Rating: 
Summary: Rhino's DVD of Crawling Hand has Nice Price
Review: This is a review of the Rhino DVD for the Crawling Hand. It is not a review of the MST3K version. I really enjoy this old turkey. Maybe it is the crude acting, the inane dialogue, or the fact the Alan Hale, Jr (The Skipper) and Allison Hayes (Attack of the 50-ft Woman) are in it. I also think there are some genuinely good moments (okay, they may be few). First a few comments about the plot, before I commnet on the DVD.The movie starts out well as the Earth has lost contact with the space probe returning from the moon. After we learn that the oxygen is gone in the capsule, we hear a voice asking for help. It is the poor pilot whose body has been invaded by some alien creature. He begs to be blown up and eventually is. His hand of course survives. The plot slows considerably after this as a college student finds the hand in California. Let me tell you, this kid is no actor (whew!). His girlfriend is even worse. Anyway, the student hides the hand in his boarding home and it prompty kills the landlady. He figures out that the hand is guilty, but Alan Hale (as the sheriff) is positive it is the boy. There is lots of fun until the movie finally ends. I won't spoil it, but you will love the hearse drivers. Now, the DVD. Rhino's picture quality is quite good, but I have two problems with this DVD. First, there are no extras, not even a trailer. Secondly, you have to turn the volume up to almost full to hear the soundtrack and in doing so it sounds distorted. Not terrible, but annoying just the same. Overall, it is worth it, because there will probably not be a better release. Just remembered the other reason I like this film, it includes the Rivington's version of, "The Bird is the Word."
Rating: 
Summary: Sorry
Review: This is a very early episode of MST3K... And even though I knew that the first few seasons weren't very good, I bought it anyway. I did laugh alot... but I barely made it though the movie... It was interesting seeing the old set though. The host segments weren't too funny... The invention exchange wasn't very funny or interesting. The riffs were pretty funny, but they made too many jokes about hands and Gilligan's Island(since the actor that played the skipper is in The Crawling Hand). And as for Josh Weinstein... well, his voice just isn't very funny. And I like Frank!(who doesn't appear in this episode)... Ok, I think that I am done now. Overall, this episode IS good... it's just that I wish that I spent my $20 on an episode from a different season!
Rating: 
Summary: Greatly Interesting
Review: This is the one first episodes of MST3K and the earlist you can get on video. It's delight to see how things looked in the old days, particuly to anyone who bacame a fan from the SciFi channel episodes. The quality of the jokes is not up to the standard it later became, but are still good enough to give several good belly laughs to anyone with the slightest interest in the show. A good buy overall.
Rating:
Summary: Not THAT good.
Review: This is very different from the later episodes. The homade props and cheesy sets look good but things are very different. Dr. Larry Earheardt, not Tv's Frank is Dr. Forrester's assistent, Tom Servo has a strange voice, and the jokes aren't very funny. However, there are some good jokes like great timing (Hi, I'm Tom Servo, Ten seconds till he slaps table, I smell a transformation scene). Tom's Fine Young Cannible jokes and how they ripp into that mean old man who say's "No dancing, not allowed" (While psychotic Paul is trying to kill him Joel and the bots say "No Zombies, not allowed." and "No Killing! Not allowed." are really funny too. Pretty funny, but in light of there wonderful work in classics such as Manos and Mitchell, kinda dissapointing. It's certanly better than the addlibbed KTMA days though.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!!!
Review: This was the first season on cable for Joel and the Bots. Cardboard sets and a homemade look, I LOVED it! Probably seems slow to those who have only seen the later slicker episodes, but to me this is a classic, especially the Shatner imitations with the rubber hand host segment!
Rating:
Summary: Hey, buddy, can you lend me a hand?
Review: Weird little film should keep most viewers' interest due to its offbeat combination of skill and schlockiness. To be more specific: 1) The story has both genuinely interesting and pretty stupid developments. 2) The acting is mainly okay but peppered with highly cheesy moments. 3) The direction is mostly effective (with lots of subtle and original touches, in fact), but also rife with ham-handedness and overstatement. 4) The special effects are often effective and downright creepy, but at other times laughable. 5) There is much knowing, intentional humor, but also many laugh-out-loud moments that clearly weren't meant to be so (often as a result of the moments of bad acting and bad special effects mentioned above). One doesn't often see these wildly diverging quality levels within the same film, and this duel nature was enough to keep me watching. Also, though this DVD is bare bones (no extras at all), the visual quality is pretty good-- so you won't be distracted by bad splices or a faded or grainy print. So, definitely recommended for those who enjoy discovering or re-visiting lesser-known horror/sci-fi entries from the 50's and 60's. Conveniently, this movie has something to offer both genre-loving camps: those who enjoy genuinely good examples of such movies and those who prefer titles of the so-bad-it's-good variety. Keep the titles coming, Rhino! They're fun.
Rating:
Summary: MTS3K's early days
Review: While I agree with many other reviewers -- this is not the funniest of the many MST3K episodes -- I must say it still has much merit. An astronaut goes completely off his rocker and blows up his ship. Soon after, a dorky med-school student named Paul finds the astronaut's severed hand on a beach while taking a romp with a foreign chick. He takes the hand home(Tom: "Thank goodness he brought a handbag!"), puts it on a pantry shelf (isn't that an odd place to keep body parts?), and the next thing he knows it's on the loose and in the mood to kill. The sheriff (the skipper from Gilligan's Island), shows up on the scene, and his arrival marks the beginning of an endless stream of Gilligan jokes. When watching this episode, one must take into consideration that this was a very early episode. They still had some bugs to work out of the show -- it was still a work-in-progress, and it took many seasons before finally reaching the peak of funniness. Even if it's just for the Def Leopard crack (visual: severed hand; audio: "didn't you used to be with Def Leopard?"), anyone who likes MST3K should give this one a shot.
Rating:
Summary: Five Fingers of Death!
Review: `Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.' I was at a loss as how to start my review, so I thought I'd go with one of my favorite Red Buttons quotes, which, coincidentally, contains a reference to hands, tying in somewhat to the film The Crawling Hand aka Don't Cry Wolf aka The Creeping Hand (1963). This review is for the non-MST3k DVD version of the film. For those who may be unfamiliar, there use to be a show on cable titled Mystery Science Theater 3000 (if you love bad movies, you need to check it out), whose specialty was presenting humorous running commentary to old, drecky films, actually making many of them bearable to watch. The show is long gone, but legions of fans still enjoy the antics of Joel (or Mike) and the `bots from their well-worn VHS tapes, and also, more recently, the various DVD releases of the show by Rhino Home Video, one of them being the `Mystified' version of this film (on a separate DVD, available on Amazon), which is why you see many reviews making reference to the show. Directed by Herbert L. Strock (Gog, How to Make a Monster, the original 1958 version, not the lame 2001 TV version), The Crawling Hand (boy, with a title like that, you know exactly what you're getting) stars Peter Breck, who also starred in the very good film Shock Corridor released the same year as this film, Kent Taylor (Satan's Sadists, Brain of Blood), and Rod Lauren (The Young Swingers). Also appearing is Alan Hale Jr. (yep, the Skipper, from the television show Gilligan's Island) and Icelandic born actress Sirry Steffen, whom some may remember from her brief appearance on the Beverly Hillbillies, as Marie the Maid.
The film begins with the loss of an astronaut returning from a mission, focusing on Steve Curran (Breck) and Dr. Max Weitzberg (Taylor), both working for the associated space agency, at a loss to explain what happened. What's so puzzling is the circumstances around the loss (this was the 2nd time it happened), as everything was going per plan, but after a mysterious communiqué with the 2nd astronaut, the spacecraft was destroyed (the astronaut appeared on the view screens looking sickly and pleading with mission control to hit the red button, which, apparently is the button used to detonate the craft). The craft was destroyed, but some pieces survived, like the astronaut's severed hand, which ended up on a beach, only to be found by college students Paul (Lauren) and his girlyfriend/exchange student Marta (Steffen). Noting that it might be something of importance, Paul returns later to collect the errant limb, but soon discovers it to have strange powers (no, it's not like a monkey's paw, granting wishes to its' owner) and a appetite for...murder (Paul's landlady finds this out the hard way)! As Paul wrestles with the abomination, he also gets a bad case of the space cooties, and begins trying to murder those around him, but never quite as successfully as the severed limb. Will Steve and Dr. Weitzberg be able to intervene and determine the nature of the evil brought that has arrived on Earth? Will they be able to help Paul before the police gun him down like a mad dog? Will Marta student visa expire before she gets a chance to renew it?
Okay, this isn't a very good film (it lists four, count `em, four writers), but I did get the feeling the original story might have been much better, suffering in translation to the silver screen (it wouldn't be the first time). I didn't mind that the very cheap special effects (the scenes with the crawling hand were often short, but sometimes the shadow of the rest of the body attached to the crawling hand was very evident), but what seemed to drag this film down was the poor writing and the extremely herky jerky pacing (there was a 20 minute scene near the beginning that spent way too much time on the needless development of the characters of Paul and Marta). I did think some of the make-up interesting, especially the characters affected by the space madness, looking like something the somnambulist character from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The lighting is also extremely poor, especially the interior shots as shadows often presented themselves in an awkward manner as if the lights were pointing towards the actors at waist level from behind the camera. The acting isn't great, but it is unintentionally funny, especially when Breck, whose character was prone to hissy fits one would expect from a three year old, chewed up all the scenery. Alan Hale Jr., as a small town police chief, was kind of fun to watch (I kept expecting him to finish his sentences with the term `lil' buddy'), but would the police really use a station wagon as a squad car? I suppose they could, but they hardly seem suitable for the high-speed chases (the film does have one, sort of). My favorite characters had to be the ambulance drivers. I loved the part where they arrived to retrieve a dead body (the evil hand at work), and decide to investigate the deceased woman's refrigerator for beer. After finding a prone Paul on the floor (again, work of the evil hand), they have a brief discussion about what to do, as they were only tasked to pick up one body. These guys have to be independent contractors...the end, which couldn't come soon enough, wraps things up a little to conveniently (so, everyone is on board about that whole alien possession thing?) and tries to throw in a completely predictable twist.
The picture on this DVD better than I would have thought, but the audio was awful, often impossible to hear. There are no special features available, but there are chapter stops. I wasn't expecting a lot from this DVD, and that's exactly what I got.
Cookieman108
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