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| All Images Courtesy Cleopatra Entertainment |
New to blu-ray from Cleopatra Entertainment, the 2024 Japanese film The Beast Hand is a grimy, gory, microbudget throwback to Japan’s prolific wave of late-80s/early-90s “V-Cinema” ultraviolent straight-to-video shockers. These low-budget films made specifically for the booming VHS market often contained some combination of the following: sadistic gangsters, grotesque body-horror transformations, low-rent but convincingly nasty practical gore effects, and lots of violence, often with sexual violence gratuitously added as well. Depending on one’s personal taste, these films were either repugnant, or the stuff that midnight-movie viewing material is made of (or both). The Beast Hand blends together all of those elements as it pays homage to that era and movement, and like the vintage ultraviolent V-cinema movies of the 80s and 90s, it willfully wallows in grime and bad taste as much as possible. Unfortunately, it also falls far short of what it seems to promise that it will deliver. Devoted afficionados of vintage Japanese straight-to-video sleaze may find things to enjoy here, but most other viewers should pass on this one – and even those who are drawn to this kind of thing may come away disappointed.
The Beast Hand tells the story of two hapless, broken characters – a man and a woman – who have fallen under the control of a sadistic gangster, who uses them as pawns and manipulates their entire lives. The man he uses as an accomplice in armed robberies, the woman he keeps around to sexually assault. When the man loses his hand in a bloody robbery gone wrong, the woman calls up a black-market “doctor” to save his life. The doctor does so by replacing the man’s hand with some sort of hideous lab-grown mutant appendage – the titular Beast Hand – which seems to possess the man and make him kill.
The Beast Hand is starkly bifurcated into its two halves – the grimy, seedy tale of misery under the control of the sadistic gangster, and the half with the killer beast-hand that has a mind of its own. Bizarrely, the film is literally bifurcated as well, with the “opening” credits instead happening at exactly the halfway point of its scant 75-minute runtime, during the shift between these modes. The problem with The Beast Hand is that after very effectively putting us through the “I need to take a shower after watching this” misery and sleaze of the first half, it completely fails to live up to the expectations set for a movie about a guy with a mutant killer hand.
The first half executes what it is trying to do quite effectively – which is to say, it is GRIM and deeply unpleasant, pretty much for its own sake. Relentlessly nihilistic and abusive of both of our characters, and thus the audience. The sadistic gangster putting our two characters through a largely arbitrary hell, and subjecting the young woman to repeated rapes, is very hard to watch, as it is definitely meant to be. And it doesn’t really seem to be saying much with this nihilistic violence; it’s just nihilistic, presumably for the edgelord shocks. It is effective in what it wants to do, but I definitely did not enjoy what it was doing. The movie is very well-shot, with very strong and striking cinematography for its budget, particularly when it comes to the city exteriors, which use night and streetlights very effectively. But that’s about the only compliment I would give the first half that isn’t pretty backhanded. While watching, I kept thinking that surely the point of all this must be to set up a scenario where the young man will seek revenge once he gets the beast hand.
And indeed, around the halfway point the film takes a hard shift into body-horror territory, in a way that totally defies narrative cohesion, as a feature common to those straight-to-video Japanese films, and not a bug. Suddenly there is a black-market mad scientist doing a shady operation in a back-alley building, and suddenly our protagonist has a hideously mutated claw hand on his arm, which turns him into a glassy-eyed, slimy-skinned zombie when it fully takes over. And to give credit where credit is due to one of the movie’s few strong points, the practical effects are pretty cool, and quite effective. Slimy, nasty, and DIY in the cool way that low-budget genre films of the 80s and 90s were.
However… the film then goes on to do very little of any interest with the whole concept. He does go on a couple rampages with the beast hand, but they are far too short and minimal, and there is very little in the way of him getting any kind of revenge for the horrors inflicted in the film’s first half. Most of the movie from this point on consists of him and the young woman sitting around talking about the uncertainty of what they are going to do with their lives, now that they are on the run and he is afflicted with a beast hand. The mood is still just oppressively grim, and oddly dialogue-heavy. For a movie that seems to promise gory killer-mutant-hand chaos, there is far too little. There is simply nowhere near enough beast-hand in The Beast Hand.
The gory V-cinema horror movies of the 80s and 90s were largely defined by their DIY-but-effective nasty practical gore effects; those that endure as any level of niche cult classic do so almost entirely for this reason. So it is another major disappointment in The Beast Hand that the film uses mostly CGI blood and gore, rather than practical. The hand is practical, and pretty cool, but much if not most of the blood and gore is obvious CGI, of a cheap enough level that it does not mesh with the footage in a convincing way. As an homage to a fully practical era of horror movies, it feels like a major failure that this film could not at least pull off entirely practical effects for its beast-hand carnage.
On top of its other failures, or ways in which it just feels like a grimy slog, the bad CGI where practical effects clearly should be feels like the last nail in The Beast Hand’s coffin. Good cinematography and a cool practical hand prop, and acknowledging that the film executes its nihilistically bleak first half effectively (for better or for worse) is not enough to save The Beast Hand from largely being a failure, and a thoroughly un-fun watch without enough redeeming qualities to make it worth the journey. Hardcore fans of DIY Japanese straight-to-video sleaze may find enough here to make it worth checking out; everybody else should probably skip it, lest your hand take on a mind of its own and start reaching for the stop button on the remote.
- Christopher S. Jordan
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