#it would just be a crusty old robot without any additional bits. creativity in machine fucking is infinitely funnier

[hillsofuhhtennessee]

cursed ideas I’ve had for a while: Velvet having godawful mascot/fursuit sex (with a character too edgy to even refer to publicly lol), and some kind of deliberately stupid mechanophilia or inanimate TF with them.

even more cursed idea: combine the two and have them screw some manky old animatronic as a mockery of 80s nostalgia or something. People really liked “kiss 2.0 as a janky old robot band” as a concept so there’s more overlap than you’d think.

even more cursed: I’m hardly familiar with the intricacies of FNAF (I like the concept but lost interest after the first few games) but man Mangle would be such an awful choice for that, especially with canon noncompliant fake fur covering vs hard plastic. “Crusty old eldritch abomination of a robot fox” is just such a concept regardless of deeper lore. It’s just so disgusting and ridiculous it seems way too entertaining and I can’t resist dumb crossovers. Even if I genericized it to avoid having to read up on all the lore, it would still be really obvious what I’m ripping off lol

I really don’t make Velvet as gross or aggressive as canon because I’m just too obsessed with making big scary character uwu vulnerable and soft. I should make them more accurately nasty more often tbh (though I also do it for other people’s sanity lol)

[mst3kproject]

106: The Crawling Hand

A movie in which a guy is brutally attacked while Surfin' Bird plays on the soundtrack.  We can all strike that off our list of Shit We Never Thought We'd See.

As the film opens, astronaut Mel Lockhart (no relation to Gilderoy, but perhaps an ancestor of Brant) hasn't quite made it back to Earth.  He gets blown up before he can complete the trip, but his severed arm somehow survives re-entry and washes up on a beach where it comes to the attention of a kid named Paul Lawrence.  The arm is carrying some kind of alien organism that infects anything it touches with the desire to kill, and soon Paul Isn't Paul Anymore as the space bugs take over his mind.  The arm, meanwhile, goes on a rather more limited rampage of its own, strangling Paul's landlady and knocking over her preserves.  Cops and scientists argue over who's in charge of the investigation, and horror and comedy argue over who's in charge of the script.

I had forgotten, but Allison Hayes is in this, too.  She plays Captain Lockhart’s girlfriend in a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere and she’s still more into it than she was in The Unearthly.  I’m gonna assume that her boyfriend blowing up in space was what caused the nervous breakdown that landed her at John Carradine’s little home hospital.  I told you guys the movies were coming together!

The bit about infectious alien bacteria in the summary isn't quite accurate.  The two scientists, Dr. Curan and Dr. Weitzberg (whose name the movie has to take the trouble to spell for us), spend significant time expositing poetically to us about what's been happening to living tissue sent into space.  Something about an Earth cell romancing a cosmic ray and giving birth to some vital force that evolves intelligence within minutes or hours, turning men into killers and rats into brooding supervillains.  I don't know why they went with this labored explanation when 'angry space germs' is literally three words. Generally in movie exposition less is more, unless the 'more' is somehow vitally important to the plot – which here, it is not.

The Crawling Hand is a dumb movie, and it's not my favourite film or my favourite episode, but I've kind of been looking forward to writing about it because this is my chance to share my theory about Hand Movies.  There are a surprising number of animate severed hands in movies.  Attack of the The Eye Creatures had one, for instance, as did The Evil Dead 2, and everybody remembers the Addams family's pet hand, Thing.  But hands also have movies of their own: in addition to The Crawling Hand there's The Beast with Five Fingers and The Hand, Severed Ties and that one short in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors.  What can we take from this, besides the fact that I watch way too many movies?  Well, I think that the Hand Movie is actually a sort of necessary partner of the Brain Movie.

We – or at least, those of us with an unhealthy love of awful old horror movies – have all seen a Brain Movie.  Stuff like The Brain from Planet Arous or Donovan's Brain, and several movies simply called The Brain.  Even things like It Conquered the World can be thought of as variations on the Brain Movie, because what the brain represents in movies like these is intellect unfettered by morality.  Either because they have no emotions or simply no interest in the lesser beings still trapped in the flesh, these brains apply their intelligence to doing things normal humans could but know that we shouldn't.

There's a problem with being a disembodied brain, though.  Humans are very proud of our brains, claiming they're the main thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom etc etc etc, but our brains wouldn't do us much good if we didn't also have hands. The thing humans do, to a degree no other creature does, is build shit.  Our brains are vitally important in figuring out how to build shit, but it's our hands that do the actual work.  We talk about finding 'intelligent life' in space but intelligence alone is not what we're looking for – dolphins are smart, but an alien SETI program would never find them. That's why dolphins need that alliance with the electricians, so there'll be somebody to build their warships for them.  Our search for life in space is a search for fellow builders.

The lack of hands plagues the villains of brain movies.  Gor from The Brain from Planet Arous needs a body in order to take over the world, so the poor thing is forced to possess John Agar's. Donovan's Brain uses its telepathic link with Dr. Cory to carry on shady business dealings.  In It Conquered the World Beulah uses human slaves, either willing or unwilling, to do its bidding.  A brain without hands is mere purpose without action – which brings us to the Hand Movie.  If an isolated brain is purpose without action, then an isolated hand is action without purpose.

Sometimes evil hands in movies do have a purpose – The Beast with Five Fingers seems to be taking revenge on the people who wronged its owner in life, for instance, and Ash' possessed hand in The Evil Dead is being controlled by the movie's nameless evil force.  Even in these cases, however, the hand itself is just a tool.  It cannot be reasoned with, and killing it does not mean killing the controlling influence, which can find another tool and try again. The Crawling Hand isn't one of these, though.  It is in fact a particularly pure example of the Hand Movie, because the titular crawling hand is animated by the alien bacteria and there is no purpose to its actions at all.  It's not trying to rule the world, or to make money, or anything like that.  It just kills people because it can, and there's no way to stop it from doing so except to either lock it up or destroy it.

If Brain Movies are about intellect without emotion, it's also possible to read Hand Movies as emotion without intellect.  The emotion involved is usually anger, whether the vengeful rage of The Beast with Five Fingers or the undirected murderous instinct of The Crawling Hand.  Whether the dichotomy is thought/action or reason/emotion, Hand Movies represent the partner of the Brain Movie, and the end result is the same whether it's the hand or the brain that has been isolated.  Either is an incomplete, perverse entity that cannot contribute anything to the world.  True creativity, true invention, and true humanity can only come from brain and hands working harmoniously together in one being.

This line of thought, that wholeness is essential to human-ness, is probably why we get things like bad guys with partially or even mostly-robotic bodies, like Darth Vader or that guy in Lois and Clark who wanted to transplant his head onto Superman's body – which I would much rather watch than bullshit like Me Before You, in which a man who has lost the use of his limbs cannot be convinced that life is still worth living even with Emilia Clarke.  For the record, if I ever lose a major body part, I am definitely going the supervillain route. If I get to hang out with the cast of Game of Thrones while I do it, bonus!

But let's get back to The Crawling Hand.  The movie presents this unreasoning incompleteness as something infectious, that can spread to humans and deprive us of our intellects, leaving only the purposeless rage of the hand.  In the opening scene we briefly see the doomed astronaut begging for help.  He is well on his way to hand-zombie-hood, periodically breaking off his sentences to chant, “kill, kill!”, but when he describes his situation he refers specifically to his problem being in his hand. It started there, 'making him do things', before moving on to the rest of his body.  The fact that it started in his hand is in large part responsible for the mess he's now in, since with that appendage out of his control, he can't activate the spacecraft's self-destruct mechanism.

Maybe it's because of the alien influence that the hand survives to land on Earth and be picked up by Paul Lawrence (man there were a lot of Pauls on MST3K), who it infects in turn.  Under the influence of the angry space germs, Paul too becomes little more than what the hand is: an undirected, purposeless killing machine. In this form he attacks people he knows, but there's no hint that this is because Paul himself is in any way resentful of them.  The soda shop owner was a weirdo but Paul had no reason to want him dead, and Marta is explicitly somebody Paul loves.  Zombie-Paul attacks them not because he is letting out anything he has suppressed, but simply because they are available.  When he has a choice, he tries to make Marta leave his house, or decides to run away from home, in order to avoid harming her or anybody else.

Sadly, most of what's interesting about The Crawling Hand is the opportunity to examine the sub-genre it lies in and how it relates to other types of body-part movies.  The movie itself spends way too much of its time on Paul and the scientists, and not nearly enough on what drew the audience in to see it, which is the unavoidably humourous image of a disembodied hand strangling people. Instead the film-makers use Zombie-Paul as the main villain, probably because they knew damn well the hand thing would make people laugh rather than scream.  This was probably a mistake.  The surf movie soundtrack, the crusty soda shop owner, and the scientists' clumsy improvised investigation are all clearly meant to be funny, and the movie as a whole would probably have worked better as an explicit horror-comedy about a murderous hand than it does trying to divide itself into discreet 'horror' and 'comedy' sections.

And yes, you can expect to see both The Brain from Planet Arous and The Beast with Five Fingers in the Episodes that Never Were section.  I wouldn't miss them for the world!