blanche-2 After a horrible car accident, a concert pianist's hands are transplanted and he becomes a monster in "Hands of a Stranger," a 1962 film starring Paul Lukather, James Stapleton, and Joan Harvey.Somewhat based on the often remade "Hands of Dr. Orlac," Stapleton plays Vernon Paris, a gifted pianist. The cab he is in has an accident, and his hands are mangled. A surgeon (Lukather) decides to try a hands transplant, taking hands from a corpse brought in a couple of hours earlier. When the bandages come off and Vernon realizes they're not his hands, he basically flips out and goes on a killing spree. A couple of times, he doesn't know his own strength and people end up dead. Then he starts deliberately killing.Unlike Mad Love, where we know the transplanted hands are those of a killer, we never do learn the identity of Vernon's new hands. As for Vernon, I guess we just assume for some reason he goes nuts. His hands are ruined, the doctor gives him a chance to continue his career, and he's furious with everyone involved and seeks revenge.Directed by Newt Arnold, this is a fairly atrocious film. For one thing, the eye makeup and use of a shiny eye shadow used to draw light is obvious. On Stapleton, who has effete features, it looks ridiculous. The dialogue is mind-bogglingly dense and the images in the film are sledge-hammer obvious, focusing on hands, hands, hands.The acting - I imagine most of these poor souls did the best they could under the circumstances. Joan Harvey is so over the top screaming and fake crying that she's practically on the ceiling. In contrast, Stapleton's face and voice remain completely unchanged throughout the movie. Paul Lukather, whose voice is famous because of all the video games he's done, had a very distinguished career in all mediums and tries to strike a balance. But what could he do talking about beauty and science and mankind all the time.If you want to watch it, be advised and just get a kick out of it.

Red-Barracuda A world famous pianist loses his hands as the result of a car crash, and is then given the hands of a killer in an audacious medical transplant. This event has a dark psychological effect on him.Hands of a Stranger is a little too talky for its own good. The story itself might be a well-worn one but there's no excuse for the serious lack of action here. An 'evil hands' film really needs to cut back on the chat and deliver more schlock. There are occasional memorable moments such as the scene where the pianist visits the home of the taxi driver responsible for the crash that maimed him but in the main such sequences are in short supply. The lead character Vernon is also a somewhat hard character to get behind. His ingratitude for the surgery that prevented him from being without hands marks him out as a somewhat arrogant and unsympathetic individual.One reasonably interesting aspect of the film is that its quite ambiguous for a movie of this type, in that it is never really made certain that the hands are inherently evil or not. It seems to me that the surgery merely effects the natural dexterity that Vernon had, and as a result makes him unable to play piano, leading to psychological breakdown. In this sense Hands of a Stranger is quite interesting. But its poor pacing and lack of action mean that it is not enough to save it from being a bit of a clunker.

bkoganbing This low budget Allied Artists thriller boasts some very unique camera work and a nice and edgy performance as a Van Cliburn like concert pianist whose hands become horribly mangled in a car crash by Paul Lukather.The film opens with someone killing and then being killed and it's those hands that are grafted on to Lukather when he's brought into the hospital. James Stapleton plays the surgeon whose hubris leads him to using Lukather as an experimental guinea pig for a new surgical transplant technique. Who knows if eventually it might have worked, but imagine asking Van Cliburn to put his career on hold around this time for several years. Lukather is not that patient and several fatalities result because of that, most tragically the death of child prodigy Barry Gordon.Though the film holds up pretty well for such a low budget product with limited production values in 1962 no one would have mistaken the lead for anyone else other than Van Cliburn. That dimension is lost to today's generation.Doesn't mean they can't enjoy a good low budget shocker.

lemon_magic I saw this movie as part of one of those 50 pack public domain DVD collections, which means I paid something like 50 cents for the privilege of viewing it. Well, it's not like I want my 50 cents back, but this was a frustrating film. There's a good looking, reasonably talented cast at work here (although Lukather comes across as a bit of a one-note stone face), some crisp black and white photography that makes it easy to see what's going on in any given scene...even if the actual art direction is risible. (You've never seen so many ham-handed (hah) attempts at visual metaphor and symbolism.) There's even a decent (if somewhat dated) premise to drive the story. But the screenplay loads the actors down with several long tons of the most affected, mannered dialog this side of an Ed Wood Jr. film, and the resulting tar pit of inaction just kills any forward momentum the story might develop. It's the kind of dialog that reads on paper much better than it works in the mouth of live actors, and there's just way too much of it. Also, some of the line readings are weird - the actors apparently devoted so much energy to memorizing and delivering their page-long sentences that they couldn't spare any to figure out where to pause, or take a breath. (I fault the director for this).It's as if someone locked themselves in a room with the entire oeuvre of psychological thrillers and noir styled movies from the last 20 years, watched them all straight through, learned all the wrong lessons,and went right out to make a movie. (Although I understand this is actually a remake of sorts of a particular earlier film.) "Hands of A Stranger" isn't all that bad, mind you. The people who made it tried so hard to be intense and expressionistic and psychologically subterranean that they probably gave themselves mental hernias, and you can't help but enjoy the results...in the same way you would enjoy a high school version of "The Crucible".Based on the results here, I wouldn't balk at watching another movie with this director or this case, but I also don't imagine I would be in a big hurry to do so.