The Crawling Hand

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!

This is not a great movie. It's definitely a B movie. It was clearly done on a low budget, belongs to a generally unremarkable genre, and has a plot that leaves much to be desired. For all that, it's actually not nearly as bad as would be expected.

The major premise (that in space there is some kind of immateriel life form that possesses human flesh and wants to kill people) is obscurely bogus, yes, but many much better movies are open to the same criticism. SpiderMan's premise is hardly more realistic, for example, but that is a major motion picture and gets very good reviews.

Then there's the plot. Sure, it's a little thin, but the movie does *have* a discernible plot (not something you can take for granted in a B-grade movie), and what is more, the plot is quite coherent. You do not find yourself confused part-way through about what is going on, which of the people on the screen are from which group (good guys, bad guys, et cetera), or any of the other vagaries that often haunt the plots of lousy movies. The plot isn't deep, but as far as it goes it is solid.

The acting, moreover, is not bad. I did not notice a single instance of noticeably poor acting. Not that anyone's going to win any awards for the acting in this movie, but they don't do anything to break all pretenses of mimesis and make you want to scream at the actors, either. This is fairly unusual, especially for such an obviously low-budget flick, and extra-especially in the horror genre. You expect, in a movie of this sort, to be disgusted when actors stutter, scream at the wrong times, leave long pauses between lines, and have wooden, unlifelike expressions on their faces. I didn't notice any of that, unless you count characters who were at the time possessed by the alien life form, and that was clearly a deliberate charactarization of the menace as quirkily unhuman.

As for the writing, I've seen worse. The characters were mostly flat and static, but horror movies seldom make any pretenses about having round, dynamic characters. Only a couple of the characters were really obvious stereotypes (notably, the scientists' boss and the deputy).

Probably the worst thing about this movie is that the ending quite obviously left things wide open for a sequel.

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.

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.

"The Crawling Hand" was completed in December 1962 as companion feature to Joseph F. Robertson's previous production "The Slime People," and AIP later picked it up to fill out the bottom half of a double bill with "The Time Travelers" (shooting title "Tomorrow You Die"). Director Herbert L. Strock was already an old hand (!) at low budget science fiction, at the helm for "Gog," I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," and "How to Make a Monster," and the presence of a veteran cast offsets the dull sections of another monster with teen appeal. Top billing goes to Peter Breck and Kent Taylor, two space force scientists spending the opening reel in somber mode, their latest astronaut repeating the failures of before, a successful moon landing and takeoff yet vanishing before reaching Earth (sexy Allison Hayes has three scenes as Breck's loyal secretary). Out of the blue, the pair receive a desperate communication from the supposedly deceased Lockhart (Ashley Cowan), living without his long depleted oxygen supply, eyes gone completely black, rambling about his unresponsive hand and its repeated impulse: "kill!" As he nears the earth's atmosphere he begs them to 'push the red button' to destroy the ship and himself, an unusual request that is actually granted by Taylor. We are then introduced to science major Paul Lawrence (Rod Lauren) and his Swedish girlfriend (Sirry Steffen, a former Miss Iceland), whose fun filled frolic on the beach is rudely interrupted by the gruesome sight of a disembodied arm and hand, still wearing the uniform of the dead astronaut Lockhart. Perhaps the opportunity to be noticed by Washington personnel compels Paul to return to the beach and gather the hand in a shower curtain and return to his one room apartment, leaving his unusual find on a shelf downstairs behind a few jelly jars, still alive to awaken landlady Mrs. Hotchkiss (former screen beauty Arline Judge). She believes her cat is responsible for the broken glass and dutifully cleans it up, pouring herself a drink before bed, where the hand is waiting to strike. The sound of a gunshot and fallen lamp brings Paul downstairs to find her strangled to death, calls Sheriff Townsend (Alan Hale) to report the incident, then tries to phone Washington long distance, only to have the hand crawl up a bannister and begin strangling him. The Sheriff's arrival drives it off, sending the fingerprints off to DC for identification, bringing both Breck and Taylor out to California for a proper investigation. No one can predict what Paul will do next, escaping from the ambulance, attempting to strangle the local soda jerk (Syd Saylor), doing the same to his girlfriend in the middle of an apology. The alien force that only afflicted astronaut Lockhart's hand has now taken possession of unwitting Paul, causing his eyes to go black under the influence, unable to resist a homicidal urge yet never succeeding in killing anyone. He finally has it out with the undying appendage, moving it from his downstairs closet to the trunk of his car, somehow crawling to the front for another bout around his throat as he skids into the local dump. Even a broken bottle can't seem to kill the hand, but some feral cats begin eating the bloodied flesh to release Paul from the evil force, the authorities satisfied that a few disembodied fingers caused this curious crime wave. Definitely more watchable than "The Slime People" (no fog here to obscure the action), its decidedly offbeat premise undone by dreadful dialogue (Kent Taylor guilty of the most clunkers), but a bad movie that goes down easy. Comic actor Syd Saylor barely finished his scenes before he died of a heart attack, his soda shop owner earning the original title with his entreaties to 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die!' Producer Robertson himself supplied the crawling hand, occasionally confusing his left with his right; only the landlady is actually killed, the hand itself kept offscreen while Paul does the honors in a strangling spree that results in no deaths. Actually better than its reputation as a low grade answer to Peter Lorre's "The Beast with Five Fingers," later entries like Michael Caine's "The Hand" or Samantha Eggar's "Demonoid" failing to turn the tide in favor of creeping hand movies. There are genuine chills in the opening reel, as a supposedly dead astronaut appears on a monitor screen to implore his superiors to successfully destroy his ship and himself, eyes gone black to signify some sort of alien possession, though whatever possessed a young man to spend more time with its five fingers than his girlfriend's entire body is beyond comprehension. Alan Hale, a year before the role of the Skipper on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND changed his fortunes for the better, plays it straight as the suspicious sheriff, Ross Elliott as his less than capable deputy, Tristram Coffin gets one scene as a security chief, Richard Arlen (who missed out on Joseph F. Robertson's previous classic "The Slime People") shows up as the disgruntled head of space operations. An eye catching delight is former Miss Iceland Sirry Steffen, showing off a fine bikini figure before screaming her lungs out at the sight of the disembodied hand, while former scream queen Allison Hayes is demurely clad in a nondescript screen farewell as a secretary who vanishes after three short scenes.