Easily influenced by "The Beast with Five Fingers", film-maker Oliver Stone makes his major film debut tackling early 80s horror pulp starring Michael Caine as a comic book illustrator who loses his hand in a freak car accident (that sequence is torturous to watch) and then suddenly he starts to have tormenting visions of his missing hand coming to life committing murders. Making things worse, is the rocky relationship with his wife and his daughter being caught up in the middle of it. A drearily intense psychological shocker, which bestows a strong tailored performance by a professional Caine, but there's also good support offered by Andrea Marcovicci, Bruce McGill, Annie McEnroe, Rosemary Murphy and minor turn by Tracy Walter. The force-fed script plays around with the idea of our central character, is he losing his marbles due to the stress of the ordeal and what's going on around him (family issues) or is his decapitated hand moving around on its own knocking off people. I don't think the mystery is hard to guess, but still Stone's direction is ably pulled off in creating an unsettling nightmare with a convincingly edgy Caine to sell it. It's done in a serious tone, which this type of story has been recycled many times before and even mocked. But it works here. There's one interesting technique, where Stone's changes the screen to a washed out black and white when the hand attacks its like reality is becoming a comic world. Maybe this is a clue, especially when blackouts are mentioned? Also the sound FX, along with James Horner's music score are simply unnerving and dread induced complementing the paranoid state growing. The camera work is beautifully implemented and there are numerous POV shots of the hand at work. Kind of liked the horrific closing too, which throws a spanner into the mix although could have been easily discarded. "The Hand" was a lot better than I expected.
"I don't think it was really alive".
"I don't think it was really alive".