Filmstruck Friday: The Hand (1981)

To give you the most basic summary, The Hand is a film about a comic book illustrator named Jon Lansdale (played by Michael Caine) who loses his right hand in a car accident. While struggling to accept his new life with half of his familiar roster of phalanges, and while plodding on through a marriage situation that is clearly in trouble, Jon takes a job at a community college, rents a small cabin in the woods, and seems unaware that his dismembered hand is still moving around, ready to act on his angrier impulses and resolve a number of issues with fatal violence. Unless it's all just the vivid imagination of our main character.

The Hand is a strange film experience, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that it was written and directed by Oliver Stone. He's not necessarily a bad choice, although he makes many bad decisions, but the plot and the way things play out make this the kind of film that you would more readily associate with his friend, Brian De Palma. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was one of those projects that a number of people discussed in theory before Stone got the opportunity to make his film.

Based on a novel that I am unfamiliar with, "The Lizard's Tail" by Marc Brandell, this takes a bit of adjustment on the part of viewers who may be expecting something along the lines of The Beast With Five Fingers, And Now The Screaming Starts! or even Body Parts. It's more in line with The Hands Of Orlac, in the way that it shows the main character starting to unravel, and it's a shame that Stone can't decide on how he wants to play things. Shots of the hand about to commit grave misdeeds are too few and far between while the script doesn't ever have enough interesting statements to make about the clearly-unstable mental state of Caine's character. Things are packed in to the last few scenes, but they're too little too late, and also come as no surprise to viewers who have been waiting for something to be revealed ever since the halfway point.

Caine is fine in his role, and he's called upon to be the focus of most of the scenes. Andrea Marcovicci does well in a much harder role, she's the wife who fell out of love with her husband a long time ago, Bruce McGill is as great as he usually is, and Annie McEnroe appears just in time to derobe and give the main character a temporary ego boost.

If you go into The Hand expecting a schlocky horror movie about a killer hand then you'll probably end up disappointed. If you go into it expecting a portrait of a traumatised and shattered individual then, well, you'll still probably be disappointed, but hopefully less so. This is a Stone project that sees him holding back when he should have just pushed things further, either in terms of the bloodshed or the skewed viewpoint of the main character.

4/10

Here's a film with a much better animated hand.
And Americans can get it here.