The Hand That Feeds the Dead (1974)

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Crappy film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Sergio Garrone tries to juice up the old gothic horror/mad scientist deal get up by adding gore and nudity, but still manages to bore the life out of me.The whole deal is that Klaus Kinski is a scientist whose wife has been horrifically scarred in an accident that also claimed the life of her brilliant scientist father, Ivan Rassimov, who is a character called Ivan Rassimov and not the actor Ivan Rassimov. Kinski of course has one of those labs you get in old mansions that's full of bubbling flasks and electricity,and this is where he conducts his skin graft experiments, using local girls. I'm getting bored writing this review.There's an Igor character running around the place, a couple of girls, one of which is searching for her missing sister, and some guy. Other things happen that you've seen a million times before but Garrone throws in a lesbian sequence, treachery, and Kinski talking to a toy doll but also pads things out with the girl going to the police over and over again, and the medical procedures taking forever. Does it matter if the film bored me? Would that deter others from watching it anyway? Some people love this film and think it's some sort of classic. Maybe instead of an opinion, a brief description of the film and where to find it would suffice. Or is it better to hear the opinion of someone whose watched hundreds of these rather than, say, Mark Kermode?I don't know. There's another film called Lover of the Monster which was made using the same sets and the same actors. I'm going to watch that one, even though this one bored me, so I'm ignoring my own opinion too.

Klaus Kinski plays an evil scientist named Nijinski who wants to restore beauty of his disfigured wife.With the help of his hunchback he kidnaps young women to steal their faces."Evil Face" by Sergio Garrone is a dull Italian horror film with a bit of gore and lesbian sleaze.The characters are often wandering around doing nothing.There are some huge lapses in logic and several characters are extremely dumb.The cinematography is lazy and uninspired too.Fortunately "Evil Face" never reaches the dullness of Garrone's annoying Nazisploitation flick "SS Experiment Camp".It's always great to see Klaus Kinski in the role of villain.I have seen much worse Italian horror films,so I can recommend this one for fans of Italian horror.6 face transplants out of 10.

This is another collaboration between crazed German actor Klaus Kinski, hack Italian director Sergio Garrone, and beautiful Dutch actress Katia Christine, and it is a marginal improvement over their other collaboration "Amanti di Mostro". The story is superficially similar to the other film. Once again, Kinski is a mad scientist married to Katia Christine, and once again he is carrying on the work of his late father-in-law (named "Ivan Rassimov" in this movie, which is perhaps an inside joke since Ivan Rassimov was a familiar character actor in Italian exploitation films during this era). But instead of Kinski turning himself into Mr. Hyde and attacking all the half-naked,local women, this movie has an "Eyes without a Face"-type plot where Kinski uses his Igor-like assistant to kidnap all the half-naked, local women in order to transplant their flesh onto his disfigured wife.Sergio Garrone (to borrow a line from "Shock Cinema's" Steve Puchalski) probably couldn't successfully direct his own bowel movement, so it's impressive here that the direction at times approaches borderline competence (or maybe that should be credited to his Turkish co-director?). Kinski generally gave two kinds of performances in movies like this--scenery-gnawing or totally phoned-in. He definitely gnawed some serious scenery in "Amanti di Mostro", but here is performance is pretty much phoned-in (he also may have stormed off the set at some point because they seem to use a double for some of his scenes). If you're a fan of Katia Christine's acting, you'll enjoy this more than "Amanti" because she has much more screen time and essentially plays two different roles, one of which is deliciously evil. If you're more a fan of Katia Christine's body, however, you might prefer the other movie because she generally keeps her Victorian garments on here. There is as much nudity and even more gore than in "Amanti", but it all comes toward the end of the movie, by which time you may have already slipped into a boredom-induced coma.Although the best thing about this might be the literal translation of the Italian title, "The Hand that Feeds Death", this was recently released on Region 1 DVD under the ho-hum title "Evil Face". I wouldn't really recommend this, but god knows I'VE seen worse movies.

I watched Turkey version of this movie from a very old VHS cassette. The film was re-edited by co-director Yilmaz Duru and just 78 minutes. It seems that those other 9 minutes was very gory for the eyes of Turkish co-producer Tugra Film and they decided to chop that footage. There were neither "yanking the guts out of a dead puppy" by Kinski nor his "spending a lot of time running wild through the woods". He was more of a decent but passionate guy, anyway he was spooky. There were some inconsistencies during the film, or better some long jumps in the narration. After the professor's henchman buries Daniel out somewhere in the garden, then all of a sudden in the next scene we see Daniel trying to free from sarcophagus in the cellar. And the film finishes right after Daniel runs out the manor through the woods and collapses crying on the grasses.