HAND OF DEATH

d. Gene Nelson (1962)

Dr. Alex Marsh (schlock superstar John Agar, Shirley Temple's first husband) is one of those madly intense scientists obsessed with making the world a better place by inventing unspeakable things. 

The main thrust of his work is to combine a hypnotic drug and non-deadly nerve gas, thereby giving the U.S.A a paralyzed and compliant enemy to invade. His reasoning is that it will save the horror and destruction of nuclear war but, as he speaks, his eyes glitter and his mouth grows wet: the idea excites him very much, a lot more than his over-eager fiancee seems to, who is reduced to playing the coquette with his cheerful best friend in desperate lieu of attention from her permanently working husband to be. 

 

One late night, an exhausted Marsh clumsily spills some of his experimental solution over his hands, and tears open his lab coat and Hawaiian shirt in pain and horror before falling onto the bed and hallucinating test tubes, beakers and scurrying white mice. When he awakens, he not only has a first class tan, but the merest touch of his hands means instant death, a lesson his Mexican lab assistant learns very quickly. Ever responsible, Marsh douses the corpse and the rest of the lab in white spirit and puts a match to it before driving off to cause chaos downtown.

A film that runs out of steam very quickly and soon descends into jumbled images of a bloke just staggering about, Hand of Death is most notable for Marsh's transformation from handsome(ish) young(ish) scientist to bloated, blackened monster, as mutation turns his head into a lump of swollen coal and his deadly hands into bunches of over-ripe bananas. 

Interestingly, to disguise the disfiguring condition that has distorted his entire body and robbed him of his speech and sanity, he does the only thing he can under the circumstances: he puts a hat on.  

FREUD: THE SECRET PASSION

d. John Huston (1962)

Freud: The Secret Passion is an important entry in the psychoanalysis sub-genre, not least because it is effectively a biopic of psychiatric practice. Directed by genius journeyman John Huston and starring poor old Montgomery Clift as an obsessive and controversial Sigmund Freud, the narrative alternates between intense hypnotic therapy sessions and gauzy interludes from Freud's own personal history which serve to help him iron out the wrinkles in his own crumpled psyche. Although the depiction of treatment is greatly simplified and the outcomes far more emphatic than in reality, the film does a good job in joining the dots, ably assisted by excellent performances, moody music and a feeling of eerie, scalp prickling mystery. In many ways, Freud is a horror film or, at least, a film about ghosts, where the haunted house is the human mind.

Clift burns at the centre of the film, his damaged face conveying the agony of the seeker as he obsessively pursues his goal, alienating his family and scandalising his peers as he relentlessly moves towards understanding. It's an outstanding performance, but Clift was apparently difficult on set, and this caused the film to go over budget, effectively ending his career.

Clift had always been demanding and, after his near fatal car crash in 1956 became increasingly erratic - but he still made money. In Hollywood, then as now, you can self-medicate and misbehave all you like, but as soon as you start cutting into the profits, you're finished.

INCUBUS

d. Leslie Stevens (1966)

In a village by the sea, the venal and the conceited gather to prolong their worthless lives with the magical, recuperative powers of the local water. Whilst there, they are seduced by succubi: young, blond women who lead them into temptation and then kill them and send their corrupted souls to Satan.

Into this rather odd set up walks William Shatner - a wounded soldier with an incorruptible soul. When a succubi cannot destroy a man, she is fated to fall in love with him - with far reaching cosmic results.

Thrown together quickly by 'Outer Limits' producer Leslie Stevens, 'Incubus' is a truly bizarre film: arty, beautiful, original - yet also clumsy and cheap and very slow moving. It looks like a Bergmanesque bad dream, and the choice of Esperanto as the language spoken throughout is a stroke of strange genius* - it makes an odd film even odder, and lends a suitably disorienting feel to this already atmospheric production.

A few words about William Shatner: I love him, and his presence in something is always a treat. I don't care about his hair and he's always been a good enough actor for me. We'll miss him when he's gone.

* The actors apparently speak it very badly, though, so the film isn’t even a favourite with Esperanto speakers.

HANDS OF A STRANGER

d. Newt Arnold (1962)

A noir-ish take on the much filmed Hands Of Orlac, this is a torrid tale of a self-obsessed concert pianist called Vernon Paris who has his hands mangled to buggery in a car crash. He is treated by an equally egocentric surgeon, who takes the decision to illegally graft the hands of a victim of a gangland slaying onto Paris’ bloodied stumps. The operation is a complete success, if you don’t count the bit where Rose goes insane and starts killing people, first by mistake, later by design. Oh, and afterwards he plays the piano like a chimp at a tea party, so that didn’t work either.

This is a terrifically entertaining film, filled with intense performances and clever but florid dialogue which goes a mile a minute and would probably call a spade a hand operated metal and wood earth penetrating excavation device. It’s also choc-a-bloc with clever camera work and punchy visual motifs, mostly hands and pianos and hands playing pianos. Everything is played in deadly earnest and without a scintilla of camp, which, of course, makes it all ten times better (and ten times camper).

Unlike the Orlac story, we never find out who the transplant hands belong to, so there is little emphasis on the hands as being evil or imbued with evil, although it does make you wonder why they spent the time establishing that the donor was a gangster if they weren’t going to use that as part of the story. Here, the supernatural is replaced by the practical, the psychological: put simply, the accident and transplant snap Paris’ already brittle mind, and drive him to kill over and over again (he breaks his victims fingers, then strangles them). This ripe exchange sort of marks the boundaries:

'If you're concerned with the possibility that the donor might have been some kind of madman, let me assure you that psychotic tendencies don't transfer themselves to the physical extremities after death!'

'You know that for a fact?'

'No, no, I don't!'

Need I say any more? Recommended.

PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

d. Ray Milland (1962)

A sombre, tense film about life in America in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike, Panic in Year Zero! starts happily enough, with Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland) and his family setting out on a fishing expedition. A couple of hours into the journey, Harry sees a series of flashes in his rear view mirror, and stops the car just in time to see a mushroom cloud billowing over what used to be Los Angeles.

What happens next unfolds slowly and meticulously, as Harry tries to get his family to a safe place in the hills before the world goes crazy. In order to do so, he must become a more ruthless and resourceful man than his wife ever expected him to be, a man of decisive action and no little force: within an hour, for instance, he is holding a shop keeper at gun point for refusing to take a cheque then, a little later, he knocks out a filling station attendant who is trying to charge him $300 for $10 of petrol.

Harry has immediately grasped that the war will not just be between America and its enemies but between ordinary people fighting to live, not to mention an element that will use the bomb as an excuse to let their more anarchic tendencies loose. Harry’s wife very much disapproves of her husband’s methods, even after their teenage daughter is raped by two hoodlums. While she cries and wrings her hands Harry tracks down the rapists and kills them, ably assisted by his son (Frankie Avalon), who is not only seeing his stuffy old man in a totally different light, but also getting quite an apprenticeship in the ancient art of survival.

The army picks up the reins after a few days and things start to return to - well, not normal as most of the cities of the world have been wiped out. It’s been a nightmare, of course, but, secretly, you know that Harry and his son are just a little disappointed that it’s all over. A final caption states 'There must be no end - only a new beginning'. Good luck with that. 

It would be interesting to know what the US government thought of the film, as it’s not a particularly edifying or comforting message. But it is realistic, thought provoking and rather good. 

As a final note, there are a lot of automobiles in this film, and most of them have wood stuck on the side of them. It's a rather sweet, forgotten detail: human beings used to make their moor vehicles partially out of wood, as if we weren't quite ready to make the leap from cart to car.

SUDDEN DEATH

d. Eddie Romero (1977)

We’re back in the Pearl of the Orient Seas* again, this time finding out about the hitherto hidden world of ruthless sugar barons, greedy, amoral men who are prepared to displace native people and destroy the environment in order to make a dollar, a sweet, sweet dollar. These men are so cartoonishly evil that, when their nice managing director tries to make reparations to the native people for the wholescale destruction of their homes and habitat, they have his entire family, including two little boys and a baby, shot to death, leaving the badly injured executive for dead.

Out of danger, but still full of grief and shotgun pellets, the man tracks down the legendary Harrison ‘Duke’ Smith (little Robert Conrad, wiry and in very tight trousers), a man who has had an illustrious career as a state sanctioned murderer, terrorist and all round good guy / undercover bastard. Now living out an idyllic retirement in a shack on the beach, he initially refuses to help, giving his about to graduate teenage daughter and a beautiful young girlfriend as reasons to stay alive.

When the man is subsequently burned alive, and Duke’s daughter tuts at him in disapproval, he finally decides to get involved, although his motivation is far from clear. I mean, firstly, teenage girls tut all the time and, even so, the guy is now a charcoal briquette and the rest of his family are already dead, and Duke didn’t know any of them, so what’s the point apart from the fact that feature films aren't usually twenty seven minutes long?

Enlisting the help of his old friend Wyatt, a sharp black martial arts expert, he roots out the conspiracy and takes out the nasty Sugar Barons one by one, at first almost by accident and then with accelerating zeal and sadism. Towards the end, you realise that this noble mission has unleashed a psychopath, a man who is so used to killing that it has become his default setting.

The film’s pacing is glacial for the most part, but then culminates in a spectacular last ten minutes, where even the camera struggles to keep up with the action. The last third of the film is greatly enlivened by the addition of ex-surfing champ and all round lunk / hunk Don Stroud, here playing a dandyish but socially awkward Corsican hitman called in to take Duke out before he can murder everyone in Manila. I like Stroud, but he often makes strange acting choices, here speaking in a weird, cotton-mouthed way, as if he wants to try an accent but is embarrassed by it. The battle between two professional killers ends in a bruising and very bloody encounter in an icehouse, where quick cutting is used to convey violence and to disguise the fact that Stroud is at least a foot taller than Conrad.  

The final moments are not entirely unexpected but are genuinely gut-wrenching, and the use of carousel music to accompany the horror is a masterstroke, symbolising both the grotesque tableau and the breaking of a over-stretched mind. It’s tough stuff.

*The Philippines, mate.

SAVAGE SISTERS

d. Eddie Romero (1974)

Another blog entry, another low budget, high entertainment Filipino made exploitation film, this time a broad romp about a proposed revolution in a fascistic 'banana republic' and the hunt for a briefcase containing a million dollars that will help finance the whole thing. That's the whole plot. 

Inconsequential but fast moving, the film looks like it was fun to make, although post-production stories of having to use the jungle as a bathroom and a cave filled with bats as a dressing room perhaps put a different perspective on it. It's mainly a lot of running around, gun play, martial arts and John Ashley showing off as an amoral but endearing entrepreneur who wears leopardskin underpants and has sex with everybody.   

As is often the case in these films, the female characters are at the forefront, and the three stars are black, white and Asian, which accounts for the film's alternate title, Ebony, Ivory and Jade. Yes, these women are there to be looked at, but they also kick arse and are always one step ahead of everybody else, and their motivations (greed; revenge; freedom) are clear and believable. The Ebony element is provided by Gloria Hendry, a striking looking and talented actress whose greatest performance was pretending to find Roger Moore irresistible in Live and Let Die. 

The usual suspects show up to support the stars: Sid Haig (as a sadistic panto Mexican) and the ever-present, always welcome, inexplicably still alive Vic Diaz (he looked close to death forty five years ago), here playing a bandit called One Eye who wears a tight t shirt that sits atop his pot belly and, when he turns around, reveals far too much bum crack, i.e. any.

The once all-conquering cycle is clearly running out of steam, but is still a good way of passing the time. Life is short, my friends, you must take your meagre pleasures while you may. The body count is ridiculously high, by the way, but even torture scenes are played for laughs so you don't really notice. Good times.