The Hand Reviews

Before adopting the mantle of Hollywood's last angry liberal man, writer-director Oliver Stone (SALVADOR; PLATOON; WALL STREET; TALK RADIO) made this fairly awful horror film--it's a good thing he found his true calling. Poorly adapted from Marc Brandel's The Lizard's Tail, the film follows newspaper cartoonist Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine), whose career and marriage go out the window after an auto accident claims his right hand. Abandoned, alienated, and angry, Lansdale soon discovers that his disembodied hand has returned and is crawling around killing everyone who has done him wrong. Is this merely a psychotic manifestation of Lansdale's rage? Is he, in his madness, pinning his own murders on a disembodied hand only he sees? Or is there really a loose right hand skittering about strangling Lansdale's friends and associates? Don't expect many answers from the movie, for Stone hedges his bets toward the end and vacillates, leaving the whole thing infuriatingly ambiguous. The special effects aren't very good either--in fact, they're laughably worse than those in THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946).