The Hot Spot Rating
Hand, The (1981)
Starring: Michael Caine, Andrea Marcovicci, Annie McEnroe, Bruce McGill
Director: Oliver Stone
Synopsis: Comic strip writers severed hand returns from the undergrowth for justice!
“silly and nasty” Time Out
“dull” Video Movies Guide
“embarassment” Maltin
“very silly ” Blockbuster Guide
“sleep inducing ” Horror of the 80’s
“thoughtful” Creature Features“
A suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.”— Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“Mr. Stone’s screenplay is tightly written, precise and consistent in its methods, and seemingly perfectly realized in the performances of the very good cast headed by Mr. Caine.”— Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“A director of very real talent.”— Vincent Canby, The New York Times, referring to Oliver Stone after reviewing The Hand.
“An overwrought misfire that is best left to horror film completists.”— AllMovie
“Strictly for Caine filmography completists or Stone enthusiasts.”— The Terror Trap
“Inescapably cheesy.”— Rob Gonsalves, eFilmCritic
“The Hand is just as silly as the fictional comics drawn up by its protagonist.”— Brett Gallman, Oh, the Horror!
When the poster boldly warns that “Nothing will prepare you for… The Hand“, you naturally assume it’s indulging in the usual exploitation hyperbole.
As it turns out, it wasn’t exaggerating.
Nothing quite prepares you for the mind-numbing experience that unfolds over the next ninety minutes—although it feels considerably closer to nine hundred.
Michael Caine stars as Jon Lansdale, a gifted comic-strip artist with the appearance of an irritable Stan Lee after a particularly bad morning. Already suspicious that his wife is having an affair, his life deteriorates further when a car accident—courtesy of her less-than-exemplary driving—severs his drawing hand at the wrist.
Traumatised by the loss of his career-defining asset, Jon desperately attempts to adapt. Unfortunately, his left hand proves hopelessly inadequate, his publishers quietly replace him with a younger artist, and his once-promising career collapses before his eyes.
His increasingly weary wife decides she’s had enough of living with an embittered, permanently miserable husband and moves away. Jon takes a teaching job to keep himself afloat, but before long a series of bizarre murders begin occurring around him. At the same time he starts suffering disturbing blackouts and vivid hallucinations in which he senses the presence of his severed hand, now apparently wandering around pursuing murderous revenge of its own.
One by one, anyone who crosses Jon seems to meet a grisly end.
The family cat is the first casualty, throttled and unceremoniously hurled through a window—presumably mistaking the detached hand for some mutant rodent. Shortly afterwards Jon brushes past a disagreeable tramp, played by writer-director Oliver Stone in a brief cameo. Minutes later the homicidal hand emerges from behind a pile of rubbish and strangles him with gleeful efficiency. One suspects the hand may simply have objected to Stone’s screenplay.
The film lumbers predictably towards the inevitable revelation that the severed hand represents Jon’s subconscious rage—his Freudian id made flesh, or rather, disembodied flesh. Eventually the hand begins acting independently, even turning against its former owner in a final burst of psychodramatic symbolism. By this point, however, both Jon’s sanity and the film itself have completely unravelled.
Michael Caine deserves a unique place in the Hall of Fame for great cult turkeys. The Swarm remains one of the most magnificent disasters ever committed to film, while his gloriously overblown performances in Hurricane, Brian De Palma’s superb Dressed to Kill, and later the immortal Jaws: The Revenge have ensured his permanent place in bad-movie folklore. His wonderfully earnest portrayal of Hoagie in Jaws: The Revenge alone is enough to secure cinematic immortality.
To Caine’s credit, he attacks The Hand with complete professionalism, despite looking fully aware that he has boarded a sinking ship.
The film’s greatest failing is that it isn’t entertainingly awful. Great cinematic disasters usually possess an accidental sense of fun; this one remains relentlessly humourless and po-faced throughout. Oliver Stone clearly intended a serious psychological study of trauma and repression, but the central premise—a homicidal severed hand stalking its victims—simply isn’t substantial enough to sustain such earnest treatment.
Ironically, Sam Raimi would demonstrate exactly how this concept should be handled a few years later with the unforgettable possessed-hand sequence in Evil Dead II, embracing the absurdity with manic comic invention.
Stone, by contrast, insists on taking every ludicrous development with deadly seriousness, and the result is a joyless slog. Whether or not he later tried to distance himself from the picture, it’s hardly difficult to understand why.
Ultimately, The Hand isn’t frightening, thought-provoking or even enjoyably ridiculous. It’s simply dull—an astonishingly tedious slice of psychological horror that never once capitalises on its deliciously absurd premise.
A severed hand on a killing spree ought to have been outrageously entertaining.
Instead, it merely gives the audience the overwhelming urge to wave goodbye.
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