The Crawling Hand

"The Crawling Hand" was completed in December 1962 as companion feature to Joseph F. Robertson's previous production "The Slime People," and AIP later picked it up to fill out the bottom half of a double bill with "The Time Travelers" (shooting title "Tomorrow You Die"). Director Herbert L. Strock was already an old hand (!) at low budget science fiction, at the helm for "Gog," I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," and "How to Make a Monster," and the presence of a veteran cast offsets the dull sections of another monster with teen appeal. Top billing goes to Peter Breck and Kent Taylor, two space force scientists spending the opening reel in somber mode, their latest astronaut repeating the failures of before, a successful moon landing and takeoff yet vanishing before reaching Earth (sexy Allison Hayes has three scenes as Breck's loyal secretary). Out of the blue, the pair receive a desperate communication from the supposedly deceased Lockhart (Ashley Cowan), living without his long depleted oxygen supply, eyes gone completely black, rambling about his unresponsive hand and its repeated impulse: "kill!" As he nears the earth's atmosphere he begs them to 'push the red button' to destroy the ship and himself, an unusual request that is actually granted by Taylor. We are then introduced to science major Paul Lawrence (Rod Lauren) and his Swedish girlfriend (Sirry Steffen, a former Miss Iceland), whose fun filled frolic on the beach is rudely interrupted by the gruesome sight of a disembodied arm and hand, still wearing the uniform of the dead astronaut Lockhart. Perhaps the opportunity to be noticed by Washington personnel compels Paul to return to the beach and gather the hand in a shower curtain and return to his one room apartment, leaving his unusual find on a shelf downstairs behind a few jelly jars, still alive to awaken landlady Mrs. Hotchkiss (former screen beauty Arline Judge). She believes her cat is responsible for the broken glass and dutifully cleans it up, pouring herself a drink before bed, where the hand is waiting to strike. The sound of a gunshot and fallen lamp brings Paul downstairs to find her strangled to death, calls Sheriff Townsend (Alan Hale) to report the incident, then tries to phone Washington long distance, only to have the hand crawl up a bannister and begin strangling him. The Sheriff's arrival drives it off, sending the fingerprints off to DC for identification, bringing both Breck and Taylor out to California for a proper investigation. No one can predict what Paul will do next, escaping from the ambulance, attempting to strangle the local soda jerk (Syd Saylor), doing the same to his girlfriend in the middle of an apology. The alien force that only afflicted astronaut Lockhart's hand has now taken possession of unwitting Paul, causing his eyes to go black under the influence, unable to resist a homicidal urge yet never succeeding in killing anyone. He finally has it out with the undying appendage, moving it from his downstairs closet to the trunk of his car, somehow crawling to the front for another bout around his throat as he skids into the local dump. Even a broken bottle can't seem to kill the hand, but some feral cats begin eating the bloodied flesh to release Paul from the evil force, the authorities satisfied that a few disembodied fingers caused this curious crime wave. Definitely more watchable than "The Slime People" (no fog here to obscure the action), its decidedly offbeat premise undone by dreadful dialogue (Kent Taylor guilty of the most clunkers), but a bad movie that goes down easy. Comic actor Syd Saylor barely finished his scenes before he died of a heart attack, his soda shop owner earning the original title with his entreaties to 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die!' Producer Robertson himself supplied the crawling hand, occasionally confusing his left with his right; only the landlady is actually killed, the hand itself kept offscreen while Paul does the honors in a strangling spree that results in no deaths. Actually better than its reputation as a low grade answer to Peter Lorre's "The Beast with Five Fingers," later entries like Michael Caine's "The Hand" or Samantha Eggar's "Demonoid" failing to turn the tide in favor of creeping hand movies. There are genuine chills in the opening reel, as a supposedly dead astronaut appears on a monitor screen to implore his superiors to successfully destroy his ship and himself, eyes gone black to signify some sort of alien possession, though whatever possessed a young man to spend more time with its five fingers than his girlfriend's entire body is beyond comprehension. Alan Hale, a year before the role of the Skipper on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND changed his fortunes for the better, plays it straight as the suspicious sheriff, Ross Elliott as his less than capable deputy, Tristram Coffin gets one scene as a security chief, Richard Arlen (who missed out on Joseph F. Robertson's previous classic "The Slime People") shows up as the disgruntled head of space operations. An eye catching delight is former Miss Iceland Sirry Steffen, showing off a fine bikini figure before screaming her lungs out at the sight of the disembodied hand, while former scream queen Allison Hayes is demurely clad in a nondescript screen farewell as a secretary who vanishes after three short scenes.

This is a pretty typical piece of Sci-Fi tripe of the late 50's-early 60's period. With the assistence of the Skipper (Yep, Alan Hale) two scientists track down a rougue body part that takes over the mind of a local teen, Paul. The hand controls him through some "cosmic force" that goes unexplained. The hand/arm strangles the poor lad's toadlike landlady before taking over his mind. Paul is less successful in killing people, as he fails to kill both a sour soda shop keeper and his Swedish girlfriend.

Will Paul be able to defeat his foe? Or will he need the help of alley cats? "Dames like this ALWAYS got beer around".

THE CRAWLING HAND looks like something straight out of the 1950s, when TV was beginning to upset the Hollywood applecart, forcing the major studios to look for new angles and gimmicks (Todd A-O, Cinemascope, VistaVision, Cinerama, 3-D, stereo sound, and big-budget color remakes of old films) and small indie directors like Ed Wood were having a field day turning out tons of drive-in drivel. HAND is about a dead astronauts's severed hand seeking revenge on the living. Yowsa! How's that for a plot! In some scenes, you can actually spot the uncredited actor whose hand is doing the crawling. Considering HAND is from 1963, I am a little surprised as drive-ins by then were on the wane and no self-respecting movie house would have been likely to show this. It is a terrible, wooden movie, with poverty-row sets, little or no action, a virtually nonexistent script, bad music, uncorrected sound and so on. But ... for true film buffs, we get to see a very young Peter "Big Valley" Breck, veteran leading men Kent Taylor and Tris "King of the Rocketmen" Coffin, a pre-"Gilligan's Island" Alan Hale and the alluring Alison "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman" Hayes. A rather unusual cast for a no-budget movie. I guess they were taking what they could get in the dawning era of color TV and the collapse of the studio system.

Delightful hokum from the early sixties and the directorial seat of Herbert Strock. A space flight to the moon brings back the dead body of a man who warns his space station to kill him...and the thing that has partially possessed his body. The man is literally blown to bits on his return flight home, but one lone appendage happens to make it intact to the beaches of California. That's right.....THIS is the Crawling Hand! Two teenagers, very well-versed in science and knowing about these manned flights to the moon, come across the hand. Rod Lauren as a teenaged scientist takes the hand home for scientific glory, but soon becomes a pawn in the hand's quest for murder and body possession. This film has many faults and you will laugh your hands off(okay it's a cheap pun) at the film's bad acting, cheap sets, and incredibly inept scientific logic. But make no mistake....this is a fun film to watch and has a lot of charm. The make-up of the people strangled by the hand is pretty chilling and Allison Hayes and Alan Hale(the Skipper) have some fun in their roles. One scene that really stands out is a hand's on strangle of a soda shop owner with a juke box playing menacingly in the backdrop. I'm sure some statement of misbegotten youth was being made.

I saw this movie on the Saturday night "Sci-Fi Movie" when I was a kid in the mid to late 60s. It scared me then. I had to find a copy and watch it again almost 40 years later. Upon this second viewing, the part that scared me the most is that there may have been people who took this seriously! I can't believe grown men (OK people for the PC world we now live in) could actually invest time and money on a project like this but I'm glad they did because I must admit that I am a fan of "bad horror movies." They don't get much worse than this so of course I enjoyed it. As another reviewer pointed out, there is almost no acting. Also, there isn't much of a plot, the special effects are terrible, if not, non-existent. All of which adds up to one of the best bad horror movies I've ever seen. Very entertaining in that regard.