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.

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.

i caught this kooky little horror film on cable the other night. it held up pretty well. the notion of scientist turned monster is obviously familiar, but it actually managed to be creepy and suspenseful..wished the guy had found a pair of gloves before touching all those poor people. i also loved the 'nightmare' sequence when he's exposed to the deadly gas, and dreams of beakers and flying white mice. kewl! how odd that it was directed by a musical comedy song and dance man. this is a fun 50's -ish horror tale, with delightful over the top acting. and it's really short. which is something.

Last night, Fox Movie Channel ran the long-feared-lost sci fi thriller HAND OF DEATH, starring John Agar. I believe this may have been the first-ever TV showing of this film. Here's my verdict....First off, anyone hoping that Fox was clinging to a pristine print of this film, which had been simply filed away in the vaults, was in for a disappointment. What FMC ran was a clumsily panned and scanned transfer of a dupey, 16 mm print. The sound quality was fuzzy and the picture quality so contrasty that for stretches the monster-Agar was reduced to a silhouette.Director Gene Nelson and screenwriter Eugene Ling make very little of a fertile idea, unused since The Invisible Ray in 1936. A scientific experiment goes haywire, and scientist Alex Marsh's (John Agar) metabolism is altered so that his mere touch suddenly kills any living creature. The film's first 20 minutes are devoted to bland domestic melodrama and strained comic relief. But the the real problems begin once Agar gains his `hand of death.'When he gains the death-touch, Alex goes insane. Unfortunately, so does the movie. From that point forward, none of his actions have any coherent motivation, and the picture simply lurches from one ludicrious scene to the next without any apparent logic. When there's no logic, there's also no tension. Puzzled viewers are left to simply watch Agar run amok. As a result of the accident, Alex also turns black, and eventually morphs into a grotesque, bloated monster that looks like a cross between Uncle Remus and Ben Grimm (The Thing, from the Fantastic Four comic books). Making the scientist turn black gives the film unintented but hilarious additional layers of meaning.The acting is wooden, but the characters are so poorly sketched that it matters little. Agar has very little to do here except run around in an oversized foam rubber mask and grunt. The film is further weakened by a juvenile score (which, at one point, breaks into `Chopsticks!'). Nelson worked mostly in television, where he shot an episode of the original Star Trek series (`The Gamesters of Triskelion'), among other TV episodes. At just 58 minutes, Hand of Death isn't much longer than `Gamesters of Triskelion.' This appears to have been Ling's final screenwriting credit. Perhaps after this, he was too embarrassed to continue. The most distinguished member of the Hand of Death crew was cinematoprapher Floyd Crosby. Crosby (father of singer David Crosby) had lensed major Hollywood features including the stunning High Noon (1952), but was blacklisted by the major studios and reduced to shooting B pictures (including Attack of the Crab Monsters and Teenage Cave Man). After Hand of Death, Crosby would shoot most of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations, as well as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Black Zoo, among other genre favorites. It's impossible to judge his work here, due to the poor quality of the FMC print.Hand of Death is not a good film, but manages to hold audiences' attention in the same `I-can't-believe-I'm-seeing-this' sort of way that films like The Hideous Sun Demon amuse audiences. It was not a major rediscovery by any means, but it was nice to finally see this little curio.