THE HAND
Because only fetishists would pay to see "The Foot"

  Thing from The Addams Family goes on a rampage in this early effort from Oliver Stone.  I tells ya, if you've seen one scene where somebody gets strangled to death by a severed hand, you've seen them all.

On this repetitive premise rests The Hand, a film about a comic-strip writer/illustrator who loses his hand in a car accident.  (you know how there's this knowing chuckle you have to suppress every time you see a horror movie and hear the words "They never found the body"?  It's a good thing that here nobody said "They never found the hand!" in as many words.)  Given that the title is The Hand and not The Man Who Lost A Hand, it's easy to tell who the villain here is and the rest writes itself.

Michael Caine plays The Great Stumpkin in question, and the only thing this movie does to disprove the oft-heard lament that no good actor has appeared in as many bad movies as Michael Caine is make dubious the notion that he's a good actor.  This is not exactly his shining hour, but I guess playing opposite a severed hand will tax even the most gifted of thespians.

Stone's script is a little more thoughtful than most for this kind of thing, and that's appreciated.  Our hero fears replacement on several levels in his life, before and certainly after the accident; a young up-and-comer is threatening to take over his comic strip entirely, his wife is getting a little too flirty with her yoga instructor (and had been making overtures of separation even at the beginning of the film), and she even tells him that her daughter views him less as a father than as a big brother.  (Ouch!  I think.) He gets a grotesquely Borg-like prosthetic which has a mighty grip that can crush steel.  Well, not really, but it's a pretty strong grip.  Surprisingly, nothing really comes of this (maybe being replaced by a cartoon-o-matic at work would've been appropriate), although I did appreciate the brief lesson in just how these prosthetic gripping hands work, something I've always wondered.

But let's not kid ourselves; this is a movie that gives us a several scenes of people writhing on the floor trying to release the grip of this severed hand (which just will not respect the basic laws of motion).  It's such a silly thing to be watching that you can either chuckle the whole way through or just shake your head.  Me, I was doing about a fifty-fifty split between the two.

Near the end, the film tries excusing away a lot of its goofiness, which was actually disappointing; nothing at the end could've made the 100 minutes leading up to it any more effective than they were.  Then the film tries excusing away that excuse, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Oliver Stone has made some really fine films but none of them have for even a moment convinced me that he actually knows what he's doing; some directors figure that if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, some of it's gonna stick.  Here, he's more hunkered-down and straightforward than in his later work, and I found myself wishing he'd discovered his spaghetti technique earlier on; it might be a lot of things, but it's rarely dull.  The Hand is, too often, dull.  (watch for Stone in a cameo as an inarticulate drunk)

It's pretty graphic for a PG-rated movie, with sex, nudity, that really gruesome hand-severing, and one use of the word "fuck", which at the time almost warranted an automatic R right there. (note - after originally posting this, several people pointed out to me that this movie is indeed rated R.  Nevertheless, right there on the tape I rented [a fairly recent-looking print, too] was a big PG)  Maybe this earns points for playing its ludicrous premise straight, but it keeps falling on its ass, and in the end I'll still take Idle Hands any day; it's funnier, and besides, it's got Jessica Alba.

Recommended only to those who are curious about Stone's salad days.

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