S01E06 - The Crawling Hand

Plot

An astronaut returning from a mission to the moon is seen in a bizarre, suicidal state by mission control before his space ship is blown up under the astronaut's orders. As the mission's scientists try to unravel the mystery of what's going on, a coastal California town experiences the aftermath of the ship's explosion when a remnant of the astronaut terrorizes the locals.


Movie Review

Commando Cody is a no-show in this episode, leaving us with just the film, The Crawling Hand. After watching this flick all the way through, I would've actually welcomed Cody's generic serial to spice things up, because this movie hardly qualifies as a movie at all. A movie is meant to have things like plot, characters, and motivation, and yet this movie has none of these things.

The so-called plot, first of all, is ridiculous. From what little is mentioned, it seems that a mysterious organism on the moon is using human bodies as hosts to grow and ultimately control. The astronaut, succumbing to the organism's control, destroys his ship before it reaches Earth, but this doesn't stop the astronaut's severed arm from landing on a beach, where it is found by a medical student. After this...well, a lot of stuff happens, but it feels nothing like an actual movie plot. It's like the director ordered his actors to just "do something," and they did something whether it was interesting or not.

And the eponymous crawling hand in the film is barely even in the movie, much like the eye monsters in The Crawling Eye (perhaps the sharing of an adjective in the titles is the source of this?). Instead, after attacking a throwaway character and the main character, the crawling hand defers its monster status to the protagonist, who becomes..."possessed" by the organism, it seems. I suppose this was cheaper than using the severed arm prop all the time, and also to prevent the audience from realizing how nonthreatening a severed human hand really is.

Second, the characters are nonexistent - there are no actual characters in this film, only caricatures. The protagonist is an unconvincing mix of tough guy and intellectual, and everyone else is a one-note stand-in. The most "memorable" character is the sheriff, played by Alan Hale, Jr., better known as the Skipper of Gilligan's Island. He severely overestimates the depth of the material and acts, as the bots call him, like a two-bit character actor. But Mr. Hale's acting is still better than whoever plays the protagonist, whose random outbursts are like a bad impersonation of James Dean.

And motivation...what motivation? What direction? What script? The plot holes in this film are laughable, the most offensive one being the sheriff chastising two men for allowing the protagonist to escape his house arrest out the back door when only one deputy was guarding the house (from the outside) at the front door. On the bright side, the effects for the possessed arm were fairly good (some of the time), but even the best effects could not convince moviegoers of a severed arm's deadliness.

Outside of a pair of overblown performances, there is very little to say about this film because it is utterly unmemorable. It's not completely unwatchable, but one feels nearly bored when viewing it. As soon as the "The End" title card appears, one can't help but wonder what exactly he watched, since it seemed to have drifted away into the ether of forgetfulness.


MST3K Review

Though there were some quality riffs in this film, Joel and the bots seemed to be as bored with the movie as I was, as there was a slight yet noticeable step down from the previous episode. The abundance of hand puns made up for the smaller frequency of jokes, though, despite some of them being incredibly painful.

Something I noticed that Joel did quite a bit in this episode (at least in the first half or so) was using his silhouette to play against the movie. This is something that I have rarely seen Mike do during the sci-fi years (though not entirely abandoned, as evident by one famous riff in the Girl in the Gold Boots episode), but something that Joel has done quite a bit. He did it in Planet of the Prehistoric Women (by pretending to play with a ship console) and in The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (by pretending to cover up a woman's mouth). While a nice break from the usual riffing, these kind of riffs aren't the strong point of the show's jokes and should be used sparingly, in my opinion.