The Hand, Oliver Stone’s second full-length feature and first big budget production, takes Marc Brandell’s hard-sale premise from his novel, The Lizard’s Tail (given that–since Robert Florey’s 1946 feature, The Beast with Five Fingers–The Addams Family appeared with the phalange-laden character, Thing), and rises to the challenge of making a suspenseful psychological thriller in a vein comparable (but by no means equal) to Mary Harron’s American Psycho.
Jonathan Lansdale (Michael Caine)–in the midst of martial strife with this wife, Anne (Andrea Marcovicci)–loses his writing hand in an automobile accident. Unable to continue his career as a comic book artist, he moves to California and takes a teaching position at a small college. It is there he begins his affair with a student, Stella Roche (Annie McEnroe) and, mysteriously, people whom John loathes begin to go missing before resurfacing as homicide victims. Is the culprit John’s missing appendage doing his subconscious bidding or is John suffering from selective amnesia after enacting murderous rampages?
Granted, regardless of Thing’s cultural influence by way of The Addams Family, Stone’s plot is, a-hem, far-reaching at best but, wisely, Stone never makes the severed appendage the central focus of the film. Instead, we are forced to contend with the very volatile and unpleasant character of John–played to a scathingly effective degree by Caine throughout–and his dilemma (to add more salt to the wound, after we wince at the thought that, after his accident, John now has a focus for his viciousness, Stone drags the razor blade across his audience’s exposed nerve endings by having John be escorted by a colleague in a stick shift). What’s even more remarkable than the fact that Stone keeps his plot viable and entertaining while refraining from lapsing into camp, is how he plausibly poses the question to his audience of whether or not John is the murder-at-large or if, indeed, John’s missing hand is the culpable party.
Predictably, the titular character is posited as a metaphor and, yes, Stone opts for the most viable symbolism given that he is making a work of horror: John’s phantom appendage is presented as its owner’s unbound id. Ironically, though the hand represents, in part, John’s collapsing marriage, it is this facet of the character’s life which leads to John’s life-altering accident. Whereas a novice director might attempt to have the otherwise cumbersome premise carry itself, Stone parallels his theme with John’s orphaned comic character, Mandro, which–when David Maddow (Charles Fleischer) steps in to continue the storyline on behalf of the publisher–Mandro’s creator objects to the liberties which the new artist has taken with his first born: David has made the comic character, much like John, self-conscious. After establishing the ambiguity as to who the killer might be, and then tainting our opinions with Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill)–a psychologist working alongside John at the university–uttering such less-than-ambiguous lines as “You can do anything you ever dreamed of [during a blackout] and never had the guts to do” and “The unconscious can do anything” while permitting the character’s castration anxiety to be bombarded with event after event where John is deprived of something within his life–his hand, wife, signature ring, Mandro, Stella, and daughter (Mara Hobel), Stone sardonically spoofs the readymade epilogue in Alfred Hithcock’s Psycho by giving his audience exactly what its wants–denial.
Aside from the requisite boo moments and sometimes expendable special effects, it is evident that Oliver Stone, with only one full-length feature under his belt, has complete control of his narrative in that several of the themes within the film are foreshadowed–much in the same manner that Hitchcock does–in the opening scene of the film, thus making The Hand a delight to watch in that any reservations one might have approached the should-be hokey premise with are subsequently dispelled as we are greeted shortly thereafter with a fun, intriguing, and overall satisfactory psychological horror effort.
Conversation piece: Oliver Stone appears in the film as a wino.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
