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.

Shudder Saturday: The Stuff (1985)

This is the second film in as many days that I have revisited with a very different "head on my shoulders". I first saw The Stuff when I was about 12 years old. It was a horror (apparently) that I'd already heard plenty about, with most people being interested in it due to one fun scene occurring during the final act, and I wasn't disappointed when I finally got to see it. It had the strangeness, it had the gloopy moments, and it had that fun scene as a highlight. AND I wasn't too scared by the time the end credits rolled. In fact, I don't think I was scared at all.

What I can see nowadays is that The Stuff is a damn fine satire, something that would be obvious to many viewers but wasn't obvious to 12-year-old me. It's a film about whatever makes the special sauce so special. The trademarked recipes of Coca Cola and those KFC flavours? The Stuff highlights the dangers of not knowing exactly what we're eating . . . especially when it is something that could also be eating us.

Things get started quite quickly, when a group of workers discover a white substance seeping out of the ground. It's sweet, it's addictive, it's soon packaged up and being sold to every consumer as The Stuff, a fine new product with no artificial ingredients and no calories. But it's not as good as it might first appear. It might even be alive, which alarms a young boy (Jason, played by Scott Bloom) when he sees it move. He's not the only one who becomes aware of the sentient nature of The Stuff. There's also David 'Mo' Rutherford (Michael Moriarty), an ex-FBI agent now working on his own, and currently hired by businessmen who want to know more about the sensation that is affecting their own businesses.

Written and directed by the talented Larry Cohen, The Stuff has just the right mix of comedy and thrills to hold up as a fun bit of entertainment. It might not be as scary or gross as it could be, with the horror coming more from the idea than the effects on display, but it has a couple of really good set-pieces (one involving Jason hiding inside a tanker) and is a lot smarter than some might expect, although fans of Cohen should always know that he likes to deliver a decent amount of subtext and thought-provocation with his thrills.

Moriarty is great in the role of Mo, especially in the times when he explains why he goes by that name (altering it slightly, depending on who he is speaking to), and Bloom is very good as the teenager lashing out at something without any idea of how to properly deal with the situation. Andrea Marcovicci is the main female, an advertising executive who sees the error of her ways, and she does equally good work, and you get Garrett Morris giving a memorable turn as 'Chocolate Chip' Charlie, as well as small roles for Danny Aiello and Paul Sorvino.

Time has been kind to The Stuff, perhaps because viewers can now approach it as the satire it is rather than the horror it was marketed as, and I think it's one well worth revisiting, or checking out for the first time. It may even become one you go back to often. Because, as the advert says, enough is never enough.

7/10

You can try to get enough of The Stuff here.
Americans can have their fill here.