The Crawling Hand from 1963 sounds like it could be a spin-off from the Adams family staring Thing. It’s not, what it is though, in a word, is terrible. In two words, very terrible. In three words, very very terrible. 

But just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful space trip, that stars Alan Hale Junior, better known as the skipper. Our story is set during the quest to land a man on the moon. Only the space agency isn’t having much luck with getting astronauts back from the moon. They keep dying, and the latest venture isn’t any more successful. The current guy is begging them for unknown reasons to blow up his spacecraft before he lands. Also, he was out of oxygen for twenty minutes and should have been dead so that’s kind of weird. 

The head science guys think the reason for this is life is different in space. It evolves differently or some almost sciencey-sounding crap like that.  Meanwhile at the local soda shop dancing has broken out, and the soda jerk is being a jerk about it because he grew up in Footloose. Also, our Movie Star, Marta, gets introduced and she carrying a rat, which is for her grandfather, a scientist. I think she wants him to catch the plague or something. Her boyfriend Paul picks her up and takes her and the rat home so she can get her bathing suit and go for a swim at the beach. The rat doesn’t have a bathing suit so he can’t go swimming, and gets handed off to Grandpa. They change at the beach, and we don’t get to see them naked, due to some careful camera work, and due to some not-so-careful camera work, we can also tell that she’s not naked but putting on her bikini bottom over another bikini, so that careful camera work wasn’t careful enough.

They frolic on the beach, and when he talks about marriage, she tries to run away, so he flings her around before tackling her, It’s supposed to be romantic I think. But she falls face down looking at a dismembered and not yet crawling hand and forearm, or at least it appears to be one inside an astronaut flight suit glove and sleeve. She’s understandably upset and wants to leave. Her Boyfriend wants to take it home with him, and believe it or not, she’s not on board with that idea. So he goes back in the middle of the night for it, That seems like an idea that will end well.  But he wraps it up in a bag takes it home and puts it in his aunt's house’s pantry.

Our science guys meanwhile have decided that the rats they sent into space are as smart as humans because Check notes … one unlocked a cage that one time. 

During the night, the hand gets hungry and decides to get something to eat, which wakes up his aunt, who he lives with. She finds a mess, cleans it up, and then tries to go back to bed.  But before she can, the hand, now somehow gloveless, leaps at her throat. Lunges at her throat? Flies? Hurls it’s self at her throat? Moves to her throat using propulsion of unknown origin. Look I don’t know how it lept in the air and choked her to death. But I find that more believable than it taking the glove off of it’s self. 

Paul hearing the commotion, runs into the aunt’s bedroom and finds her dead. Finding a scrap of sleeve he runs to the pantry, before even checking for a pulse, and finds our crawling hand has … crawled away. It’s gone so he calls the Skipper. I mean Sheriff. The skipper investigates for a bit, leaves Paul to catch up on sleep, and then Paul also gets attacked by the crawling hand until he loses consciousness. The coroner shows up to pick up the body of the landlady, who has just been casually lying in her bedroom unattended. The coroner and his assistant stumble upon unconscious Paul and are freaked out by the not-dead body.

Paul awakes in the back of the hearse next to the actual dead body and he understandably loses his shit. At least it’s supposed to be dead. She blinks an awful lot for a dead woman. When Paul eventually wanders home the Skipper, I mean Sheriff is there waiting for him. He tells him not to leave home. 

The fingerprints from our crawling hand have been traced back to the space agency, and this could cause issues if one of their dead astronauts is fingered in a crime. So they start their investigation and Sheriff Skipper’s kinda pissed about losing the case. But he knuckles down and lends a hand by sending a deputy to keep the house safe. 

Something strange is happening to Paul. He’s wearing eye makeup and entered his goth phase. Or turning into a hand-possessed zombie.  He leaves the house and attacks the jerky soda jerk and tries to strangle him to the upbeat tune, “The Bird Is The Word” and not even the Trashmen version of the song everyone is familiar with. I mean I get the character isn’t going to stop strangling anyone just to put another dime in the jukebox, but the writer could have scripted a different one playing. 

Paul flees the scene and heads over to his girlfriend’s house to wave goodbye before he flees town to prove his innocence. To further prove his innocence he also tries to choke Marta Unconscious. Luckily Skipper Sheriff, along with the feds, is already en route so he’s able to … almost assist. He addresses Marta’s father as “The Professor” and I fully expected him to start building things out of coconuts to defeat the crawling hand, 

Paul goes back home to … get something out of the bottom of the closet and the creeping hand falls out of the top shelf attacking him. They arm wrestle for a bit, but then Paul wraps the hand up in a towel using his extra hand advantage. He throws it in the trunk, and heads off the the town dump, as they arrive however the hand escapes and tries to choke the chicken named Paul. Paul and Righty battle it out, Paul stabbing it with a broken beer bottle. 

Skipper and the feds show up at the Dump and Paul is still armed with the broken bottle. Skipper warns Paul to drop it, threatening to shoot with his boom stick. Stray cats are eating the rouge hand, which finally defeats it, freeing Paul from the spell. 

The Crawling Hand is terrible, and as it ends we need not give it a hand when a single finger will do. 

The Crawling Hand is available streaming on Tubi.