No Good Very Bad Movies 23: The one by Oliver Stone

 

Title: The Hand

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

As I write this, I’ve been developing ideas for either wrapping up this feature, spinning it off, or both. I got the idea to do a run with a theme: Very weird films by famous or notorious directors. That immediately brought up one film which I’d had in mind all along, and another I had definitely meant to look up sooner or later. The present selection is the odd one, a movie I saw not long after I started doing reviews but never had a use for anytime since, until I thought of doing this. I’m doing it first because it’s the one I had to get on a tight time table, and the one that really makes me mad, in no small part because it’s easily the most polished and professional movie to come up in this feature. I present The Hand, a movie with the talents of Oliver Stone, Michael Caine, and the best practical effects guys who ever lived, and it is… just… stupid.

Our story begins with a quick introduction to an artist named Jonathan Landsdale who does a Conan-like comic strip, and his wife and daughter. The marriage is clearly strained, as the couple get into an argument that ends in an automobile accident. In the aftermath, he is left with his drawing hand severed and never found. As he struggles with his new disability and worsening personal and professional life, he begins to have visions of his missing hand wandering with a life of its own. Soon, strange accidents begin to befall those he believes have wronged him. Meanwhile, he takes a teaching position that comes with a cabin, and soon strikes up romance with a college girl, yet the disturbances soon follow. Is the hand really come to life, is it all in his head, or is it his own subconscious revenge? Can he salvage his old life or the new one? Spoiler- even the people making this movie don’t really care!

The Hand was a 1981 film directed by Oliver Stone from his own screenplay, based on the novel The Lizard’s Tail by Marc Brandel. The film was produced Edward R. Pressman, evidently as a Canadian-American project as the budget was reported as 6.5 million Canadian dollars. It was Stone’s only feature-length directorial credit between his 1974 debut with Seizure and 1986, when he made his mainstream breakthrough with Platoon. The film starred Michael Caine as Jonathan Landsdale, with Andrea Marcovicci as Mrs. Landsdale and Annie McEnroe as his student Stella. Effects for the hand were provided by a team that included Carlo Rambaldi (see Conan The Destroyer, ET), Thomas Burman (Cat People) and Stan Winston (see Invaders From Mars, Leviathan, etc,etc). the soundtrack was composed by James Horner. The film had a reported box office of $2.4 million, less than half its budget. It was also poorly received by critics, with Peter Nicholls describing the film as “deeply confused”. The film was somewhat more successful on home video, and is currently available in digital form. Pressman and McEnroe married, and have a son born in 1987.

For my experiences, I suppose what made me vaguely interested going in was how iconic the premise of the disembodied hand is, compared to how few films really use it, especially on “straight” terms. The definitive treatment was and remains the late-Gothic 1919 horror story “The Beast With Five Fingers” and its 1946 cinematic treatment with Peter Lorre (which I still haven’t seen). Since then, it’s become fairly routine to have undead (not to mention aliens, robots, etc.) whose bits keep coming when dismembered, as in Splinter.  To make the self-driven hand a main antagonist remains far more novel and most obvious in the realm of parody/ comedy, as in Evil Dead 2 and Idle Hands.  With that context, the present film stood out even sight unseen as both earlier than many it could be compared to and seemingly completely serious. With further hindsight, this was all a very strong indication of the problems to come.

Moving forward, the central reality of the film is simply that there is indeed little if anything that can be considered funny, intentionally otherwise. Caine and most of the rest of the cast play their roles very seriously, which brings out a sense of domestic awkwardness in the film’s better moments. The story told is likewise very much in the tragic form as the protagonist goes from troubled to abusive, even if there isn’t much effort to make us like the protagonist or anyone else. In certain lights, this is a big part of the problem, as Caine’s character never pushes the emotional gauge far past neutral. He isn’t sympathetic enough to be a “fallen hero”, not entertaining enough to be a lovable rogue, and without a trace of the gleefully over-the-top villain who would keep us watching just to see his comeuppance. It doesn’t help that he never seems distressed or even disoriented by his supposedly worsening blackouts and dissociations. On that front, I cut off a longer rant just to compare to Bruce Campbell as Ash. He’s obviously no equal to Caine, but the one thing he’s good at is making you like his character and absolutely believe he is in a terrible and terrifying situation.  Here, the vibe is a classy actor trying to play a character who can barely pretend to care, and the result is that we don’t either.

Then what really tugs at my mind is the effects, and this aspect of the film that first got me to its strange vibe: This is not simply a movie that could have been better, but one that could have been more effective if it was worse. The hand looks every bit as good as it should, yet it’s oddly unimpressive. The obvious issue is with the concept; the hand succeeds so well that it looks like any other hand, and it was already clear that it’s hard to make this scary, especially with the surprisingly low body count. What gets strange is comparing it to movies that are by any standard inferior, like the stop-motion finger spider in Bride Of Re-Animator or Winston’s own loose arm in Dead And Buried. The most egregious yet instructive comparison is with Dead Alive, where virtually everything looks like kaka on purpose. What that very odd film succeeds in is creating a sense of the surreal, to go with an already psychotic level of energy. By comparison, the effects here simply feed into a dull linear realism that directly undermines the movie’s already thin pretenses. Then this is as good a point as any to rant about the ending, which is no more or less than a cop-out interrupted by another cop-out.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I really couldn’t come up with anything better than the set-up sequence. A few minutes into the film, Jonathan and his spouse are arguing during a drive through the countryside. In the midst of the quarrel, the lady speeds up and tries to pass a slow-moving truck. Suddenly, they find themselves hemmed in between an oncoming truck and a big brick of a car crowding in from behind. In the most amusing touch, Jonathan tries to wave back the other driver back, and of course he’s having none of it. Naturally, a gruesome collision follows, in which we don’t really see anything though the chain of events is quite clear. The emphasis is on the aftermath, as Jonathan/ Caine rushes out. It’s as grisly, cynical and sleazy as the movie is supposed to be, and in my usual refrain, what follows does not live up to it.

In closing, what I find worth commenting on is my background as a self-advocate, which is certainly a major reason I have gone as I have on this movie. As I keep saying, I have enough problems that I can get the stoned-out-of-your-mind experience going off my meds. Throughout my time doing reviews, I have regularly dealt with movies that try to imply themes of mental illness and sheer unreality by doing weird and random for its own sake. What’s really noteworthy is that the ones that come anywhere close to succeeding wouldn’t really change if  the subtexts were explicit. If The DayTime Ended, House or Death Bed were framed as a schizophrenoid episode or a bad acid trip, they would still be every bit as weird and disconcerting as they already are. These movies may not be that good in their own right, but they have the authenticity that keeps eluding polished mainstream fair. And with that I’m calling this one done.