Demonoid (1980)

The first and last time I got stitches was before I hit double digits.  I was bitten by a dog (which wouldn’t be the last time), and had to get four sutures in my right bicep (when you’re that age, it’s not a lot, but it sure as hell feels like it).  Since then, I’ve had injuries to my hands that I probably should have had stitched and didn’t, because that first time was more than enough for me.  While working at a fast food restaurant in my teens, I was hauling a box of shortening up from the basement, and my hand got caught on the hook end of an electrical junction box cover.  While working on a dryer, I split a knuckle open.  While removing a water valve from a washer, I gouged another knuckle on the same hand.  To this day, I maintain that the actual bone was bifurcated, but since no doctor was consulted, I guess we’ll never know.  Needless to say, I’m sure these injuries will come back to haunt me in short order, as I can already feel how arthritis is and will set in on my joints (not good for someone who works with their hands).  If you’ve ever stared at your hands for any length of time (like Felix Unger did in the “Odd Monks” episode of The Odd Couple), you really do discover what a marvel these appendages are.  They are one of the hardest parts of the human body to draw, too.  The things we can do with them are amazing, and, more often than not, we truly do take them for granted (until, of course, we are without their use, partially or in total).  I wonder, then, why, for as “important” a purpose as he has and as much work as he has to accomplish in a given day, Satan would cut off his left hand and send it to Guanajuato, Mexico, as he does in Alfredo Zacarias’ Demonoid (aka La Mano Del Diablo aka Macabra aka Demonoid: Messenger of Death)?  You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. 

Visiting her husband Mark (Roy Cameron Jenson) at their Mexican mine, Jennifer Baines (Samantha Eggar) uncovers a chamber previously used for Satanic rites.  She and her husband remove a tiny “coffin” shaped like a human hand from which escapes the titular Demonoid (no one calls it that in the film; it just sounds neat).  The avaricious anatomical appurtenance proceeds to wend its way through a series of victims, all the while setting its sights on the woman who freed it (this becomes a rather perplexing point, as the entire film could have been about thirty minutes long, realistically).

Aside from telepathic/telekinetic heads/brains-in-tanks, the most filmed disembodied human limb has to be the hand (I know of no film where an evil foot attacks people, and even the penis got its own cinematic sojourn in Doris Wishman’s The Amazing Transplant).  Whether they are grafted onto some hapless sap or scuttling about under their own steam, hands just have a greater visual appeal than any other body part.  Plus, they’re really good for strangling (and crushing skulls from the evidence presented here; I had to resist saying “on hand”).  What the idea of a lone hand causing malfeasance does is brings up a discussion about accountability.  If the hand is attached to a person who then turns to evil (Mad Love, Hands of the Ripper, The Hands of Orlac, etcetera), we, as an audience, have to consider whether the flagitiousness is located in the hand or in the person it wields.  If it’s all in the hand, then the person abrogates their role in any villainy.  They are no more than another victim or a fall guy.  This additionally raises the question of where consciousness resides; in the mind, in the spirit, or in every part of the body (the last two being easily tied together)?  Like the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing, maybe every microbe has an instinct for survival.  This is fine for straight forward horror/monster movies.  You have the good guys, you have the bad creature.  You don’t need any more.  

However, if we deem that the evil is inside the person and not the part, we have more possibilities to work with, a more nuanced premise.  Now, it’s the person struggling with the evil within them, the transplanted appendage being just an excuse for them to exercise their darkest desires.  We can even postulate that, even if the hand or whatever is, indeed, evil, its influence brings out the worst in its host rather than working strictly toward its own purposes.  In this sense, the chicken and the egg come into existence at the same time.  In Demonoid, we can say that Mark always wanted to blow up his mine with all his workers in it.  We can say that he always wanted to run away from his wife and head out to Vegas.  We can say that Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman) always wanted to attack a woman.  They simply never had the stones/opportunity to do it.  Even when the Demonoid does things after its host has apparently died or is moribund, we can still say that the person’s psychosis is so deep-seated that they do these things subconsciously in order to keep their mental narrative going.  Bear in mind, I am in no way saying that the hand in this film isn’t its own thing.  We see it do plenty while unattached to anyone, and it clearly has an agenda (though said agenda is unclear; does it want to rule the world?  To just get joined up with Jennifer?  To play Craps until it runs out of money and credit?).  But we can still consider its host’s responsibility in the proceedings, the same as if they were being controlled by the “injecto-pods” in Zontar: The Thing from Venus or somesuch.  Just something to think about, I suppose.

What I find special about this film is not that it’s especially well-written or well-shot or well-acted (though all three jobs are performed competently enough).  Rather, Demonoid is mindful of its mindlessness.  It knows that the premise is silly, but it plays it straight.  It disregards the common theme in films like this of a crisis of faith (sure, Father Cunningham has a few scenes regarding this dilemma, but they never develop into anything all that important, and the idea of the power of God defeating in the power of Satan never plays out except on a surface level).  The filmmakers understand that all they have to do is say that this is Satan’s hand without any other background information and let it ride.  There is a gleefully grimy aura on the film.  It is utterly unafraid to go for the gore, and said gore is usually accompanied by/women with copious amounts of cleavage.  The big “shock” ending is as predictable as that of an EC Comic.  The film stands there in front of the viewer, warts and all (but especially warts), and it couldn’t care less if you believe in it.  It believes in itself.

MVT:  The serious/not serious attitude allows the film to keep going and drag you along with it.

Make or Break:  The vague prologue that kind of sets up the story but is really just a small showcase for some tits and blood.

Score:  7/10      

Sands Of The Kalahari (1965)

The first time I went on an airplane, I was not scared.  I was flying to visit my uncle in New Hampshire, and I was probably about thirteen or fourteen years old.  I had no butterflies in my stomach.  I had no trepidation about looking out the window at the ground so many miles beneath my feet.  As a matter of fact, I kind of liked flying.  Unfortunately, my feelings are not the same today.  I have been on more flights than I would care to count which have flown through hellacious turbulence (the actual number is probably far less than ten, but I feel that’s more than enough, don’t you?).  I have been on flights where it felt like we were coming down for our landing at a (shall we say?) not-so-great angle.  I’m sure that when you’re piloting a flight like that, you have a large degree of control, and the danger is as minimized as it can be.  That said, I am an inveterate misanthrope and distrustful of most people, so my faith in airline pilots is about the same as the distance I can throw them (did I mention I have a bad back?).  I realize that the odds of being involved in a fatal airplane accident is about one in a million, but more often than not, I feel more like the one than the million, especially mid-flight when it feels like the large metal coffin you’re gliding through the air in (as well as your bowels) are about to make fast friends with Mother Earth.  Now, just add in a swarm of locusts, and you have Cy Endfield’s Sands Of The Kalahari, a film which has done nothing to alleviate my phobias about aviation, whatsoever.   

When their flight to Johannesburg, South Africa is delayed, a small group of passengers, including Grace Munkton (Susannah York), Mike Bain (Stanley Baker), Mr. Grimmelman (Harry Andrews), and Dr. Bondrachai (Theodore Bikel) find a small cargo plane willing to take them that evening for a nominal fee.  Piloted by the jovial-but-caddish Sturdevan (Nigel Davenport), the plane takes off with one additional passenger, great white hunter Brian O’Brien (Stuart Whitman).  Running afoul of the previously mentioned winged insects, the plane goes down in the middle of the (you guessed it) Kalahari Desert, and the survivors are faced with two choices: live or die.

Simply put, this film is in the Survival subgenre, yet what’s interesting in this one is the setting.  It’s not so much that it’s set in the desert (there are scads of movies about characters stranded in a desert), but what this particular desert says about the story.  The film came out at a time when apartheid was still national policy in South Africa and only two years after Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for his anti-apartheid efforts.  However, the rest of the world was not really on board with South Africa’s practices at this point, even though the United States had only just passed their own anti-discriminatory Civil Rights Act in 1964.  The film very subtly addresses the idea of segregation within its first few minutes.  As Grace makes her way along the airfield, there are bunches of African kids hanging on the fence, calling out and gesticulating.  It’s not that they are portrayed as particularly dangerous but more as full of life and energy, and they almost seem to be taunting the white people who pass them by, the fence the only thing keeping the whites safe (in their own minds, at least) for now.  Upon entering the airport terminal, there is almost total silence.  It is unnatural, this quiet, but it also serves to describe the differences of the racial divide.  The whites inside the terminal are cold and lifeless.  Here they are guarded and distinctly separate from the rest of the world outside the door.  In a sense, then, it can be argued that the locusts which take down the plane and the travails that follow are a sort of revenge on the people who have partaken in and enabled the racism which has divided the nation by the very land itself.

This sort of story set-up will typically lend itself to a microcosm cast, a sampling of different types representing different sections of society and watching how they interact under great stress.  Not so much with Sands Of The Kalahari.  Aside from the affable Grimmelman and the timid Bondrachai, the characters are rather unlikable.  Sturdevan is a misogynist pig and a borderline rapist.  Bain is a self-pitying drunk with a bad leg (making him an even more flawed and incomplete man who could never be a suitor for Grace’s affections).  Speaking of Grace, she starts off as a tease but quickly becomes an opportunist giving herself over sexually to O’Brien, because he is the most traditionally masculine and capable of keeping her alive.  O’Brien is a bloodthirsty paranoiac who is only looking out for number one (and not really caring if he steps in number two).  Even without any redeeming values among them to make them sympathetic, there should still be something there to keep the audience following their tale.  Unfortunately, they all seem to act out of character at a moment’s notice, seemingly in attempts to garner said sympathy, but these changes felt forced and hollow to me.  I would guess this has to do with the film being an adaptation of a novel (by William Mulvihill), so the episodic feel (which should help us see the characters as more rounded individuals) simply leaves one with a rather uneven impression.  Oddly, this also appears to reinforce my theory that South Africa wants to have its vengeance on these people.  Making them jerks just makes it easier for the audience to want it done.

We expect this type of ordeal to be either transformative or truthful.  That is, we expect the characters to either become different people from how they started or to show who they truly are behind any façade they may wear.  I would actually argue that it is both transformative and truthful.  The trials and tribulations set before a character are going to change them, even if it is only for the duration of their misfortunes.  And since character is shown by the actions one takes under pressure, we are seeing these people for who they really are.  Ergo, the transformation is in the stripping away of the fronts people put on in polite society and showing in public who they are behind closed doors.  That the characters in this film are not really worthy of the redemption we would normally afford someone who has undergone a trial by fire is a bit of a letdown.  But then again, the filmmakers only seem to be interested in judging (and punishing) one of them in particular, and since no standard of conduct is laid down or enforced in the diegetic world, how can any of these characters be either damned or praised, since the film itself doesn’t want to do it?  This non-judgment doesn’t make them any more appealing, though, and I personally wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with the majority of them outside of this movie.  But then, that’s my prerogative, isn’t it?    

MVT:  Endfield’s direction is clean and clear, and along with Director of Photography Erwin Hillier, he has a fantastic grasp of widescreen cinema.  Every inch of the screen is used to amazing effect, and the film is gorgeous from start to finish.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the scene when O’Brien is down in a hole and desperately flinging himself at the sheer walls in a vain attempt to free himself.  As he clambers around, he babbles incessantly, and his character is finally stripped bare.  It’s a great moment and only beats out the final scene for me, because it was the point at which I decided I like this film.

Score:  6.75/10

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