Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

poe-48833 HAND OF DEATH opens with a sequence that might've come straight out of THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (or VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED). It's an ominous beginning (thanks in no small part to the music) and the fact that the movie involves experiments with Nerve Gas makes it Topical no matter the decade. When Agar begins his Transformation, it's his MIND that goes first, and he ends up looking almost exactly like Ben Grimm ("The Thing" from THE FANTASTIC FOUR), at least as rendered in the beginning by Jack Kirby. And, like any good Monster, he Inadvertently (at least at first) wreaks Havoc wherever he goes. Decades ago, I created a super "hero" of sorts of my own, called The Leper. A homeless man subjected to the experiments of a mad scientist working for The Military Industrial Complex, his mere TOUCH became lethal. Like Agar in HAND OF DEATH, he used GLOVES to try to prevent infecting folks... A couple of years ago, I entered a Halloween costume contest. I made myself up as The Leper. The makeup took me three hours to apply and was convincing enough that my own niece didn't recognize me when I approached her. (One man who attended the contest- held at a local comic shop- couldn't take his eyes off of me.) It wasn't until I got in my car to leave and looked in the rear view mirror at myself that I realized just HOW convincing my makeup was: I didn't recognize myself. On my way home, people stared at me (one woman even rolled down her window and asked me if I was alright) until I explained that it was just a Halloween makeup. Yesterday, reading one of Tom Weaver's books of interviews, I discovered HAND OF DEATH in a John Agar interview. I've just watched it and it's EXACTLY the kind of movie I'd hoped to make about THE LEPER. Dammit.

grokenstein John Agar and his assistant are conducting independent secret nerve gas experiments in the California desert with the goal of creating a hypnotic-paralytic agent which will allow America to "peacefully occupy" any country it likes, rendering nuclear weapons unnecessary. If that alone isn't making your head swim, Agar's safety procedures will; in the opening moments, a mailman investigating the apparently-dead sheep littering Agar's front lawn stumbles through his front gate and almost succumbs to lingering chemicals, five whole feet from the roadway.So it should come as no surprise that overworking, careless Agar winds up splashing a fresh and faulty batch of formula on himself, giving him a literal nerve-gas touch-of-death. Said touch is both horrifying--as a casual arm-clutch causes a hapless dopey gas station attendant (Joe Besser) to die screaming in seconds--and silly, as Besser spins to the camera to display what appears to be a rubber glove pasted to his face to represent bruising, swollen flesh.Other victims get modeling clay and greasepaint pasted on their kissers, but Agar's character gets the worst of it: while the formula doesn't immediately kill him, it does cause him to abruptly transform into Marvel's The Thing with a bad case of toad-throat halfway through the movie, forcing Agar to shove his typically hammy performance out the holes in the puffy mask for the remainder.And that's not even the worst of it. This movie is only sixty minutes long, and the front end is packed with a ridiculous romantic triangle sporting dialog that would make Jerry Lewis' writers flinch, while the last half is a broth-thin manhunt for the swollen death-toucher as he stumbles and flails his way across town from one random encounter to the next. These time-wasters include a particularly pathetic scene on a hideous rock-and-concrete-strewn beach in which the collapsed monster gets stalked and investigated by a small boy (Butch Patrick of The Munsters). And all the while, the worst score you could imagine before the invention of the synthesizer plays incessantly. INCESSANTLY.If Rifftrax doesn't tear this one up, it will be a crime.

ashew Reading through some of the IMDb reviews, I was truly bewildered by the responses. It was like bullies beating up on the weakling in school...not because he necessarily needed to be beat up, but just because the bullies could. Well, I'm the principal here to tell those folks to lighten up and leave the poor kid alone! My goodness, this movie had a budget of $1.95, yet everyone is expecting "Lawrence of Arabia"? Come on.John Agar is a government scientist out in the California desert who thinks he is a few steps away from creating a revolutionary nerve gas agent that will eliminate all wars. His mentor, the mentor's secretary, his scientist buddy, and even his own college intern think it's too dangerous and want him to stop, but John has noble and lofty goals and pushes on. Well, John has an accident, spills one of the liquefied variations on his hands, and slowly turns into a hideous, mutated creature whose touch can kill...and kill he does.Maybe I was just in the mood for a fun little film like this, but I must say the acting didn't bother me, nor did the production values, the music, the directing, or the monster make-up. Yes, the screenplay is dopey, has holes in the logic, and a rather abrupt and unsatisfying ending, but this is a Z-grade film aimed at kids at a drive-in theater looking for a fun time, not stuffy film critics or pretentious film snobs.Set your expectations at a reasonable level, have fun, and enjoy a great little throw-back to a bygone age of sci-fi/horror.

Doug (padawandoug) First of all the only reason I watched this movie all the way through was because it was short (about 90 min with commercials, on AMC). If it had been any longer, I wouldn't have bothered.This movie is bad in so many ways, it's hard to know where to begin. The script is awful. The acting is bad, even for a B movie. The pacing is REALLY slow, especially in the first twenty minutes or so. The stupid banter of the girlfriend complaining that she doesn't get enough attention from her scientist boyfriend seems to be padding out this non-existent story.That's really my biggest complaint: NO STORY! A story requires a beginning, middle and an end. But once the "scientist" (Agar) turns into the blackened Thing (from Fantastic Four), there are no further developments; he simply runs around like an idiot. This movie has an ending about as bad as "Jurassic Park," where everyone just runs away. Here, the Agar character is just killed.This movie is not even enjoyable on a "guilty pleasure" Ed Wood type of level. I don't understand how this ever got released by a studio. Don't they usually demand re-shoots on something this bad? Film students ought to be required to see Hand of Death, as a lesson in how not to make a movie: Don't start filming without a finished script, and make sure to tell a whole story! And don't pad out the first act with stupid banter -- just get on with the story!If you're not a film student, don't waste your time with this one. If you want really good B movies, look at the works of Val Lewton. The original "Cat People" is atmospheric and excellently noir-ish, and "The Curse of the Cat People" is a fantasy disguised as a horror film, and is magical and poetic. And "Bedlam" is a downright classic about the famous insane asylum in England. Check those out if you want to be entertained and touched, not this piece of drek, which left me wondering why I bothered. The best thing to say about Hand of Death is that it's short.