Sat 20 Jan 2007
Someone please introduce me to the sad but enlightened room of TV Guide (that’s who they work for, right?) writers that pop this stuff out. Access to the “info” button does not count as a formal meeting.
“The Hand”: Michael Caine, Andrea Marcovicci [1981]
A caroonist loses his hand in a car accident, but it comes back to crawl around and kill people. [1:45] [R] One and a half stars.
….not sure if any of you Doofus Wainwrights know this, but Oliver Stone wrote and directed The Hand. That would place it after the, shall we say, “different” Midnight Express (screenplay only), and before Scarface (which he claims to have kicked cocaine in the process of writing….while in France). The Hand is a coke problem up on the fucking screen, people.
January 30th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Did you watch it, though? I got about 40 minutes into it. Caine plays this temperamental Frazetta-esque strip writer with a deteriorating marriage, whose hand goes FLYING off in a country road car accident. Doctors give him a metal hand to cover up the stump, but we’re led to believe that the severed appendage is out, blackened and decrepit, running around and killing. I’m guessing he’s the killer all along. The whole thing can be viewed as an allegory for giving into one’s vices, which makes your description pretty legit.
January 31st, 2007 at 8:09 pm
The Hand is good-bad. I didn’t know about the kicking coke tie-in with Scarface. That movie’s bad-bad. A lot of unfulfilled fantasies fuel the critical acclaim that tihng gets. If that’s the result of kicking coke, he should have kept snorting.