The Crawling Hand

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.

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.

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

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!