The Hand

1981 **

As I've been participating in this contest for the last five years, I've been slowly collecting movies about rogue hands. If I ask myself why, the most obvious answer is for the comedy of it: who's afraid of a crawling hand, really? Maybe if you were asleep it could crawl onto you and poke at your eyes, but you'd just wake up and put it in a drawer and go back to sleep. However, there is certainly something that haunts me about the idea, and it might be that I saw The Hand back in the Video Connection days and only remembered the good parts.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Lansdale, the creator of an ongoing newspaper strip about a Conan analog called Mandro. While he and his wife Anne are arguing in the car, she gets fed up with the slow truck in front of them and the fat, honking lady behind them. She speeds around the truck only to face an oncoming vehicle, so Michael Caine sticks his arm out the passenger window and tries to wave the fat lady back, saying "get out of the way, you stupid cow!" Our friend Mike Cain used to imitate that line a lot; he thought it was hilarious. Anyway, Jonathan Lansdale doesn't find it hilarious because the resulting collision lops off the hand he was stupidly waving out the window.

This is the movie's peak, and it hits less than ten minutes in. The accident makes you cringe, Caine's agony is completely believable, Anne's efforts to help him are hampered when her face is sprayed with blood -- it's genuinely horrible. Any power this movie has is in the depiction of the terrible loss suffered -- Caine later delivers another real moment of pathos when he turns to his wife and breaks down crying, saying "it's so ugly!" about his stump. Worse still, he's an artist who has lost his drawing hand, which is another place where this film resonates with me. I fear the idea of having my hands chopped off more than the idea of drowning in a pit of live cockroaches. That's in part because I'm a sculptor and model builder, but mostly it's just because I'd feel cut off from the world in a sickening way.

Right! Okay! So where's the murderous crawling hand already? Is this a Lifetime movie about a brave handicapped guy or what? Unfortunately, that's pretty much what happens. Remember the Simpsons moment when Sharry Bobbins threatens to make Bart read a Playdude article that's "Norman Mailer's latest claptrap about his waning libido"? This movie becomes that threat: a slow, heavy-handed investigation into "men's issues" that nobody ever asked for.

Lansdale and Anne had been arguing about a trial separation when the accident struck; he refused to be separated from his family, despite the growing estrangement from Anne and the fact that his daughter looks like a troll doll.

Realistically, the issue is dropped for a while due to his needs and Anne's enormous guilt over the accident. So he goes to New York, where she enrolls in The Origin Institute, a haven of fools who do yoga and don't eat meat and discuss their feelings and touchy feely crap like that. In the guise of breakthrough therapy she starts openly flirting with the foofy, leotard-wearing head of the institute. Meanwhile, the new artist on Mandro completely rewrites Landsdale's script and turns Mandro into a talky, soul-searching puss puss, and of course the publishers are really excited about this new approach because the seventies just ended and everyone's riding a decade-long wave of sensitive guy mishmash. Boooooring. Where's the crawling hand?!?

Oh, there it is, lurking around in Landsdale's apartment, committing dastardly acts like hiding the big ugly ring it used to wear and then putting it back.

Abandoning the continuation of Mandro, our stumpy hero takes a teaching gig at Laid Back College in northern CA, where he lectures to spaced-out college kids and eventually starts sleeping with one of them. Then about four hundred years later we get a hand attack. Sigh.

Okay, this movie really honked me off and here's why: the long and tedious psych 101 presentation of this idea that poor, figuratively castrated Lansdale can't be the big tough Man-dro that he wants to be, so his disembodied hand becomes his id for him -- or does it? While it seems like the hand has more power than a rat-sized monster would, holding people down while strangling them and presumably dragging the bodies away afterwards, it's also left wide open that Landsdale has cooked the whole thing up in his busted little mind. This culiminates in a ludicrous mano-a-mano showdown (sorry, couldn't help myself) in Landsdale's garage, in which he's outsmarted a couple of times by his own hand and eventually rendered unconscious. He awakes to the cops, and we get another ponderously drawn-out scene while they ask him to open the trunk of his car and he protests that there's nothing in there. And then, surprise!

Boy howdy, that is one roomy trunk you've got there Mr. Lansdale.

If I had any shred of sympathy left for this flick, it evaporated when I saw the crossed eyes on the girl victim there. It's like director Oliver Stone (yes, that Oliver Stone) felt like he hadn't quite completely ruined the horror yet, so he added that to make sure.

Do you remember me from Snowbeast? Right, no, of course you wouldn't.

There's a simple reason all this male psychobabble nonsense gets under my skin like it does: Jonathan Lansdale is a complete JERK. I don't know if it's meant to be part of the presentation or not, but besides being a good, loving father to his daughter he treats all the women in his life like dirt. Dirt that he desperately needs to have around, but as soon as he's got what he needs it's off to Lansland again. Any hope that this character can be interesting or sympathetic is grounded by this flaw, and we're left with the irritatingly bogus head-shrinking.

And speaking of, The Hand's offensive recipe of blunt psychology caps itself in the final scene, in which we see what the hard science of mental investigation looks like.

That's right, he's strapped to a chair in an institutional basement, wires all over his head so scrolls of paper can record his reactions while a lab-coated woman with a German accent summarizes the movie for us in an enthusiastic torrent of pop-psych jargon.

Of course I'd totally had it with this movie at this point, but I was amused at the state of this "lab."

Just lean those big machines that don't do anything over in the corner there, by the empty water cooler bottles.

Dude! Where the hell did I leave that box of Popov vodka?

I'd remembered the closing big whammy from when I saw this as a teenager. After the extensive "it was in his head the whoooole time" explanation, we're treated to the big "OR WAS IT" when the hand takes out the pseudo-shrink. Duh-duh-DUH. And yes, I just ruined the whole movie for you. In fact, I ruined it with that picture at the top. Believe me, you're better off.

What's too bad is that maybe the story of an artist's hand somehow having its own life could be worthwhile, but before long The Hand gets far too bogged down in its rudimentary character work to be scary or even remotely engaging. Two stars for the effective accident scene and generally touching on my phobia points, but it would be more fun to spend 104 minutes organizing your garage.