Ominous October: The Crawling Hand (1963)

To celebrate spooky season, we view and review lesser-known scary movies from the golden age.

RODNEY BOWCOCK:  There’s no better place to start except for the beginning, so here we go.  An astronaut is coming back from a successful moon landing though things aren’t going well.  He’s run out of oxygen and while he can communicate with mission control, the video monitors show him in bad shape, begging to ship to be blown up as his hand is making him “do things…kill…kill”.

Meanwhile, a couple of college students are cavorting on the beach when they discover a disembodied hand, which one of them decides to keep, unaware that the hand is possessed by a murdering alien.  Before long, a couple of people are dead, and one of the teenagers, Paul (Rod Lauren), is full on possessed and starts doing some attacking himself.

SAMANTHA GLASSER: The story is actually decent. In the 60s, space travel was on everyone's mind, so it is a timely subject. It was also an unknown frontier, and the prospect of meeting alien life wasn't unthinkable. With a big budget, this could be a respectable thriller, but the way it is executed makes it a comedy instead. In the scene where the hand attacks Mrs. Hotchkiss, it moves in an unnatural way, obviously pulled up abruptly on a string. The hand is rarely shown to be completely severed from a body, so we know there is an actor to the edge of the frame awkwardly strangling people.

RB:  The story was by Joseph Cranston (father of Bryan Cranston), Malcolm Young and Bill Idelson.  Idelson is probably best known today for his role on The Dick Van Dyke Show or (if you’re lucky), the sublimely brilliant radio show Vic and Sade, but he was also an accomplished screenwriter of sitcoms, including a lot of the best episodes of The Andy Griffith Show.  Idelson wrote several books about the writing craft, but, for unknown reasons, he didn’t mention this movie in any of them, so we’re left kind of at a loss to understand why he wrote this film.  But one of his books is titled Writing For Dough, so I suppose we can guess.

SG: This movie has a 3.3 star rating on IMDB and the reviews on Letterboxd are pretty abysmal. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It is just the sort of schlock I love. The fear elements are completely unbelievable and hokey, and we can see the strings behind the special effects. It feels like the kind of movie you might make at home with your friends for fun. However, this one has the added bonus of a familiar cast for fans of the golden age including Richard Arlen, Arline Judge, Kent Taylor, Alan Hale Jr., and Ross Elliott. Lauren does his best with the material in the leading part. Sirry Stephen, also known as Miss Iceland, is his cute girlfriend.

RB:  Movies from this era that feature character actors from the 30’s and 40’s are lots of fun.  It’s always nice to see people working in films long after we’ve stopped thinking of them, but of course, they can sometimes look a little worse for wear.  Very few among us don’t 20+ years after our heyday.

SG: There are things that are genuinely eerie. The opening sequence is well done; enough information is withheld to keep us engaged in finding out what is going on. The scene where Paul wakes up in the van on the way to the mortuary next to the dead body is also good. The ending with the mysterious item in the box even suggested later better usage of the same idea in Kiss Me Deadly and later Pulp Fiction. Paul's transformation when he becomes possessed would have been much more effective with a bigger budget. That could have been the wolf man or Mr. Hyde moment of the film, but instead we get paltry black eyeshadow.

RB:  The script actually has a fair sense of pacing and building of suspense.  It was shot on an approximate $100,000 budget, so I’ll give the emo-style eyeshadow a pass, this once.

SG: There are many flaws. The law enforcement officials are completely incompetent. At the initial crime scene, the sheriff picks up the lamp with a handkerchief but the gun with his bare hands. The ambulance drivers try to explain away the second body and deny responsibility for it. The FBI agents act immobilized and helpless when they're attacked even though there are two of them against a single severed arm. I also laughed at the way they shoehorned rock-and-roll into the story by including a jukebox, you know, for the kids. As much as I enjoy seeing Judge in movies of the 30s and 40s, I have to give her a failing grade for continuing to noticeably breathe when she is meant to be dead. Although I didn't notice it while watching, apparently both a right and left hand were used for the crawling hand.

RB:  Potentially less noticeable than the things that you note, the film also suffers from really clumsy editing.  Scenes jump with weird abandon and while it was shoehorned in, it was still a fun song (NO DANCING!).  It all added to a surreal dreamlike state.

SG: Motion Picture Exhibitor said, "There are several moments of suspense and terror, and the production, direction, and acting, as well as the technical effects, are all adequate. The surprise ending is an asset."

Box Office magazine wrote, "The black-and-white has a sharp realism about it, and the running time is sufficiently trim to prevent too much dawdling, story-wise." In other words, thank goodness it's short.

RB:  Clocking in at just over 90 minutes, it’s short but not that short. Could’ve maybe benefited from a bit tighter editing but considering much of the rest of the drive-in fodder that was unspooling across the country, this isn’t too bad at all, and it is above average for the genre.  Three and a half stars.

SG: This movie would go over well at a party, and I will absolutely watch it again. It falls nicely into the so-bad-it's-good category.  (Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured it in 1989.) Four stars.