Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1981)

There had been 'living' severed hand movies before (The Beast With Five Fingers, The Crawling Hand, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, And Now The Screaming Starts), and there have been a few since (The Hand, Evil Dead II and Idle Hands), but none of them have been as wonderfully schlocky and unintentionally funny as Demonoid, an inept slice of z-grade Mexican horror made all the more laughable by earnest performances from leads Samantha Eggar and Stuart Whitman, and direction from Alfredo Zacarías that shows no sign of intentional humour. Eggar plays Jennifer Baines, who attempts to track down and destroy an ancient evil force that possesses people's left hands (starting with her husband Mark, played by Roy Jenson). Whitman is Father Cunningham, the initially sceptical priest who eventually helps her on her mission.Demonoid immediately displays its trash credentials with a marvellous pre-credits sequence that delivers both gratuitous nudity and gore: a woman wearing cult robes fights against several men, but is overpowered, her clothing torn open in the process, exposing her ample breasts. After she is shackled, one of her assailants hacks off her left hand, the severed appendage crawling across the floor before being skewered and placed in a special metal case. It's a great way to start things off, and is just one of many fun scenes in this very daft horror. Each time someone is possessed, they are driven to remove their hand, which results in some truly memorable moments: Mark's badly burnt reanimated corpse slams his wrist in a car door, a gun-toting cop tells a plastic surgeon 'either you cut my hand off or I'll kill you!', while the very same surgeon severs his own hand by placing his arm on a railway track. Special affects are bloody but wholly unconvincing, which only adds to the charm of the piece. The final act features a supposedly tense chase with zero sense of urgency, and sees Father Cunningham burning off his own possessed hand with a blow-torch, later scattering the ashes in the sea. It looks like the 'devil's hand' has been vanquished once and for all, but a delightfully silly epilogue sees Jennifer attacked by the five-fingered horror, which has somehow returned from the ocean.

Jennifer Baines (the always classy Samantha Egger), the wife of industrialist Mark Baines (a sturdy portrayal by Roy Jensen), joins forces with renegade boxing Irish priest Father Cunningham (a gloriously hammy portrayal by Stuart Whitman) to combat a lethal ancient evil force that has taken on the form of a deadly severed crawling hand.Director/co-writer Alfredo Zacarias keeps the entertainingly absurd story zipping along at a brisk pace, treats the ridiculous premise with utmost misguided seriousness, and delivers many jaw-dropping moments of inspired lunacy. The crude (not so) special effects further add to this film's considerable infectiously clunky charm. Buxom Russ Meyer starlet Haji pops up (and out) in a small role as a cheap floozy. The sharp cinematography by Alex Phillips Jr. makes this low-grade schlock look more polished than it deserves. The funky pulsating score by Richard Gillis hits the get-down groovy spot. A deliciously tacky hoot and a half.

*Note: Like many of my reviews, this is taken from my blog, which is called "Talk of Horrors." This one comes from the last entry of "Not on DVD Week." The workers at a Mexican mine don't exactly want to go there because of a curse. Well, Jennifer (Samantha Eggar) and Mark Baines (Roy Jones) go in anyways, and accidentally unleash a demonic force that has a fondness for possessing people's left hands. I guess Ned Flanders was wrong when he said "Lord Love a Leftie." Anyways, the only way a person can free themselves from committing acts of evil is severing said hand-which will then go after someone else and kill or possess them. Can Jennifer and Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman) stop this handy horror?As you can tell from the premise, "Demoniod" is about as goofy as they get. The plot really doesn't hold up to scrutiny, most of the performances are lackluster, and the film is loaded with moments that are unintentionally hilarious. The highlight of those goofy moments is a police officer demanding "cut my hand off or you die!" In spite of it's problems, I found myself kind of enjoying this movie. It's not really good, but the whole concept is so daffy that you can't help but go along with it. It's like "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats" or "I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle", only played straight and without evil inanimate objects. Apart from that, Eggar and Whitman aren't great, but do their best carrying the material, and there's something perversely amusing about seeing people finding different ways of getting their hands severed, providing some fun bloody moments. Add a great score by Richard Gillis, plenty of (unintentional) laughs and a downbeat (though predictable) conclusion, and you've got yourself an amusing little piece of trash cinema. It's amazing that a movie this offbeat hasn't gotten a DVD release yet, as it's the kind of cult oddity fans of trash live for.

"Demonoid: Messenger of Death" is a moderately flawed and entertaining effort.**SPOILERS**In a newly-discovered mine in Mexico, Jennifer Baines, (Samantha Eggar) discovers a long-sealed burial chamber that the locals are fearful of. Eventually finding the main room inside, her husband Mark Baines, (Roy Jenson) suddenly takes an interest in the site, which reveals the secret of the site as being a sacrificial altar that required human parts to a statue that resembled an ancient demon. Soon thereafter, a bunch of murders committed around the site draw Sergent Leo Matson, (Lew Saunders) and they find that it's all a disembodied hand from one of the former victims in the chamber and killing off anyone around the group. Finally seeking help from Father Cunningham, (Stuart Whitman) on help with dealing with the situation, they try to put an end to the reign of terror.The Good News: There's some really fun stuff here when it tries to. That's due to the film's actual action scenes in here being actually fun and enjoyable when it really lets loose. One of the greatest is the sequence in the doctor's office, where a cop forces a doctor at gunpoint to surgically remove his left hand, and is shown in full detail, which is quite bloody and messy in and of itself, then it shows the resulting chaos which really gets the best out of the scene. The offending member jumps from tray to table, brandishes a firearm, and guns-down a fleeing nurse as she makes for the door. It's all got the rather fun ending as well with the really brutal face-reconstruction with the disembodied hand to provide a great close to it. There's also a semi-decent car chase in here, which ends with a hokey stunt that ends in a mild laugh and another rather brutal hand-lopping which looks pretty good as well. The main action scene, when the hand goes crazy in the shack with other victims getting wiped out before an errant spark causes the whole thing to go up in flames, is perhaps the best one. The ending of it, with one guy totally engulfed in flames stumbling along for a few steps before falling to the ground while managing to have the severed hand buried in the sand by dislocating itself. The opening, down in the mines after the cave-in where they're all trapped inside with all the unusual sort of amulets, statues and trinkets that are used for the ancient ceremony make the location pretty creepy and eerie, and the back-story given to it is even better. There's also some nice creepy scenes in here at the end, when the disembodied hand chases them around the church, and at one point even cutting both the phone and power, making for some really nice atmosphere at times. These here are what the film has going for it.The Bad News: There wasn't a whole lot of problems for this one. One of the biggest examples is that there's a lot of scenes early on which don't really do much here except pad out time in a film that didn't really need it. There's no point in showing the scenes in the casino, since it's all quite unneeded to show him wandering around the different parts looking for him. It's not exactly fun to watch, serve no purpose and just makes them all pretty boring to sit through. That also includes the numerous discussions of the two in the church, since it's always the exact same conversations that are carried out every time. This also applies to the film's middle segment, which contains those scenes but also, just in general, doesn't really have a whole lot that works beyond just getting boring, not featuring any action but just simply all different kinds of conversation that isn't all that interesting or exciting to feature. There's also the film's inherently weird and lame way of showing the demon, mainly by throwing the silhouette of the creature out of nowhere and for completely weird areas and reasons. It's pretty hard to understand the reasoning behind it. The last flaw in here is the inherent cheese, as the premise is a little wacky, there's some hokey effects and some of the sequences do give off that cheesy look. These here are the film's few bad points.The Final Verdict: With some stuff that's actually pretty good and a couple of flaws to drag it down, this one is actually somewhat watchable. Give it a shot if you're into these kinds of creature features or have some kind of interest in it, while those who aren't into it should heed caution.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity