Corona | Coming Attractions

The Hand (Original Release Date: 24 April 1981)

The Hand is the answer to the question "What else did that kid who played Christina Crawford in Mommie Dearest do?"  That's the kind of movie The Hand is: one you're liable to know about because of its relationship to another movie, director, or star, and not one you're liable to have seen.  (Another answer to this question, it turns out, is The Happening, where she plays "Woman with Hands Over Ears."  I consider this neither a step up nor down, and, without bothering to look at the three decades' worth of [likely] bit parts in between, declare her career to be remarkably consistent.)

I consider myself reasonably familiar with the careers of Michael Caine and Oliver Stone, and feel I should have at least known The Hand existed.  I didn't.  It also never would have occurred to me to pair Caine and Stone, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder why that is.  I can picture Caine in a Stone movie without much difficulty--though this probably has something to do with Caine's ability to make it seem like he belongs wherever movies stick him--and can make a go at re-imagining some Caine vehicles as though they were directed by Stone. (I think of a Beyond the Limit directed by Stone, for example, and I think of a movie memorable for more than just a Paul McCartney chase theme.)

What I actually got with the Stone/Caine pairing was something less engaging than I had hoped.  Stone was still green as a director at this point, having only directed one feature-length movie before this one. (That other movie, Seizure [1974], is notable for, if nothing else, featuring Jonathan Frid playing someone other than Barnabas Collins.  It also shares a number of thematic parallels with The Hand that would make watching the two back-to-back an interesting experience.)  Stone-as-writer, though, was coming off an Oscar win for his Midnight Express screenplay, and was only a year away from his collaboration with Milius on Conan the Barbarian.

Let me pause here to say I consider Conan the Barbarian's script to be one of the best things ever to have come out of Hollywood.  "And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!"

The Hand is not a script I would expect to be written between Midnight Express and Conan the Barbarian.  It's too cliché-ridden (black cats jumping toward the camera!), too filled with uninteresting characters, and too reliable on the gimmickry of dream sequences and flashbacks.  If the story were interesting enough, these things might be overlooked, but it's a story you've probably already encountered some superior variation on.

It's a simple story.  A cartoonist loses his drawing hand in an accident, and that hand either develops a life of its own and becomes murderous, or the cartoonist becomes murderous and dreams up the idea of a serial-killing hand because the reality of his murderousness is too painful for him to deal with.

The murderous hand has been done on film before.  If you haven't seen it done in the Conrad Veidt-starring Hands of Orlac, or its remake, Mad Love, you've likely seen it done in Evil Dead 2. (If you're a fan of EC Comics, you may even remember the story "The Maestro's Hand!" from issue #18 of Tales from the Crypt.  Speaking of Tales from the Crypt, Charles Fleischer, the Crypt Keeper's voice, shows up as a cartoonist about midway through the movie.)  If you go beyond hands, you'll find strong similarities to narratives such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Psycho, Monkey Shines, and Fight Club.

You probably won't be surprised by The Hand, in other words.  If you are, it will be because you're expecting more from it.  You'll expect character development, but you won't get it.  Instead, you'll be introduced to types: the loud hick, the job-stealing opportunist, the flirtatious undergrad, the swimmy-headed new age guru, the dissatisfied wife, the bottled-rage cuckold.  You'll expect a compelling mystery, but you'll get two contradictory versions of reality force-fed to you in such a way it'll run the risk of causing you to shrug with disinterest.  This is what happened to me.  I stopped wondering which version was the real version, and found myself simply waiting to be told.  By the end of the movie, I was paying more attention to the movie's half-hearted attempt at selling the illusion of Caine's character's handlessness (sometimes a convincing double, sometimes an embarassingly unconvincing fist-in-sleeve) than I was to the plot, which had already written itself out in my mind a few minutes into the movie.

The Final Word: Recommended?  No.  Not unless you're an Oliver Stone and Michael Caine completist.  If that's the case, then why not?  

Availability: DVD.  It's on YouTube broken up into pieces. 

Standout Scene: The scene where Caine's character loses his hand is incredibly graphic and pretty funny.  Some of the scenes with the hand crawling are similarly funny.  You get gray flashbacks from the point of view of the "hand," which all occur during the main character's blackouts.  These are supposed to lead you toward the conclusion it's all him.  You also get scenes with the hand going from place to place, miles away from Caine's character.  These are supposed to lead you to toward the conclusion that maybe the hand's truly alive.  This piss-poor attempt to have you guessing appears to have worked for some, at least.  According to IMDb user timelikeinfinity, "I think this movie works on so many more levels than mainstream people can see....  THERE'S NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT THIS FILM! " 

Hey! I Know That Guy!: Aside from Mara Hobel and Charles Fleischer, you may recognize Bruce McGill.  He has some silly facial hair, and is a lot younger than you're used to seeing him, so it may take a second to recognize him.

Nostalgia Score: 3/10.  Walt Kelly's Pogo is mentioned.  I guess that gives it a tinge of nostalgia.
 

Review Score: 43 / 100