No. 132 : The Hand (1981)

The Hand @ the IMDb

 “What a pile of shit” Michael Caine declares midway through this schlock horror nightmare - whether he was talking about the production is unclear but such words would be a bit harsh. Just a bit though.

Caine plays Jon Lansdale a successful newspaper comic strip artist whose creation ‘Mandro’ pays for a nice life with an unfeasibly young, and new age wife. Lansdale is a bit of a dick from the off and enjoys yelling at his wife whilst she is driving him to the shops. This ends badly for him however as his drawing hand is lopped off by a passing truck as he tries to wave a car back. This scene was fantastically realised as the hand goes flying and Caine, covered in blood, starts screaming - possibly at his agent.

Time passes and soon the stumpefied Caine is getting fitted for a prosthetic that looks like it has been salvaged from a terminator. He suspects his wife is getting a bit too close to her yoga instructor and his agent is keen to let a young artist take over his strip. Caine meanwhile is having trouble adapting to his new single hand life and has flashbacks about the incident whilst pondering about the fate of his hand, that was never found.

With wife trouble escalating Caine heads off for a teaching job in California where he can talk to bored students and brood in his lonely log cabin. Things look up however when a young student shows up at his home and takes her clothes off - clearly a wavy hair / stump fetishist.

Despite trading the wife in for a younger and less annoying model Caine keeps spiraling further into madness and we wonder if the black and white flashbacks of the disembodied hand killing a tramp are for real or just his frenzied imagination at work.

With the wife ready to take their daughter away and his bit on the side having gone missing we have to guess if Caine is doing all the murders or is the disembodied hand really the culprit?

Despite my better judgement I enjoyed ‘The Hand’. It’s rubbish but it knows it’s rubbish and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Caine is manic throughout with his hairstyle getting ever madder as an insight to his mental state. The hand is well done and despite people clearly holding it on whilst it strangles them it’s a good laugh to see it scuttling about the place.

The film does stretch itself somewhat with a final wrong foot but as a study of madness and loss it is well done and it has a few unintended laughs peppered throughout, which adds to its appeal.

This was an early directorial outing for Oliver Stone before he got all political and for pure enjoyment purposes I’d put it up there with his best. Caine is of course working for the pay cheque but he gives it his all and is happy to go deep with the murder and sex scenes, despite the ridiculousness of each.

THE Tag Line : Give it a big hand! 68%

No. 131 : The Island (1980)

The Island at the IMDb

I’m in the middle of reading Michael Caine’s enjoyable autobiography ‘The Elephant to Hollywood’ and given the slagging he gave to ‘The Island’ I just had to move it up my viewing list.

Made in 1980 the film sits squarely in Caine’s wilderness years with rubbish like ‘The Swarm’ in the near past and ‘The Hand’ just up ahead - it’s almost like he had this blog in mind when making his flawed choices!

This effort sees him as an English journalist who bags an assignment to investigate the mysterious disappearance of dozens of ships in the Bahamas over the last few years. Over 2000 people have been lost but that doesn’t impress his editor who says the roads managed 50,000 in the same time. Not to be put off, Caine heads down to Florida with his annoying teenage son whom he buys a gun for, for no discernible reason, whilst on the way.

Caine hops on a cargo plane with the boy which manages to crash on a remote island - fair play to them, this sequence was pretty good but alas the budget when up in flames with the plane because it’s bargain basement from here on in.

Now stranded, Caine takes advice from a Hemmingway inspired old soak called Windsor played by the guy who was an old Alexei Sayle in an early season of ‘Stuff’. He’s really poor in this and you can only hope the drunk act was nothing of the kind. Anyway, Caine heads off on a boat towards the scene of many of the disappearances. He manages to finds a secret gang of pirates who have been pillaging the area for centuries in about five minutes, which does make you wonder what the authorities have been up to all this time.

The pirates have lived on ’The Island’ for 300 years and over time have developed their own dialect which sounds a lot like gibberish. Their leader is David Warner who takes a shine to Caine’s son. No, not like that. The boy is easily led and is soon giving his Dad no end of grief. Caine meanwhile busies himself with trying to escape and getting into the affections of a native lady. Can he get away and rescue his son? Will the pirates be exposed for the bunch of middle class English actors they are? Or will Caine’s sharp shooter son put his Dad out of his misery and save us all from Water ?

This was a fun romp despite being totally rubbish. It was written by Jaws scribe Peter Benchley but lacking the focus of a big shark, it meanders about as they try to find ways to advance the plot.

The pirates who include Bullman and Tinker off Lovejoy have no menace whatsoever and despite a few bloodthirsty murders they all look like they have just been pulled off the beach. Their motivations are weak given they look to avoid civilization yet regularly go on plundering sprees for NYC t-shirts and hi-fi equipment.

Caine is terrible as journalist and hapless Dad Blair Maynyard but he does have our sympathies as he’s dealing with a ridiculous script and some cringe worthy dialogue. At one point he utters ‘They’re a bunch of arseholes playing at Long John Silver’. Couldn’t have put it better myself!

THE Tag Line - Pirates of the has a beens 27%

No. 130 : The Actors (2003)

The Actors @ The IMDb

 The Michael Caine-a-thon reaches film 19 out of a potential 111 with ‘The Actors’, which I saw on general release in 2003 and awarded an IMDb score of 7 - but can remember nothing of it. That’s not to dismiss it out of hand as it is good fun, but I doubt I’ll have retained much of it when I inevitably come to watch it again in 15 years time.

Caine plays Anthony O’Malley, a washed up actor who is starring in a risible theatre production of Richard the Third set in Nazi Germany.  The cast includes Bernard Black himself, Dylan Moran, who is an awful actor but is kept on as he helps Caine with his hump. Both are at a low ebb after Moran fails a sausage commercial audition and Caine realises he’ll never get out of debt or low rent roles unless something changes.

Opportunity knocks when Caine, who is researching a role in a gangster’s bar, hears of an unclaimed debt for which the two parties involved have never met. This seems a bit convenient but it gives them the chance to hatch a scheme where their acting skills can be employed to collect the debt and split the cash.

The gangster, Barreller, played by Michael Gambon seems a tough prospect at first but Moran soon softens to him especially when he meets his daughter, Cersei Lannister. The Actors manage to get the cash but soon have to resort to ever more elaborate schemes to keep the real villains from taking back their money and exacting some deserved revenge.

‘The Actors’ is a pretty good distraction for 90 minutes. It’s no masterpiece but there are plenty of laughs throughout with the two leads quite happy to take the piss out of their profession and the luvvies who inhabit it. Caine especially does well as the old ham O’Malley. His language is choice throughout and he shows real dedication by appearing in drag at the end - how the baddies were ever convinced he was a woman is another matter.

The film has a five acts narrative device with a cute nine year old girl giving the narration and the guys some pointers. This was a bit cutesy pie for me and didn’t sit well in a script where every other word was an expletive. The pace did bounce along well though, and it was only towards the end that things started to get a bit muddled and contrived.

The two leads were good value but Michael Gambon seemed a bit muted in the potentially fun role of Barreller. He didn’t have too much to do though, conceding much of the ground to Lena Headey as his daughter who had to do her best with a thin romance with Moran.

It was good to see a lot of familiar faces bobbing about such as the sarcastic priest off ‘Father Ted’. He’s a really good actor!

All in all this was a fun film that didn’t take itself too seriously and neither should you. A suspension of disbelief is required as there are a lot of unlikely events, but it’s worth your time for Caine and Moran cursing a blue streak in some elaborate make up if nothing else.

THE Tag Line : Luvvie It 70%