The Manitou

The Manitou

The Manitou is a forgotten (some may say deservedly-buried) classic of utterly ridiculous ‘70s big-name horror. Tony Curtis headlines this socially-conscious shlocker about an evil Indian spirit out to get revenge on San Francisco for the sins of the fathers. While the Manitou purports to be a serious horror film, and even conjures over an hour of involving character development and intensifying plot, it explodes into a bizarre, silly mess by the end. In other words, Video Sewer afficionados will lap this swill up like gleeful little piggies.

Camp signs are heavy as The Manitou opens with Curtis hamming it up as Harry Erskine. Erskine is a cape-wearing tarot reader who grudgingly fleeces wealthy old ladies through weekly readings.

Matinee-idol slickness - however ill-employed - soon gives way to real horror as Erskine cracks open a brew and starts dancing around his apartment to awful disco music. And even though plenty of Curtis’s latter-day mascara-and-bloat combo is in evidence, we’re asked to still view him as a ladies man.

Luckily we’re quickly distracted by an hour of good old-fashioned plot and character establishing, featuring a loony and delightful ‘special guest appearance’ by Burgess Meredith. He’s an anthropologist who’s supposed to help figure out why Erskine’s ex-girlfriend has a huge blob growing on her back that makes her speak in Native American curse-words.

Better help is had when the eagle’s call announces the arrival of an ‘Indian Medicine Man’ who works for tobacco (or something, it’s been a few weeks since I watched this - as follows my new review style.)

The Manitou was marketed on video as ‘In the tradition of Alien,’ because (it should be no secret) the evil Manitou bursts out of the girl’s back in a class of special effects that can only be called sucky. In fact, this 1977 release is so crude it makes the contemporaneous Star Wars look like today’s CGI.

Ahh, but it makes for some great laughs, and when the mercury-stunted (dwarf-portrayed) Manitou comes out to turn his hospital suite into a star-spangled disco paradise, it’s creepy for a few seconds. An then he skins an Orderly.

Who knows whether the threat of the Manitou will be vanquished; I don’t because I can’t really remember how the crappy video copy I rented ended up. Nevertheless, this self-serious cheese platter is required viewing, and deserves the full-on DVD treatment for the delight of you psycho-tronic shlock fans.