Mexican Film Bulletin Online (and some other bloggers), we now at least know what the Mexican posters and lobby cards looked like.

First up is this Mexican one-sheet, which was posted over at Rip Jagger's Dojo.

As you can see, the artwork was repurposed for the Alpha Video DVD release a few years back (see the top of this post).

Zombo's Closet, meanwhile, featured this nifty lobby card:

That still begs the question: where's the U.S. artwork? If it played theaters here, there ought to be at least a poster. Anybody ever seen one?

Trailer of the Week: The Year of the Yahoo! (1972)

Not a horror film, but I thought it was appropriate for the primary election season. Here's H.G. Lewis' take on A Face in the Crowd -- The Year of the Yahoo!

All Manos, All the Time

Just when I thought there couldn't possibly be any more Manos-related developments, another bombshell. First there was the puppet musical, then the 2-disc special edition from Shout! Factory, then rumors of a sequel. And now -- some half-mad film archivist has stumbled across the original Manos: The Hands of Fate workprint, and is in the process of restoring the film to strike a new theatrical print and potentially produce a Manos Blu-Ray.

A fellow using the handle "Ben Solo" (actually, Ben Solovey) over on the Something Awful forums picked up a pile of film at auction that had originally belonged to Manos distributor Emerson Film Enterprises. Among the reels was the original Manos workprint (bearing the title Fingers of Fate). You can read the whole story (along with a lot of technical details) here.

Solovey now plans to restore the film, and has set up a website so we can all follow his progress.

The site includes some stunning frame scans that show just how much image (and color) has been lost in the dupey copies-of-copies of Manos that most of us are familiar with. I've pasted a few below.



You can year an interview with Solovey over at Film School Rejects. Let's all hope he can stay on schedule and deliver on the high-def DVD -- and that some forward-thinking distributor (Criterion, are you reading this?) can pitch in and give a restored Manos the type of release it deserves.

Trailer of the Week: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The one and only...

Tobe Hooper Meets Frankenstein

The archives here at The Dead Next Door are, to put it mildly, a bit disorganized, which is why I'm just now posting about another semi-lost regional horror nearly three years after I found out about -- and it was directed by one of the giants of the genre, to boot.

Back in 2008, Classic Horror Film Board member Paul Haight posted links to some interesting photos from the LIFE Magazine archive. According to the information on the site, the photos were from an amateur production of a Frankenstein film made in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by a crew of teenagers in 1959.

As it turns out, the teen director was none other than Tobe Hooper (that's him in the picture above, pouring chocolate syrup on one of the monster's victims), who would go on to later acclaim for his Austin-lensed Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Hooper himself joined the conversation briefly (you can see his comments here), sharing that The Heir of Frankenstein was his first 16mm production -- unfortunately, he didn't say whether it was a full-length feature or a short.

I've posted a few of the photos below, but you can see the whole archive at the LIFE site. (All photos are, of course, properly of LIFE.)

Trailer of the Week: The Abomination (1986)

Bret McCormick's Super 8 splatter fest was shot back-to-back with Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants. It was finally released on DVD by Muther Video last year.

Trailer of the Week: The Black Cat (1966)

Crazed Texas terror from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe ... sort of.

Please Don't Return to Boggy Creek

Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce took out this full-page ad in Boxoffice magazine to deny any connection to the unsanctioned, G-rated sequel Return to Boggy Creek (1977), brought to you by Texas producer/director Tom Moore.


Pierce would later produce his own official sequel, Boggy Creek II, in 1985. Moore also directed Mark of the Witch, and had a hand in Horror High.