The Crawling Hand / The Slime People

Fans of ’50 and ‘60s sci-fi monster movies are a dying breed. In the CGI age, does anyone have patience for rubber suits, cosmic rays and scenes filmed in rented trailers passing themselves off as mission control? I’m willing to bet there are a few of us left tracking down unseen gems like The Crawling Hand and The Slime People now out on a remastered Blu-ray double-feature courtesy of VCI Entertainment. It looks like a bargain bin special, but the 4K scans from the original negative say otherwise.

In The Crawling Hand (1963), the severed arm of an infected astronaut washes up on a California beach where the microorganisms inside infect an ambitious college student. Meanwhile, the hand itself skitters away from a pair of scientists and the local sheriff (Alan “Skipper” Hale, Jr.) as they attempt to solve a string of mysterious strangulations. Well, duh!

Taking a fairly serious approach to the low-budget material, director Herbert L. Strock was no stranger to the teenage horror market, having pumped out I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and How to Make a Monster in the ‘50s. This one ticks all the boxes for some serious MST3K riffing, including a lead actor channeling the late James Dean, a thickly accented Swedish love interest and the aforementioned Skipper throwing his considerable weight around. But despite its flaws, The Crawling Hand is never boring, even throwing in a few clever false scares as hands pop up unexpectedly behind curtains, couches and bedsheets. It’s just about everything you could ask for in a drive-in movie from the era.

Released the year prior, The Slime People takes things even further, opening with an off-camera apocalypse that finds the entire city of Los Angeles wiped out by an army of shelled monstrosities from beneath the earth. The fate of humanity rests with a sportscaster, a scientist, a marine and two useless females who attempt to break down the wall of fog terraforming our planet into a habitat for the invaders.

There’s a definite zombie-apocalypse vibe at work here, but no budget to pull it off convincingly. We only see three of the Slime People at a time, but the costumes are creative and creepy, hidden behind a layer of optical fog. Director Robert Hutton swings for the fences, which makes things all the more enjoyable when the film strikes out occasionally. Set mostly outdoors, The Slime People offers up a nice change of pace from the wood-paneled offices and cramped living rooms of its contemporaries. Throw a few hundred million at this idea and it could pass for A Quiet Place IV.

This VCI double-feature is waaay better than you’d expect. That “restored in 4K” banner on the front is no joke; each movie looks terrific. Plus there’s a great hour-long Tom Weaver commentary for The Slime People with co-star Susan Hart, another for The Crawling Hand, poster gallery and slipcover.

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