The Crawling Hand

In NASA, the technician Steve Curan (Peter Breck) and Dr. Max Weitzberg (Kent Taylor) lose contact with a spacecraft returning from the moon and they assume that the astronauts have died. Out of the blue, one of them appears in the monitor and asks to people destroy the ship, and Dr. Weitzberg pushes a button and explodes the spacecraft.

Meanwhile the medical student Paul Lawrence (Rod Lauren) goes to the beach with his girlfriend Donna (Allison Hayes) and they find the severed arm of one astronaut. Later Paul returns to the beach and brings the arm as a sort of souvenir. The arm mysteriously comes to life and kills his landlord. Further the alien in the hand occasionally takes over his brain and he begins the prime suspect of Sheriff Townsend (Alan Hale) of being the killer in town.

The lame "The Crawling Hand" is so awful that becomes very entertaining and even a cult movie. The story is stupid; the lead character is dumb; the acting and direction are terrible. There are many funny things, like the scientist blowing up the spacecraft after the request of an ill astronaut, but maybe the best is when Paul Lawrence brings the severed arm home and puts it on the shelve like a trophy. In the end, who said that Ed Wood is the worst director of all time? My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): Not Available on DVD or Blu-Ray

I saw this movie on the Saturday night "Sci-Fi Movie" when I was a kid in the mid to late 60s. It scared me then. I had to find a copy and watch it again almost 40 years later. Upon this second viewing, the part that scared me the most is that there may have been people who took this seriously! I can't believe grown men (OK people for the PC world we now live in) could actually invest time and money on a project like this but I'm glad they did because I must admit that I am a fan of "bad horror movies." They don't get much worse than this so of course I enjoyed it. As another reviewer pointed out, there is almost no acting. Also, there isn't much of a plot, the special effects are terrible, if not, non-existent. All of which adds up to one of the best bad horror movies I've ever seen. Very entertaining in that regard.

Delightful hokum from the early sixties and the directorial seat of Herbert Strock. A space flight to the moon brings back the dead body of a man who warns his space station to kill him...and the thing that has partially possessed his body. The man is literally blown to bits on his return flight home, but one lone appendage happens to make it intact to the beaches of California. That's right.....THIS is the Crawling Hand! Two teenagers, very well-versed in science and knowing about these manned flights to the moon, come across the hand. Rod Lauren as a teenaged scientist takes the hand home for scientific glory, but soon becomes a pawn in the hand's quest for murder and body possession. This film has many faults and you will laugh your hands off(okay it's a cheap pun) at the film's bad acting, cheap sets, and incredibly inept scientific logic. But make no mistake....this is a fun film to watch and has a lot of charm. The make-up of the people strangled by the hand is pretty chilling and Allison Hayes and Alan Hale(the Skipper) have some fun in their roles. One scene that really stands out is a hand's on strangle of a soda shop owner with a juke box playing menacingly in the backdrop. I'm sure some statement of misbegotten youth was being made.

MAN!! This movie is the cheese. It's about a astronaut who is taken over by an unknown force and goes mad in space. He begs his friends down on Earth to push the red button and blow him up. So they do so. However, his hand survives the blast and starts killing people. Though, it horrifies his girlfriend, a med student finds it and takes it home. It kills his landlady, and then takes him over. The kid starts acting weird and kills people and attempts to kill the crusty old man who says "No dancing, not allowed!" in his restaurant. The hand is picked clean by cats but then it is attempted to be shipped away and....Well....let's just say never trust the delivery man. This really scared me as kid.

Now here's what cheap sci-fi teen horror is all about, and it's from AIP, of course! Astronaut is killed in space while possessed by an evil alien force, but somehow his severed arm makes its way to earth, still hosting the alien, and begins a killing spree. If that's not good enough, you've got troubled teens, two proto-X-Files scientists tracking the hand, a sublimely weird malt-shop assault scene, and the crawling arm's demise comes via a pack of stray cats! Classic trash from start to finish!