The Crawling Hand

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.

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!

One of my guilty pleasures is watching 50s and 60s schlock horror films. So, when I found this DVD listed on Netflix, it seemed like a natural choice for me! Well, after having seen it, I can happily report that it was every bit as bad as I expected--meaning that it was fun to sit and laugh at the ineptness of this film.

The movie begins with hearing that the space program has once again lost contact with one of their ships returning from the moon. They assume the astronauts are dead but don't know why. Then, suddenly, one of the men appears on the view screen. Oddly, he now has eyes like a raccoon or Robert Downey and he is screaming about having an urge to kill. He begs the people on Earth to push the self-destruct button before the ship can return and so naturally they do(!).

Later, some horny teens are at the beach and bits and pieces of the ship are scattered about--including a human arm that naturally made it through the atmosphere. In such a case like this, what would you do? Yep,...take the arm home and stick it on a shelf!! And, since this is a low-budget horror film the arm comes to life and begins to kill--though how a disembodied arm can so easily find people (even though it's missing eyes and ears) is beyond me. And, when it fails to kill our dumb hero (the one who brought it home), he, too, becomes a raccoon-eyed maniac!

The film is dumb but what makes it worse is that again and again, scenes were not re-shot even though they had obvious mistakes. My favorite was when the hero woke up in the back of an ambulance. When he saw the corpse next to him, he screamed AND then the corpse blinked its eyes!! Also, this same lady was seen breathing at one point AFTER she died! So my recommendation is that if you like good film, keep looking. If you like schlock and could use a laugh, give this one a try.

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.