FFWD Weekly
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Video Vulture by John Tebbutt This week, I’m taking a look at films featuring severed hands that crawl around making nuisances of themselves. Sometimes they strangle people, sometimes they play the piano and sometimes they just creep about and look silly. Perhaps this sounds like a fairly limited topic, but once I began looking, these movies just started turning up left and right. (Hee hee hee! Sorry.) • The Beast With Five Fingers (1946): The original disembodied-hand-on-a-rampage movie. Plus, Peter Lorre’s in it! Cool! • The Hand (1981): A cartoonist makes the mistake of sticking his hand out the window of a moving car and it gets sheared off by a passing truck. (Let that be a lesson to you reckless types.) The severed hand then comes to life and goes on a killing spree. Sounds like another cheap b-movie with a no-name cast? Nope. It’s written and directed by Oliver Stone, and the star is Michael Caine! • Bride of Re-Animator (1990): Not exactly the classic that its illustrious predecessor was, but good, sick fun nonetheless. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is back and so is his corpse-reviving serum. By now, resurrection of the dead is old hat to our Herbie, but he’s still exploring variations on the theme. At one point, he attaches a revived eyeball to a revived hand and lets it scuttle around. (Mad scientists are such show-offs.) • Quicksilver Highway (1998): This direct-to-video release includes two stories. The first one, written by Stephen King, involves a conflict between a psycho hitchhiker and a possessed pair of novelty chattering teeth! The second segment is an adaptation of an old "Books of Blood" story by Clive Barker, in which hands start developing wills of their own and begin to separate themselves from their owners. A very strange revolution results. ("Seize the means of production! Take arms! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" Hee hee hee! Sorry.) • Summer School (1987): Halfway through this dopey teen comedy, some horror-obsessed students decide to give the faculty a shock by staging a fake chainsaw massacre in the classroom. Severed body parts abound, including a lively hand that crawls on a desk and snatches a tongue from a severed head. After getting yelled at, all the "corpses" stand up, wiping fake blood off and looking sheepish. • The Crawling Hand (1963): The crawling hand of the title comes from an astronaut whose rocket exploded in space. In addition to getting up to the usual mischief, it has the ability to possess folks, giving them a ghastly dark-eyed pallor. It would be gauche to give away the nifty surprise ending.... (Oh, what the heck – the hand gets eaten by a cat! Hee hee hee! Sorry.) • Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992): Zach Galligan sets out to catch the living severed hand from the first movie – he needs it as evidence in a murder trial. His pursuit takes him through a number of time periods/horror movie parodies. (A character points out that he’s stuck in "God’s Nintendo game.") Watch for the spoof of The Haunting, which features some classic Bruce Campbell-in-pain comedy. • For more severed-hand action, check out Severed Ties, The Addams Family (with "Thing", the cinema’s most lovable disembodied hand), Evil Dead II, and Demonoid, Messenger of Death starring Samantha Eggar.

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