Powerful

Absolutely Brilliant!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Other reviews here indicate that the pilfered film footage in this "effort" by schlockmeister Jerry Warren comes from legitimately *good* Chilean movies, but you wouldn't know it from Warrens' bungling. He manages to make this assemblage of footage pretty dull and uninteresting. It still has some appeal for people channel surfing in the wee hours of the morning, and is not without atmosphere. "Curse of the Stone Hand" only really comes to life in scenes where the legendary John Carradine, one of Warrens' repertory players (and seemingly a man who could never say no to *any* script), appears. (However, that's because of Carradines' grandiose screen presence, not because of anything Warren does.)The first tale is an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevensons' "The Suicide Club", in which a young man, desperate to rid himself of debts, enters a club where he thinks he can gamble his way to good fortune. The second story is derived from the 1945 feature "The House is Empty", regaling us with the experience of two brothers tormented by an older sibling. Warren attempts to tie all of this together with his "stone hand" nonsense, which has something to do with a curse on the residents of a house, and removes the dialogue from his source material in favour of narration.Even at only 68 minutes, this is a little tough to get through. In compressing / editing the footage from the two Chilean features, Warren and company rob them of their effectiveness. There's still the entertainment value from the revelations provided, in any event. If you're a Carradine fan, you may feel let down from only seeing him in the brief additional scenes. Another of Warrens' regulars, Katherine Victor, also appears here.At the very least, seeing this exercise in dullness may motivate one to see the Chilean films in their proper context.Four out of 10.

I remember seeing most of the first half of this film years ago, being somewhat impressed by the atmosphere, and feeling that the fault must be my own, for having tuned in five minutes late, that it wasn't making total sense. I cut it more slack for being obviously dubbed. Sure, after all some movies suffer from bad translation.These many years later, after finding a public domain DVD online, I had a chance to finally check my generally positive -- and at any rate intrigued --memory of this film. First off, I am convinced that someone studied the visuals of the original films this was supposedly re-shot from (or however culled from) with no access to a translation.Therefore, while there are motivated people walking to and fro, gazing smolderingly at each other, uttering lines of obvious deep portent, all as a pretty serviceable music track swells and fades in the background, while camera setups and lighting that seem to come right out of a well-made film are everywhere in evidence, none of it -- NONE OF IT -- really makes clear sense. It's close to a pantomime in which the audience is not invited in, as they would have been in a high period silent film with few inter-titles. Something's missing; it all stays fuzzy.The first half is a basically comprehensible story, in that you can tell what's going on in a schematic sense. But the connective tissue that would make it a full-limbed, resonant experience is missing. We see a couple, not really meeting them, and never learn anything about them. Right off, the husband opens a letter summoning him on account of a gambling debt. You can tell by the furrow of his brow and the flaring nostrils that he's up against it. But why do we care? We don't even know him or his wife. OK, so I'm an empathetic sort who decides to care about other people who are in trouble. Still, the experience of this film is completely opaque. I want to care, but I am held at a distance. It's a pity, too.I read a lot of really harsh criticism of Jerry Warren online, even an article in which we are told that Warren himself said in an interview that he didn't care about film -- he was making money. But the look of this film is actually pretty accomplished. There seems to have been the craftsmanship there to put something credible and creditable together. There is a respectable achievement of atmosphere throughout, even in the stone hand framing device at the beginning which is pretty much a non-sequitur cooked out of purest nothing. There's a semi-potent horror scene when the poor husband is in a town square at night, and wheels around to face various creepy grotesques peering at him from the dark. It's an effective moment. It's because of these things that Curse is doubly frustrating. This film didn't have to be as opaque and nebulous an experience as it is.At whatever point you drop the needle on this film, it will seem as if you came in after something major happened, and that you will never get the point because of that until you backtrack and watch the entire thing. But no. That's just the way Curse plays.The second half makes even less sense than the first, and with no big horror payoff moments. I can't tell who anyone is, what their relationship is or what is going on, until the end comes, when I can only wonder what has just happened.I don't dislike this film. I wish I understood what the heck happens during that last half. And I wish they'd had a translator for the first half so they actually had known what was going on with the characters and been in a position to share with us. --Or do I? The famed, hated Carradine sequence of this film is native-spoken English, and it is horrible. Junk. Maybe this film seems better specifically because of the cryptic quality it has from having been stolen sans understanding by the makers/thieves.

I saw this film once, on the late, late show, when I was in high school. The only part that stays with me is an interesting segment that suddenly makes the previously dull movie come to life, when a group of men are holding a meeting of some kind. I remember exclaiming out loud, " Wait a minute, this is Robert Louis Stevenson's story The Suicide Club!" It was the only part of the movie that actually made any sense, and held my interest, as it was based on a strong literary source, and professionally acted and directed, in contrast with the typical Jerry Warren goofiness of the rest of the picture.My impression of Jerry Warren is that his movies were just one slight step above the level of Ed Wood's productions. The hilarious sequence in Invasion of the Animal People, where a psychiatrist solemnly questions Katherine Victor about the argument that led to her daughter leaving the house in a snit, and later encountering a UFO, is like something you'd see on Saturday Night Live, along with the bit where the police surgeon demonstrates to his colleagues the structure of the inner ear, using a Halloween prop skull.

For a long time, the true origins of this pitiful travesty of a film were unknown; it was rumored that two Mexican films were used as the basis of the Jerry Warren "work" - but in fact CURSE OF THE STONE HAND is composed (apart of the Warren-filmed horrendous sequences with Carradine, Katherine Victor, etc.) of two EXCELLENT (in their original form of course) Chilean movies of 1945, both directed by exiled Argentinian directors. The segment known as "House of Gloom" is made of one-third of LA CASA ESTA VACIA, directed by Carlos Schlieper, and the other segment, "The Suicide Club, is equally one-third of LA DAMA DE LA MUERTE, directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen. Both directors were highly talented men, and as you can imagine their works are totally destroyed by the Jerry Warren ineptitude. Another Christensen movie, LA BALANDRA ISABEL LLEGO ESTA TARDE (1949) was also "cannibalized" by Warren, and released under the title "The Violent and the Damned". If you can, AVOID AT ALL COSTS any Jerry Warren travesty (you can eventually watch his OWN films, such as "Teenage Zombies" or "Frankenstein Island"...) and try to see the original foreign movies destroyed by this man...