The Crawling Hand

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.

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".

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.

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!

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.