The Hand That Feeds the Dead (1974)

Sergio Garrone tries to juice up the old gothic horror/mad scientist deal get up by adding gore and nudity, but still manages to bore the life out of me.The whole deal is that Klaus Kinski is a scientist whose wife has been horrifically scarred in an accident that also claimed the life of her brilliant scientist father, Ivan Rassimov, who is a character called Ivan Rassimov and not the actor Ivan Rassimov. Kinski of course has one of those labs you get in old mansions that's full of bubbling flasks and electricity,and this is where he conducts his skin graft experiments, using local girls. I'm getting bored writing this review.There's an Igor character running around the place, a couple of girls, one of which is searching for her missing sister, and some guy. Other things happen that you've seen a million times before but Garrone throws in a lesbian sequence, treachery, and Kinski talking to a toy doll but also pads things out with the girl going to the police over and over again, and the medical procedures taking forever. Does it matter if the film bored me? Would that deter others from watching it anyway? Some people love this film and think it's some sort of classic. Maybe instead of an opinion, a brief description of the film and where to find it would suffice. Or is it better to hear the opinion of someone whose watched hundreds of these rather than, say, Mark Kermode?I don't know. There's another film called Lover of the Monster which was made using the same sets and the same actors. I'm going to watch that one, even though this one bored me, so I'm ignoring my own opinion too.

Titled on my box as, The Hand That Feeds Death, but a more accurate translation, I believe is, The Hand That Feeds The Dead. Either way, of course nothing to do with the film in hand. Another confusing aspect to this title is the fact that director Sergio Garrone managed to complete another film the same year, called Lover Of The Monster, that had almost the same cast, same locations and more or less the same story. using much of the same footage. Add to that the fact this was made by the Italians with the Turkish, it is no wonder it seems a little off kilter. More than that it seems to switch from one location to another, day to night and almost story to story in the blink of an eye. On the positive side we do have Kinski (brilliant at the very end with lipstick bloodied lips) lots of gore (transplants) and a fair amount of flesh (young and female) and although it seemed ridiculous from the outset, I enjoyed it. It is bright, colourful and cheery with a really impressive laboratory with blood being pumped hither and thither. Silly yes, boring no.

The Hand That Feeds the Dead apparently is often confused with a film called Lover of the Monster. That's not at all surprising; they're both directed by Sergio Garrone, feature basically the same cast (both headed by Klaus Kinski), both were released in 1974, they both feature similar plots and even some of the same footage. Unfortunately, they're also both rubbish. After seeing Lover of the Monster recently, I had it in my head that at least it couldn't be worse than The Hand That Feeds the Dead - but I was wrong, as despite a very nice title; this film is utter dross. The film takes place in the nineteenth century and focuses on a doctor by the name of Prof Nijinski. He stumbles upon an old laboratory in his basement and begins experimenting with life and death (yadda, yadda). Of course, the experiments go wrong and end up messing with the doctors head.I have to admit that the version I saw was sourced from a Turkish VHS and was cut down to about seventy eight minutes. I don't know exactly what was cut out, but I'm guessing it was all the good bits because we haven't been left with much. I'm sure that some of the gore was cut out because I didn't see much of it; there were a few skin graft scenes but overall the film is very lacking on that front. The period setting and obvious low budget gives the film something of a gritty feel that works fairly well with the plot but is nowhere near enough to save the production on the whole. Klaus Kinski is undoubtedly one of the major stars of cult cinema, but even his presence is not enough to lift this production; frankly he looked about as bored as I was. The pace is very slow and the editing is inept, which makes the film even harder to watch. I really didn't care what happened at the end and the climax was not interesting anyway. This film has vanished into obscurity since its release and I'm not at all surprised about that. The Hand That Feeds the Dead is nowhere as interesting as it sounds and is not recommended!

You don't hear much about them anymore, but from the 50's, to fairly recent times, Facial Transplant horror films were a thriving sub-genre.Beginning with "La Yeux Sans Visage" (eyes without a face/Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus) by Georges Franju, these continued onward with "Awful Dr, Orloff" by Jess Franco (who has made quite a few, including one of the most recent, "Faceless"), "Double Face" by Riccardo Freda, "The Devil's Commandment", and "The Hand That Feeds The Dead". "THTFTD" was unknown to me at first viewing, but this is one of the great facial transplant movies. Klaus Kinski is in fine form as our "mad scientist", attempting to correct a past mistake. The laboratory he uses is also one of the best ever, just eye-popping. Very obscure in America, but available subtitled from the usual sources. This is one of the greats, and almost nobody even knows about it.--Judexdot1--