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.

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.

PRESSURE POINT

d. Hubert Cornfield (1962)

I've always loved films about psychoanalysis, mainly because they provide so much scope for offbeat and inventive attempts to turn the objective camera into a subjective eye. I particularly enjoy dream sequences, haunting visuals, unusual staging, blurred edges, atonal electronic music and lots and lots of mime. Pressure Point is almost mainstream in many ways, but has some fascinating components that keep it plenty weird enough for consideration on this somewhat specialist blog. 

The very great Sidney Poitier is the prison psychiatrist, Bobby Darin the prisoner patient, an American Nazi imprisoned when the USA entered the war with Germany. They are diametrically opposed from the outset, of course, but the tension between the racist loser and the black high flier sparks some soul searching from each of them, which makes for a fascinating conflict. 

Their sessions together open up all sorts of odd, abstract flashbacks from Darin's less than illustrious past, sometimes staged in anonymous dreamscapes (the scenes where a young Darin bullies his imaginary friend), sometimes in Poitier's office (the venue for a fantasy about Darin ordering an elephant to stand on his pathetic hypochondriac Mother's head). It's pretty intense, particularly the restaging of a unsettling incident in which Darin and his drunken friends play Noughts and Crosses on every available surface in a bar - including the landlord's wife.   

Although the narrative is framed as a fairly conventional tale of triumph over adversity, Pressure Point does a lot more besides, riveting the attention and stimulating the imagination, and the performances, particularly from the under-rated Darin, are excellent. 

THE COUCH

d. Owen Crump (1962)

Charles Campbell (Grant Williams) has issues: he's a thief and a fantasist with delusions of grandeur; he's choking with anger and sexual rage; he pretends that his hated dead father is alive, and his beloved alive sister is dead, and, every night at seven pm, he goes into the busy streets of the city and stabs a stranger to death with an ice pick. He's also in love with his psychiatrist's niece and, god help her, she feels the same way about him.

Nearly noir, nowhere near normal, most of the action takes place in public places rendered desolate and full of shadows: out of hours offices, a lonely spot overlooking the neon lit city, the busy streets at night where thousands of people walk shoulder to shoulder and fail to notice one another. No wonder some of them go a little crazy although, to be fair, our protagonist takes it as far as he can without actually falling off the edge of the planet.  

Grant Williams is a favourite actor of mine. He's somewhere between a matinee idol and a method actor, although he has a curiously pitted face, and his skin looks like a sheet of low density sandpaper. Williams plays the psycho killer as charming and weird, managing to keep his character constantly off beam but without ever rolling his eyes, gnashing his teeth and playing the obvious villain. You even feel sorry for him. When he hears something he doesn't like he shoves his fist in his mouth and bites down on it, a fairly standard bit of dramatic business apart from the fact that, when you see his hand a little later, he has actual bite marks on his knuckles. It's not necessarily acting, but it is impressive.

THE MANSTER

d. George Breakston and Kenneth G. Crane (1962)

Regular readers may have noticed that many of the films written about here are concerned with transformation, mainly of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable sort: people shrink or grow; they die but stay alive; they become bestial and unhinged or taken over, mostly at the gnarled hands of bad science, pure evil or alien conquest. Is that the worst thing, do you think? To become other, to turn into someone or something that you can't manage, and to know it is happening, to feel yourself slipping further and further into the void. Is it a metaphor for the human condition? Does transformation evoke old age, illness, death? Yes, in these films transformation is death, and can only be cured by more death including, ultimately, your own. I need some Propranolol.

In The Manster, jaded US foreign correspondent Larry Stanford is on his last assignment in Japan when he meets genius geneticist, Dr. Suzuki. Suzuki is interested in 'the beginnings of life' and seems nice enough despite keeping his brother and wife in the basement, having turned them into a hairy white ape and a disfigured hag respectively. While Larry has a Mickey Finn induced nap, Suzuki injects him in the neck with a serum designed to turn the hapless journalist into an entirely new life form.

In time honoured fashion, the first Larry knows about it is when he notices he has a very hairy hand. Next, he is startled to discover an eyeball embedded in his shoulder. After a few out of character homicidal rampages, an additional head emerges from him, malevolent and wizened, resembling a fairground coconut with comedy teeth. Head two is murderously angry with everything and everybody, not least Larry, who he wants to get away from as quickly as possible, ultimately leading to a violent split between host and parasite. 

As Larry reverts to human form, his erstwhile spare head and body conveniently having fallen into a live volcano, there is barely a second to wonder if Larry will pay for his crimes before the film's abrupt end. Let's hope the Japanese police are prepared to blame it all on the psychopathic man monkey and let Larry go home.  

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE

d. Joseph Green (1962)

'Let me die, let me die'

The human brain is the most complex thing in the Universe and, since the Enlightenment downgraded the soul to a might have rather than a must have, it's also the most important thing we possess. Little wonder, then, that the brain fascinates scientists the world over, particularly in films like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, where the line between scientific genius and obsessive fanaticism is a very thin one indeed.

Doctor Bill Cortner is full of the energy and arrogance of youth, a man in a hurry to prove his theories on the transplantation of limbs and organs to the extent that he has become unethical, performing illegal operations using body parts pilfered from the hospital where he works. When his fiancee Jan is decapitated in a car crash, he takes the opportunity to pluck her severed head from the burning wreckage, wrapping it up in his jacket and taking it to a secret lab, bringing it back to life with a 'new special compound' that not only reinvigorates the head but makes it telepathic.

Jan's head, plonked on a metal tray full of chemicals and filled with tubes and pipes, is pretty pissed off about the arrangement and asks repeatedly to die. Bill has other ideas, however, checking out strip clubs and beauty contests in search of a suitably pneumatic replacement chassis before settling on a facially scarred but otherwise intact nude model.

From here, it all gets quite complicated, despite being defiantly non complex. All I can say is that between the giant homicidal freak locked in a closet and poor decapitated Jan's overpowering death drive, it can only end in flames.