It really doesn’t matter what you think of all these horror remakes, ’cause they’re here to stay, and there will be more – many, many more. Here’s the latest “re-imagined” scarefest from the Hollywood nightmare machine.
The Hand is great. Michael Caine plays a comic book artist who loses his hand in a car accident and it comes back to kill people. OR DOES IT? Is it all in his head? Who cares? Oliver Stone directed it, and he also plays a homeless man who gets killed at the hand of the Hand. Michael Caine agreed to do the film because he needed to make a down payment on a new garage. The Hand rules.
Why the hell did it take this long for The Hand to get remade? It’s got a great lead role for an actor who wants to go all Jack Torrance kinda crazy, it’s got a hot college student who the lead actor bangs (and who does a striptease), it’s got a homeless man cameo for whoever directs it, and the main special effect – a severed HAND FROM HELL – is a piece of cake with today’s technology. Spend $15 million, and boom, at least $50 million domestic during its theatrical run and later all sorts of gangbusters on DVD.
So who’s going to remake this thing? Oliver Stone himself, of course.
Ya see, it isn’t so much that Stone has lost his mind lately. It’s just that he’s kind of gotten soft. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. He made a movie about George W. Bush – while the guy was still in office – and it was the most boring and pointless movie ever made. He made a movie about 9/11 and he didn’t point any fingers. And he’s making a sequel to Wall Street that features jokes about how big cell phones were back in the ’80s.
So why not return to the genre film that earned him a few bucks early in his career? Stone’s got nothing to prove. He still wants to work, apparently, so why not coast through a horror movie about a dude’s evil hand running around all over the place? Maybe he’ll at least make it crazy gory violent, like the original. More likely it’ll be PG-13, though.
Whatever. The Hand rules. Rent the original and watch it. It’s so goddamn freaky and weird, you’ll think you were dead or something.