Thursday 16 January 2020

THE CRAWLING HAND












d. Herbert L. Strock (1963)

The Crawling Hand is a low budget film which uses the space race to colour a fairly traditional horror story. In it, a moon shoot ends in disaster when, on the return journey,  the rocket goes haywire. Despite having run out of oxygen some twenty minutes previously, the Astronaut's frightened (and frightening) face appears on the mission control monitors, alternately hissing ‘kill!’ and ‘press the red’, i.e. the button that will destroy him and his ship. As the ship is about to crash into a populated area, mission control press the button and the ship explodes, showering debris all over the coastline including, on a secluded beach, the Astronaut’s arm, sheared off at the elbow, but still wearing its glove and spacesuit sleeve (I was reminded of J.G Ballard at this stage, almost certainly not the film makers intention).
A brilliant but brooding young science student (‘I’m going to the top – and I’m making it on my own!’) wraps the severed arm in a shower curtain and takes it back to his digs where it promptly strangles his landlady and then takes him over: forcing him to do bad things until he gets flu and his high temperature weakens the arm to the extent that he can break the link and stab the severed limb repeatedly with a broken bottle. Hungry junkyard cats finish the job. Or do they? No, not really. The uncanny is not so easily disposed of.     
The Crawling Hand has a sliver of science behind the narrative, the reasoning being that mixing Earth molecules (pronounced ‘mole-ecules’ by the Chief Scientist) with space matter might possibly result in a hybrid life form that grows incredibly quickly and wants to kill everything. Yes, it’s tenuous, but this isn’t the sort of film that has to try and justify itself, so the vague attempt is actually rather charming. 

The best scenes feature the creepy hand crawling around, using its burned and degraded fingers to pull itself towards the next throat it wants to throttle. Full of filler and filmed on the hoof (the actors don't stop when they make mistakes) the concept of a parasitic virus from space owes a  lot to Quatermass, but mainly resembles a slightly wonky ghost train ride. Tellingly, the protagonists are attractive teenagers, hopped up on soda pop, young love and The Bird Is The Word by The Rivingtons, which features heavily throughout.


There is probably a monograph to be written about crawling hands in the movies, from The Beast With Five Fingers through to The Evil Dead and beyond. They're mainly horror films, of course, severed hands don't normally creep around in anything else. 

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