The Hand is not going to win any points for originality, but it is carried by Oliver Stone's sure handed direction and a chilling central performance by Michael Caine. Caine plays Jon Lansdale, a popular comic strip author/artist who not only has to deal with his marriage falling apart but loses his hand in an accident.
Cartoonist Michael Caine's marriage is on the rocks, then he loses his drawing hand is a freaky car accident. Then even freakier said hand starts killing people known to him!
This is a perplexing British thriller that seems to be confused as to what type of film it wants to be. Is it any post-war drama of surviving a horrific prisoner of war situation?
It starts with Japanese commander Walter Randall interrogating three British prisoners of war, demanding information on their regiments and dispositions. Two refuse to answer and have their hands chopped off.
Much darker than usual from this production-line studio. A squad of soldiers in Burma led by Derek Bond are captured by the Japanese and their captors try to elicit military secrets from them.
Director Henry Cass's final exploitation film before he embraced Moral Rearmament.Both very cheap and very nasty with an incredibly complicated plot devised by a young Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, who also kept costs down by both playing coppers investgating a gruesome discovery made in a then contemporary East End of payphones with button Bs (when the NHS was already staffed by foreign nurses).
Oliver Stone's second movie was this classy, big-studio, high-budget horror movie which has a memorable, extremely well-done "freak accident" scene and great special effects by Carlo Rambaldi, but plods along too slowly, especially considering that the central big "twist" becomes obvious quickly (if you think you've guessed what's happening right from the first murder....you're probably right).
I just saw this on my phone and I wanted to comment on the aspect of psyche vs reality. It is really futile to discuss if the hand is "real" because it is not possible obviously for a severed hand to act like that.
Psychological or supernatural? Oliver Stone's The Hand keeps the viewer stumped until the end.