Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #172 The Hand (1981)
He seems nice!
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
I’m pleased to announce that I recently picked up another desperately needed ongoing Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 series exploring the complete filmography of Oliver Stone. The series began last month with an Oliver Stone movie so obscure I did not know it existed until very recently: the middling 1974 psychological shocker Seizure.
We’re following it up with a middling 1981 psychological shocker I have heard of: The Hand. The Hand confirms that while Oliver Stone may be many things, many of them overwhelmingly negative, he most assuredly is not a Frightmaster.
As a young filmmaker, Stone had a modest talent for mood and atmosphere, for subtly surreal, dream-like tableaus but true horror utterly eluded him because he thought he was too goddamn smart and classy to be scary.
Tweet for me! They took away my account!
Caine reportedly wanted to be in The Hand because he had such a good experience making 1980’s Dressed to Kill but I think it’s more likely that he agreed to star in the movie because they agreed to pay him handsomely for his services.
Stone tries to channel DePalma in his direction of The Hand. He set out to make a horror movie of ideas, a classy psychological shocker about a troubled artist who experiences unimaginable physical trauma that awakens something dark and ugly and ominous from somewhere deep within him.
On that level, Stone failed. He fucking failed. He failed completely. Even more disastrously, he failed to make a movie about Michael Caine being menaced by his disembodied killer hand that’s even the least bit fun.
On the contrary, Stone seems to find the notion that a movie about a dude being terrorized by a phantom limb should be cheesy fun faintly heretical. In Stone’s hands, this material is handled with a seriousness better suited to a Holocaust drama.
Let’s give the boy a hand-literally!
Stone wants you to know that this is a very serious film about sex and sin and guilt and shame and loss that just happens to revolve around an evil version of Thing from The Addams Family who is less mysterious and spooky, or altogether ooky, than murderous and incapable of guilt or remorse, being a sentient hand and all.
In a performance that reportedly helped Caine pay for a new garage for one of his houses (seriously), the paycheck-loving Alfie star plays Jon Lansdale, a very successful comic strip creator whose Prince Valiant-like adventure cartoon has made him wealthy and famous.
Jon begins the film enjoying a moneyed, privileged existence with precocious daughter Lizzie (Mara Hobel, who played Christina Crawford in Mommy Dearest the same eventful year she made this) and ethereally beautiful wife Anne (Andrea Marcovicci).
But even at the very beginning there are cracks in the family’s perfect facade. Jon wrestles with fits of rage and intense moodiness and Anne’s relationship with her yoga instructor is way too close for her husband’s liking.
Then one awful afternoon Jon loses a hand in a freak accident and begins to unravel psychologically. He’s unable to find the missing hand and soon begins blacking out and being haunted by violent, disturbing images.
With his marriage not quite working out, the superstar cartoonist moves to California to teach cartooning and begins an affair with Stella (Annie McEnroe), a gorgeous, much younger student.
Stella expresses her interest in the much older man sexually by spontaneously taking off her shirt in a manner that implicitly but powerfully conveys, “Here are my pert young naked breasts. Now let’s have sex.”
Jon responds in a manner that just as powerfully and implicitly says, “You had me at ‘here are my pert young naked breasts.”
Stella quickly enters into a sexual relationship with her Jon, who is disgusted to discover that she’s also in a physical relationship with Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), one of his fellow faculty members.
Every attractive woman in The Hand is sleeping with every gross sleaze bag you think she might be canoodling against her better judgment, and that includes Jon, whose life devolves into a disorienting blur of binge-drinking, blackouts and explosive rage.
Soon the people closest to Jon begin dying grisly, violent deaths. Is the culprit Jon, coping badly with the loss of his hand by projecting onto it a series of violent murders he himself is responsible for, or has his disembodied hand become sentient and is now acting as its former owner’s violent, rampaging id?
Being a VERY serious movie for VERY serious cinephiles, The Hand is ultimately ambiguous as to who exactly is doing all the killing but after a certain point I stopped caring. Then again, writing that I stopped caring at a certain point suggests that I was emotionally invested in The Hand and that could not be further from the truth.
That The Hand is watchable at all despite a complete lack of scares is largely a testament to Caine’s performance, which is engaging if unexpectedly and uncharacteristically restrained.
Stone seems to realize that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to scare audiences with the murderous danger posed by something about the size of a Barbie doll. If The Hand were to show the titular murderous appendage too extensively the effect would undoubtedly be unintentionally comic. The hand would be less scary than silly.
But if Stone doesn’t show the titular hand enough it becomes difficult to tell the killer disembodied hand apart from the hand that isn’t possibly running around killing people in violent defiance of everything we know about human biology.
As a filmmaker Oliver Stone inspires strong reactions, positive and negative. He has been heralded as a genius and a maverick and derided by haters like myself as a pompous hack.
But my response to The Hand, like my response to Seizure, can succinctly be summarized as “meh.” It was, you know, whatever.
The Hand isn’t good enough to be a film of genuine quality nor enthusiastically, energetically bad enough to be much fun. Instead it occupies a deeply unsatisfying middle ground as a movie that has deluded itself into thinking it’s art when it should be proud, vulgar, unapologetic trash.
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