Not quite the hands of Orlac

It's time for yet another movie that's been in the FXM rotation recently and is going to be on again. The time, that movie is Hand of Death, it's going to be on tomorrow at 4:50 AM and again Monday, Sept. 21, at 3:00 AM.

A mailman shows up at an isolated research station out in the California desert. Not seeing the signs not to enter, he opens the fence and walks in, collapsing immediately among a flock of equally-collapsed sheep. Thankfully, they're not dead; the scientist, Alex Marsh (John Agar), is working on nerve gases and the mailman is only knocked out, able to be revived with oxygen. But the experiment shows Marsh is on to something.

With that in mind, Marsh goes down to Los Angeles to see his nominal boss, Dr. Ramsey (Roy Gordon), and Ramsey's secretary Carol (Paula Raymond), who just happens to be Alex's girlfriend. Alex claims he's on the trail of a nerve gas that can be combined with a hypnotic, which will neutralize the enemy, and make them mind-controlled for weeks! Just think about how that will end the spectre of nuclear war. Or think about what it would do in the wrong hands. Just don't think about the plot hole that hypnotic drugs don't work like that.

At any rate, Alex has to do more research, so he goes back to his lab out in the desert to proceed in some extremely shoddy research practices that would put the scientists in Night of the Lepus to shame. You'd think with such dangerous nerve agents being used, Alex would be wearing the sort of hazmat gear he and his assistant have on at the beginning of the movie, but no. To make matters worse, he works himself past the point of exhaustion, falling asleep in the lab. When he wakes up, he accidentally knocks over one of the flasks, getting some of the liquid on his hands. Despite washing it up, he doesn't bother to see a doctor (Hello? You're working with nerve agents, buddy!), but goes to sleep.

After a night of hokey nightmares seen in a double exposure, he wakes up and his assistant points out that the lab rats have died. Alex thinks he's gotten small enough exposure to the nerve agent that he's more immune to the larger exposure from the previous evening, but we know that's nonsense. Plus, there's the fact that his skin has turned darker, as though he had gone to a tanning salon. When Alex tries to stop the assistant from discarding the lab rats, Alex's touch results in the assistant dying a horrible death, roughly burning to a crisp!

Alex realizes there's a serious problem, so he burns the lab down and takes the flask of the nerve agent with him to Los Angeles for Ramsey and another scientist, Tom Holland (Stephen Dunne) to research it and hopefully come up with a serum. Alex absolutely doesn't want any of this to become public, because he'll just be locked up in a hospital.

When Alex gets to Los Angeles, his colleagues are just as idiotic scientifically as Alex was at the lab out in the desert. None of them bother to wear the sort of gear that the researchers in The Andromeda Strain had, or that doctors trying to treat Ebola cases would wear. Nope, they just wear their civilian clothing, waiting for Alex to touch them and kill them. Meanwhile, Alex's skin hasn't just darkened; it's swollen and scaled up like an even more monstrous version of The Alligator People. Well, just his face and hands; Alex's clothing and shoes still fit. Go figure.

Hand of Death was never meant to be anything more than a B movie in the tradition of the B science fiction from the 50s that would go on through the 60s. With that in mind, the movie isn't nearly as bad as some of the reviews I read would have you believe. Despite the extremely shoddy science, the characters' motivations aren't quite so screwed up otherwise. There's the running question of how to keep Carol safe. She wants to go with the Tom, and it's easy to say that running into the face of danger might not be such a wise idea. But I found myself thinking that leaving her alone would be just as bad an idea, and that there's a reasonable claim of safety in numbers. There's no way to know which move is the right one.

So, if you're willing to overlook the multitudinous plot holes, Hand of Death is a watchable movie that doesn't do anything more than try to be a B movie. Definitely worth a watch.