Cooktopi The acting in this movie is really good.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

MartinHafer John Agar stars as Alex Marsh, a researcher working on a combination nerve gas and hypnotic drug. However, there's an accident in the lab and instead of killing Marsh, the poisonous gas turns him into a giant toxic monster. Just touching him kills folks...yet he somehow is immune to it. Can they stop him or turn him back into the handsome researcher?There are many problems with this film. First and foremost, there's enough material for about 30 minutes worth of film. As a result, the film is heavily padded and you see many, many scenes of Marsh running about town evading the authorities. Second, the weird costume they put on Agar didn't allow him to talk or act. In fact, it could have been ANYONE inside the ridiculous looking getup. Third, it just wasn't interesting...in fact, it was pretty boring...which means it's a pretty typical John Agar film.By the way, when the monster came upon a gas station attendant played by Joe Besser, I sure was hoping to see him touch him! I never could stand Besser and his naughty little boy shtick back in the 50s and he was probably the worse guy to try playing Curly's part in the Three Stooges...even worse than Joe DeRita!!

poe-48833 HAND OF DEATH opens with a sequence that might've come straight out of THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (or VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED). It's an ominous beginning (thanks in no small part to the music) and the fact that the movie involves experiments with Nerve Gas makes it Topical no matter the decade. When Agar begins his Transformation, it's his MIND that goes first, and he ends up looking almost exactly like Ben Grimm ("The Thing" from THE FANTASTIC FOUR), at least as rendered in the beginning by Jack Kirby. And, like any good Monster, he Inadvertently (at least at first) wreaks Havoc wherever he goes. Decades ago, I created a super "hero" of sorts of my own, called The Leper. A homeless man subjected to the experiments of a mad scientist working for The Military Industrial Complex, his mere TOUCH became lethal. Like Agar in HAND OF DEATH, he used GLOVES to try to prevent infecting folks... A couple of years ago, I entered a Halloween costume contest. I made myself up as The Leper. The makeup took me three hours to apply and was convincing enough that my own niece didn't recognize me when I approached her. (One man who attended the contest- held at a local comic shop- couldn't take his eyes off of me.) It wasn't until I got in my car to leave and looked in the rear view mirror at myself that I realized just HOW convincing my makeup was: I didn't recognize myself. On my way home, people stared at me (one woman even rolled down her window and asked me if I was alright) until I explained that it was just a Halloween makeup. Yesterday, reading one of Tom Weaver's books of interviews, I discovered HAND OF DEATH in a John Agar interview. I've just watched it and it's EXACTLY the kind of movie I'd hoped to make about THE LEPER. Dammit.

grokenstein 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.

mopmonkey-1 I saw this movie at a theater as an 8 year old,and was literally scared under the seat. I haven't seen it since 1962, but vividly remember the monster he became. As young as I was, I remember finding it odd that he wandered the streets without garnering more attention. It IS a shame that it hasn't been made available on DVD; I'd grab it up in a minute. It would probably seem hokey now,but, on the other hand,maybe it would still impress, like " The Day the Earth Stood Still" (no insult intended to THAT classic). We don't have AMC available in Canada, so it appears that I'll have a long wait before refreshing my memory of my first REALLY scary horror movie.