The Devil's Hand (RiffTrax)

Film Year:  1961

Genre:  Thriller

Director:  William J. Hole Jr.

Starring:  Robert Alda, Linda Christian, Ariadna Welter, Neil Hamilton, Gere Craft

RiffTrax Year:  2011

Riffers:  Micheal J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

The Movie

The Devil's Hand is the story of Robert Alda having dreams of the lovely Linda Christian, which amount to just imagery of her dancing around in a nighty.  So, of course, he wants to tap that.  Making his dreams even weirder is that he sees a doll resembling the mystery woman in the window of a doll shop, and the doll shop owner (played by Neil Hamilton of TV's Batman) informs Alda that he was the one who ordered it made.  Alda has no recollection of this, but soon he meets the woman of his dreams in real life.  She turns out to be a witch member of a voodoo devil worshiping cult, which the doll shop is a front for.  As Alda falls madly for her spell, he becomes intertwined in the satanic rituals.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans might be interested in knowing that The Devil's Hand was a movie that was quickly made for a double feature, in which its co-feature was Bloodlust, which is a film that feels similarly in how it has an engaging premise that it hasn't quite thought out that well.  Apparently The Devil's Hand was shot very fast as the very young distributor Crown International Pictures had little money (Bloodlust and The Devil's Hand were among its first films) and wanted the movie done and making revenue as soon as possible.  Crown was so short on cash that they wound up stiffing some of the actors on their paychecks, including lead actresses and sisters in real life Linda Christian and Ariadna Welter.

It comes as no surprise that the film was filmed in a hurry.  It feels padded to reach a bare minimum for feature film length while actual moments where the plot actually moves are few and far between as the film seemingly contemplates where it should take this nonsense next.  It all too often decides to do something that might seem cool in concept but lackluster in execution, such as a wheel of blades where some are real and some are paper and spinning it to decree that survivors are chosen as true believers of their cause.  This idea falls flat as all the blades look fake and when one strikes it's hard to tell if you're supposed to react to it as if someone got killed or not until the movie tells you.

Credit where credit is due, The Devil's Hand has half an idea here that could make a pretty solid movie.  It doesn't even need to change its cast even, as everyone plays their roles fine with special marks to the sisterly-duo-playing-romantic-rivals Christian and Welter, who I enjoyed in the film quite a lot.  Christian in particular is an excellent femme fatale villain.  There are things here that are promising, such as playing with the voodoo dolls for various effects on characters which make for some effective sequences.  One of the cooler ones involves Neil Hamilton using a doll to have a man wreck his car and then he lights the doll on fire to set it ablaze.  The Devil's Hand never lives up to its best moments, which is too bad because it makes me want to like it.

The Trax

The Devil's Hand was one of RiffTrax's earliest VOD titles, back when their market was mostly dominated by riffs for blockbuster movies.  This riff benefits from being a bit like the type of film you'd see on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it's even a watchable one at that.  Things like this were a refreshing change of pace back then, though in the large body of RiffTrax work since it's a bit difficult for The Devil's Hand to raise its head above the crowd.

But it's a pretty silly movie for them to tackle and Mike, Kevin, and Bill are more than ready to point out the film's many glaring logic inconsistencies.  They attempt to follow the plot but get pretty annoyed when it takes it a direction that seems to lack reason.  Some of the things they have fun with is just how much of a man-slut Robert Alda is in the film, dropping his girlfriend for another pretty face on a dime, and they play with the sexual nature of their satanic relationship in fun ways.  I love a sequence early on between Alda and Christian as the riffers just go through the different steps of how these two just had the most disappointing sex of their lives.  They also talk about how our voodoo villains don't ever seem to do anything logically villainous, like how Christian discovers that Alda took the pin out of Welter's doll and doesn't even bother to put the pin back in.  Another example being all-things-considered pretty neat car wreck scene, where Mike questions whether setting the car on fire after the man had obviously been killed already did anything useful.

And also there is a fun scene with a drunk blonde witch, which Mike dubs "An early experiment in Tara Reid."

This riff does go a bit in more non-PC directions you would find in earlier RiffTrax offerings.  There are a few mean fat jokes and more than a couple of lazy gay jokes (though I will say that the "I want a crack at him" line is hilarious and I will die on that hill).  The Devil's Hand is blemished but funny.  This is a riff with the riffers just reading the name of the director and stating "We at RiffTrax would like to thank William Hole Jr. simply for having that name."  That's just exactly what needed to be said.

Good