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.75 : The Debt (2010)

The Debt at the IMDb

A bit of ‘secrets and lies’ now as Helen Mirren tries a funny accent and keeps her clothes on - Boooo!

Helen plays Rachel, a Mossad agent, who is celebrated in her homeland for killing a Nazi war criminal in the 1960s in East Germany. The mission is coming back into the public consciousness as Mirren’s daughter has written a book about it and the launch sees Mirren and her fellow agents reappraise past events.

Mirren does a reading from the book and we flash back to witness her shooting their fleeing captive after he manages to get free, leaving her with an ugly facial scar. All is not well however when one of her fellow agents jumps in front of a truck on the way to the reunion and another has gotten wind that their 30 year old secret may be falling apart.

Mirren’s wheelchair bound ex-partner and fellow agent discuss the death of their friend and his motivation for this. We flash back again to the start of the mission and see how the rookie Rachel posed as a wannabe mother so she could get a closer look at the alleged Nazi surgeon - not as close as the look as her gets of her, given he’s working as an obstetrician.

They manage to capture their man but after a bodged escape they are left in their grotty flat for ten days while the Israelis plan their way home. The evil Nazi doctor begins to plant seeds of dissent between the flatmates and after stealing a plot point from ‘Breaking Bad’ he escapes. The three agents agree that they’ll keep the lie that they killed the Nazi and disposed of the body - secure in the knowledge that the Nazi would lie low.

Alas, the best laid plans fall apart as you’d expect, as the wheelchair bound ex-agent Tom Wilkinson finds out that a Ukrainian hospital patient is claiming to be the undead Nazi - and not in a fun zombie way. With one agent dead and the other in a wheelchair it’s up to Helen to travel to the Ukraine and try out her handy fluent Ukrainian and see if she can pay the debt she’s been living off for 30 years.

This was a pretty workmanlike thriller but it had a lot to like. The narrative flow jumped back and forth and the payoff from the ‘real’ telling as opposed to the ‘fictional’ one was signalled some way off. Given they reused a lot of the footage there was a sense of deja-vu but it was well worked with the tension racked up as the world closed in on them.

The flashback to the mission took the best part of an hour and although 1965 East Germany was well realised it did drag a bit - we all knew a debt was going to be incurred and that it’d be up to Helen to pay it off so it took a bit long to get there. I did enjoy the scene with the evil doctor as he probed his patient and would be captor both literally and mentally. Jesper Christensen, who you’ll know as ‘Mr White’ from ‘Quantum of Solace’, was excellent as the malevolent medic , with evil pouring from every loaded statement.

Mirren did her usual class act, although her Russian heritage showed in her Ukraine scenes and her lack of an Israeli one did so equally when she put on their accent. Tom Wilkinson did his usual angry routine and it was a shame we didn’t see more of Ciaran Hinds who must be the worst ‘Frogger’ player in history.

The film avoided preaching too much about the rights and wrongs of what transpired, but that tended to leave you somewhat unsympathetic towards the characters all of whom where aloof and distant. It was a well played and directed film but it could have used a tighter edit and maybe a bit more humanity to allow us to invest in the characters. There again maybe an investment in ‘The Debt’ is best avoided!

THE Tag Line - We Always Get Our Man - Eventually   71%