The Crawling Hand (1963)

Look, when I watch  film entitled The Crawling Hand (1963) I expect to see plenty of crawling hand action.  While the trailer gives the impression that we're set to see a living severed hand strangling people left, right and centre, the reality is that the movie musters only five minutes or so of disembodied hands causing such mayhem over an eighty minute running time.  Which is pretty meagre return for a movie that has said hand as its title monster.  Feeling as if it should have been made in the fifties, The Crawling Hand is a pretty typical B-movie, featuring cut price effects, (the hand itself is pretty underwhelming), the regulation small town setting and the usual shady government agencies trying to keep everything under wraps.  Even its plot - an astronaut is possessed by a murderous alien force, with only his hand (and part of his lower arm) left after his capsule explodes on re-entry, with the student who finds the still living hand now possessed by the murderous force - could easily have been taken from one of the plethora of science fiction horror films that proliferated in the fifties.  But, while it might come on like one of those AIP B-movies tailored for teen audiences, (there's a beach setting, juvenile leads and even some soda shop action), even boasting Herbert L Strock, who had presided over some of those flicks, as director, The Crawling Hand was, in fact, an independent production, trying to cash in on the teen horror market.  

In its favour, though, The Crawling Hand does feature B-movie favourite Allison Heyes as its female lead, while Alan Hale Jr plays the local, befuddled, Sheriff (as he often did when not marooned on Gilligan's Island).  It also features a novel demise for its five-fingered menace: being chewed up by local cats, (although it 'lives' to crawl another day, although, thankfully, no sequel was forthcoming).  But, as I said, there just isn't enough hand action (so to speak), with most of the plot focused either on space scientists either arguing or conducting bumbling clandestine investigations, or the activities of the alien possessed student, (you can tell he's possessed by the fact that he suddenly starts sporting lots of black make up around his eyes).  Unusually for this sort of film, its anti-hero is allowed some kind of redemption once free of the hand's influence - we last see him in hospital, apparently forgiven for all the assaults and attempted murders, joking with the Sheriff and the scientists.  Even his girlfriend now seems OK with him.  The Crawling Hand is another of those movies which is quite fun, in its own crude and derivative way, while it is on, but which ultimately offers nothing particularly new or memorable.