The Crawling Hand

THE CRAWLING HAND looks like something straight out of the 1950s, when TV was beginning to upset the Hollywood applecart, forcing the major studios to look for new angles and gimmicks (Todd A-O, Cinemascope, VistaVision, Cinerama, 3-D, stereo sound, and big-budget color remakes of old films) and small indie directors like Ed Wood were having a field day turning out tons of drive-in drivel. HAND is about a dead astronauts's severed hand seeking revenge on the living. Yowsa! How's that for a plot! In some scenes, you can actually spot the uncredited actor whose hand is doing the crawling. Considering HAND is from 1963, I am a little surprised as drive-ins by then were on the wane and no self-respecting movie house would have been likely to show this. It is a terrible, wooden movie, with poverty-row sets, little or no action, a virtually nonexistent script, bad music, uncorrected sound and so on. But ... for true film buffs, we get to see a very young Peter "Big Valley" Breck, veteran leading men Kent Taylor and Tris "King of the Rocketmen" Coffin, a pre-"Gilligan's Island" Alan Hale and the alluring Alison "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman" Hayes. A rather unusual cast for a no-budget movie. I guess they were taking what they could get in the dawning era of color TV and the collapse of the studio system.

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.

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

This is a pretty typical piece of Sci-Fi tripe of the late 50's-early 60's period. With the assistence of the Skipper (Yep, Alan Hale) two scientists track down a rougue body part that takes over the mind of a local teen, Paul. The hand controls him through some "cosmic force" that goes unexplained. The hand/arm strangles the poor lad's toadlike landlady before taking over his mind. Paul is less successful in killing people, as he fails to kill both a sour soda shop keeper and his Swedish girlfriend.

Will Paul be able to defeat his foe? Or will he need the help of alley cats? "Dames like this ALWAYS got beer around".