What’s an upstanding British chap like Mark Baines (Roy Jenson, Soylent Green) doing in a place like Guanajuato, Mexico? To strike it rich through plundered oil! But when the superstitious locals he’s hired refuse to enter the mine in question, he goes in himself, with wife Jennifer (Samantha Eggar, The Uncanny) in tow. Inside, they find dusty mummies and a hidden slide that deposits its unsuspecting riders into Satan’s chamber, where a 300-year-old hand is swiped as some sort of prize — the archaeological equivalent to finding a plastic kazoo in a cereal box.
The Baineses know they’ve found something special; what they don’t know is that the crispy claw has a mind of its own. However, unlike the Addams Family member named Thing or yesteryear’s animated Yellow Pages logo, the Guanajuato hand is neither nimble nor evolved enough to run along its fingers. What it lacks in speed, it makes up for in slaughter. Ergo, Demonoid, Alfredo Zacarías’ follow-up to 1978’s The Bees.
For phalanges-based horror, Demonoid is markedly better than Oliver Stone’s The Hand, which came out the same year. Both films involve a disembodied mitt killing people, but only Zacarías’ picture can boast Stuart Whitman (Guyana: Cult of the Damned) co-starring as a priest. Trust me: Watching a panicked Whitman stumble about the room with a supernatural paw clutching his face is Something to See. (Perhaps those of you with the DTs have seen it before.)
The swift, schlock shocker is Eggar’s show and she goes to town with it like an ol’ pro. Never is this more apparent than the real sour apple of a surprise ending. I’m sure she felt like a idiot doing it — and a dumber one when she watched the dailies — but Eggar sells it, making that final scene truly memorable, even if the whole of Demonoid is so, so not. Folks, let’s give her a big … well, you fill in the blank. —Rod Lott