Sunday, December 26, 2010

The Hand (1981), Oliver Stone.







This is a majestic sequence where cartoonist Jonathan Landsdale loses his hand in a car accident, streaking the entire side of a tractor trailer with blood and continuing to play blood fountain all over his macrobiotic,  loft-lovin' New York wife!  Enjoy!  Because that's as good as it gets.  

Once upon a time, A&E was a fancy new cable channel --- and yet, it played The Hand constantly.   But really, The Hand is one of the lesser "murderous hands on the loose" films.  The characters are all quite static, and there's no tension - we know he's a mental case that blames his severed hand for all his problems.  Having lost his source of income to the guy who later played the voice of Roger Rabbit, Caine escapes to California, which is depicted as a dreary place where it pours rain constantly and is populated entirely by country music loving rednecks!  The scene between Oscar winning Caine and Bruce McGill (below, left) who starts every sentence with "Ah reckon" is quite the thing.  Just off him already!  This disk had commentary by the director, Oliver Stone, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.  This isn't as bad as "Manos" Hands of Fate in the hand-related B-movies but next time you're hankering for something of quality from this specific genre, I'd highly recommend The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) instead.  

This trunk is roomy, Ah Reckon.

4 comments:

Adrian Mendizabal said...

WOW! I love this Oliver Stone? Where did you find it! I love Stone's Natural Born Killers! It blew me away!

Peresblancs said...

You should be able to rent it on DVD. I agree, it is awesome.

Adrian Mendizabal said...

Apparently, we do not have this on DVD here in the philippines. Mind you, where do you live?

Peresblancs said...

In North America - but you could try ebay or amazon.com which does have it for sale (don't know if they ship to the Philippines, though)! Good luck finding it!