La mano siniestra

I was expecting this to be a horror film of the disembodied hand variety (as would be the case with its 1981 namesake, which, incidentally, I watched fairly recently); instead, it's an eccentric, cheap but surprisingly tolerable Edgar Wallace-type policier which, for its modest length (running barely over an hour), turns out to have an unnecessarily complex plot – wherein myriad characters (many of them having lost the titular body part) are involved with organ-trafficking, impersonation, suicide, murder and the like!

The plot has a WWII Burma-set prologue in which three British soldiers are captured by the Japanese; the latter seek to learn the position and number of the opposing Allied forces and, to this end, two of the prisoners suffer the loss of a hand. Then, we cut to the present day, where it transpires that the third had turned cowardly – so his companions' sacrifice was in vain – and, rather than having the maimed duo seeking the traitor out for revenge, it is he who's still persecuting them! The finale, however, sees the villain getting his just desserts in a most ironic (yet totally predictable) fashion.

Investigating the weird goings-on are a couple of Scotland Yard detectives; bafflingly, one of the most frustrating aspects to this intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying film is the peculiar fact that a lot of the male actors here boast strikingly similar physiognomies and, so as not to get hopelessly confused, one has to keep reminding himself of just who the various characters are and what they represent!

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Henry Cass; Produced by Bill Luckwell; Released in America by American-International Picture. Screenplay by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton; Photography by James Harvey; Edited by Robert Hlll, Music by Wilfred Burns. Starring: Derek Bond, Reed de Rouen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Ray Cooney and Gwenda Ewen.

Unfolding in a perfectly linear style, this is a gory story of Japanese mutilation of British prisoners in Burma leading to a bizarre series of London mutilations and murders several years later. This programmed murder-mystery becomes a horror film due to the hand-amputation fetish, but its lack of style and atmosphere reduce it to the routine.

Director Henry Cass's final exploitation film before he embraced Moral Rearmament.

Both very cheap and very nasty with an incredibly complicated plot devised by a young Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, who also kept costs down by both playing coppers investgating a gruesome discovery made in a then contemporary East End of payphones with button Bs (when the NHS was already staffed by foreign nurses).

In only sixty minutes it also manages to throw in Japanese wartime atrocities and incredibly only carried an 'A' certificate from the British censor. But AIP were sufficiently satisfied with it to release it stateside.

This is a strange addition to the British 60's Horror collection- though in truth it also fits somewhere between mild thriller and fairly obvious whodunnit. First qu: why do the film's producers go to the trouble of setting the opening scenes as "Burma - 1946", when Japan had surrendered in August 1945, ending WW2? An inauspicious start.

The acting is a little stilted, although interesting to see Ray Cooney (the future king of farce) standing in as Ronald Leigh-Hunt's sidekick. Unfortunately the screenplay isn't Cooney's best and the editing is so frantic it must have been done with the finesse of a chainsaw. Despite all this and its obvious shoestring budget, there's some fun to had for us cult b+w geeks...

When I first saw this movie in the 1960's, it seemed an interesting little piece, which stood up quite well as a double-bill feature (with Village of the Damned, maybe?). However, now it just comes across as a rag-tag effort with not much substance, and virtually no style whatsoever. The opening scenes are quite effective, and are by far the best in the film. What follows is largely disappointing, and the storyline has more holes in it than a colander - it just barely makes any sense. This isn't helped by the poor direction & editing, as well as the stilted acting, especially by the lead detective played by Ronald Leigh-Hunt, who seems to hesitate, in thought, every time a line is to be delivered. The transfer to DVD is also poor and, all in all, the end product is a big let down.