RiffTrax Brings ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ to Rave Motion Pictures in Daphne (Aug. 16, 2012)

The stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 brought their RiffTrax live event to Daphne for one night only, filling a Baldwin County movie theater with the kind of comic commentary that made their show a cult classic. Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett offered brand-new comedic commentary on Manos: The Hands of Fate, the 1966 low-budget horror oddity long rated among the worst films ever made, as Gulf Coast audiences watched the trio fire wisecracks at the so-bad-it’s-good cult film on the big screen.

The one-night screening played Thursday, August 16, 2012, at 7 p.m. at Rave Motion Pictures in Daphne. The format let local fans experience a RiffTrax theater event the way audiences had come to expect from the trio’s nationwide screenings — the movie running with Nelson, Murphy and Corbett performing their riffing live and in sync, their voices filling the auditorium as the film unspooled beneath them.

For fans along the Eastern Shore, the event was a chance to see the RiffTrax experience without a trip out of the region. Rave Motion Pictures, in the Eastern Shore Centre off U.S. Highway 98, had become a regular stop for the specialty cinema events — concerts, opera broadcasts and comedy screenings — that national distributors began piping into multiplexes in the early 2010s, and the RiffTrax date put Daphne on the map for one of fandom’s favorite traditions.

From the Satellite of Love to the big screen

Nelson, Murphy and Corbett are veterans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Minneapolis-produced comedy series in which a human host and his robot companions were trapped on a spacecraft and forced to watch bad movies, responding with an unending stream of jokes — “riffing” — that made derelict cinema into comedy gold. Nelson took over the host’s chair from series creator Joel Hodgson in 1993 and led the show through its final seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel, with Murphy voicing robot Tom Servo after taking the role in 1991 and Corbett voicing Crow T. Robot from 1996, after the series’ move from Comedy Central.

When MST3K ended in 1999, the trio regrouped under the RiffTrax name, riffing first-run Hollywood films as downloadable commentary tracks and building a catalog that eventually spanned thousands of titles. The live-event format they developed — performing riffs synchronously with a screening broadcast to hundreds of theaters around the country — turned the experience back into a communal one, letting fans laugh together in an auditorium the way viewers once did in front of their televisions. The 2012 Manos screening was part of that national series, reaching theaters in every region including the Gulf Coast.

Why Manos

Manos: The Hands of Fate occupies a special place in bad-movie history. Made in 1966 by an El Paso fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren on a bet, the film was shot on a handheld 16-millimeter camera with a cast that included a local theater troupe and Warren’s own family, with synchronizing sound problems solved by dubbing every line after the fact. The result — a wandering story of a family lost on a desert road who stumble onto a lodge presided over by the grasping, kneel-obedient Master and his dog-like henchman Torgo — became infamous for its continuity errors, its looping soundtrack and its hypnotic musical score.

The film’s path to infamy ran directly through Mystery Science Theater 3000, which featured Manos in a 1993 episode that became one of the series’ most beloved. Fans ranked it among the worst movies the show ever featured, and the episode introduced a generation to Torgo’s irregular walk, the Master’s halo of dark robes and the film’s startlingly abrupt ending. That history made Manos a natural centerpiece for a RiffTrax live event: a film fans already knew they were supposed to laugh at, performed by the same three voices they associated with the original episode.

The 2012 live riffing of Manos also marked something of a homecoming for the title. A restored print had screened at comedy festivals and midnight showings around the country in the years leading up to the event, and the film’s reputation had grown into genuine cultural currency — quoted, referenced and celebrated as an artifact of what one determined amateur could do with a camera, a bet and no discernible experience. RiffTrax’s live treatment gave audiences a sanctioned way to enjoy it: the movie itself, the jokes performed live, and a theater full of people who all came for exactly that.

Rave Motion Pictures and the Eastern Shore Centre

Rave Motion Pictures’ Daphne location sits in the Eastern Shore Centre, the open-air shopping and dining complex that anchors the city’s commercial growth along Highway 98. The multiplex served Baldwin County’s fast-growing population — Daphne, Spanish Fort, Fairhope and the surrounding communities — with stadium seating and the full first-run slate, and its size made it a natural host for the alternative-content events that distributors were expanding nationally in 2012.

Those events changed what a neighborhood multiplex could be. In the early 2010s, digital projection and satellite distribution made it practical to send live performances — opera from New York, concerts, one-night comedy screenings — to suburban theaters at ticket prices comparable to a standard movie. For Baldwin County audiences, that meant events once available only in New Orleans or Atlanta were suddenly a short drive away. The RiffTrax screening on August 16, 2012, was exactly that kind of night: a national live event, experienced locally, at the Eastern Shore Centre’s multiplex.

The enduring RiffTrax tradition

The Daphne screening fit into a busy run of RiffTrax live events in the early 2010s, as the trio’s theater shows grew from occasional experiments into a national slate of annual events. Their live riffing of major films drew tens of thousands of moviegoers per screening across hundreds of theaters, and their brand of fast, good-natured mockery — jokes written by the performers and a stable of contributing writers — kept the MST3K tradition alive for audiences too young to have seen the original show on television.

For the Gulf Coast, the August 16, 2012, date was a one-night-only chance to be part of it. The 7 p.m. screening at Rave Motion Pictures in Daphne put Nelson, Murphy and Corbett’s brand-new commentary on Manos: The Hands of Fate on an Eastern Shore screen, with the trio riffing live for a national audience that included Baldwin County’s share of people who had waited years to hear what three professional comedians could do with the worst movie ever made. For one Thursday night, Daphne sat at the center of a fandom that stretches from Minneapolis to El Paso — and the movie that started as a bet between fertilizer salesmen got the biggest audience of its strange, unstoppable afterlife.

MST3K’s reach into Alabama fandom

Mystery Science Theater 3000 never missed the Gulf Coast. The show ran nationally from 1988 to 1999, first on a Minneapolis UHF station, then through seven seasons on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel, and Alabama viewers watched it in the same syndication blocks and late-night slots as fans everywhere. By the 2010s, its alumni events drew devoted crowds across the Southeast, and the RiffTrax screenings gave the region’s fans — many of whom had introduced their own children to the show through DVD sets and streaming — a theater-sized way to keep the tradition going.

Daphne’s screening also reflected the geography of Alabama fandom. The Eastern Shore and Mobile sit within easy reach of a large population of students and young professionals from the University of South Alabama, the University of Mobile and Spring Hill College, audiences that grew up with the show’s reruns and filled the region’s midnight-movie and cult-film screenings. A 7 p.m. Thursday start put the event within reach of exactly that crowd, alongside the families and longtime fans who made RiffTrax screenings a multigenerational night out.

The craft behind the riffing

Live RiffTrax performances are closer to scripted comedy shows than to free-form heckling. The trio and their writing team prepare dense pages of jokes timed to the film — multiple riffs ready for every scene, tested in rehearsal and trimmed to fit the movie’s pacing. Performing them live requires synchronization with a running film and, in the case of the national simulcasts, with hundreds of other theaters watching the same feed, a production challenge the team refined over years of events.

That craft is part of what distinguishes RiffTrax from the imitators that MST3K’s success inspired. The group’s humor leans on wordplay, pop-culture reference and running gags rather than cruelty, an approach the performers have described as punching at the movies rather than the people in them. For Manos — a film made by hobbyists whose families appeared in it — that good-natured register is part of the point: the audience laughs at the movie’s incompetence while, in a strange way, honoring the ambition that produced it.

The August 16, 2012, screening in Daphne therefore doubled as both a comedy night and a piece of film history — the latest chapter in the afterlife of a 1966 El Paso curiosity that a bet, a borrowed camera and three comedians from Minneapolis turned into a fixture of American cult culture. Gulf Coast fans who filled the Rave Motion Pictures auditorium that Thursday were participating in a ritual MST3K perfected decades earlier: sitting in the dark, watching a terrible movie, and discovering that with the right company, the worst film ever made is among the funniest.