Hands Of A Stranger (1962) I suppose I can understand why every so often, producers of shlock horror gravitate to this idea.......guy loses hands, gets psycho's hands, bad hands kill people......
Hand horror must seem like an easy choice. You know, with all those fingers attached, hands are so inherently creepy.......(that even includes "thing", the lively disembodied hand from the Addams family cartoons and movies......)
This one's officially the third film version of the French novel "Hands Of Orlac", the origin of this hands-on nonsense.
Never saw the other two, but this one's kind of a hoot,(for a short time, anyway) with its ridiculous, over-the-top dialogue.....which, if we didn't know otherwise, we'd swear was written by the immortal shlockmeister himself, Ed Wood Jr.
We couldn't help wondering if this film's writer-director Newt Arnold, ever actually watched a movie in his life. All of his script's overwritten verbiage sounds like it came from 1930's radio-show melodramas or maybe 18th century plays.
The two lead actors really got into the spirit of things by crafting overheated performances to match the pretentious, unintentionally funny pronouncements that flow out of their mouths.
The characters here could be twins, separated at the ego....Vernon Paris (James Noah) is a preening, self absorbed concert pianist diva. Dr. Gil Harding (Paul Lukather) is a preening, self absorbed surgeon diva.
Put these guys together and they could power a nuclear sub with their senses of entitlement.
Their paths cross when a car accident turns Paris's hands to hamburger and he ends up on Harding's operating table.
Seizing the day, Harding gifts Paris with a pair of hands taken off a dead criminal found recently shot dead in the street.
Yes, this does remind us of the old joke where a patient, recently out of surgery, asks the doctor if he'll ever be able to play the piano. When the doctor says yes, cracks the patient, "That's great, cause I could never play the piano before..."
The good doctor here assures the hysterically angry pianist that, by all means, he'll tinkle the ivories again, once he gets comfortable with his new set 'o mitts.
Nah....we all know that's never gonna happen. Paris can't do anything with his new hands except pound the keyboard like a toddler......and decide to kill people who piss him off.
First he immolates an old girlfriend, who literally goes down in flames so fast, it looks like she pre-soaked herself in premium high-test.
Then he goes lookin' for payback against the cabbie whose careless driving caused his hand mangling accident. The guy's not at home but Paris encounters his little boy. And in this movie's one ahead-of-the-curve, startling moment, he brutally murders the child, who shrieks in agony as Paris crushes the tot's hands before offing him altogether.
The rest of movie simply plods on and the remaining murders (including that of a young Sally Kellerman) occur offscreen. Unfortunately for an audience, the ornate, overly florid dialogue never lets up to the bitter end.
You can have some fun mocking the ridiculous lines spouted by the cast, but that tends to wear thin after 15 minutes or so. And his movie runs for a tortured 85 minutes. Only completists of vintage horror should bother checking one this out. I'm already sorry I did. 1 star (*).
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