There had been 'living' severed hand movies before (The Beast With Five Fingers, The Crawling Hand, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, And Now The Screaming Starts), and there have been a few since (The Hand, Evil Dead II and Idle Hands), but none of them have been as wonderfully schlocky and unintentionally funny as Demonoid, an inept slice of z-grade Mexican horror made all the more laughable by earnest performances from leads Samantha Eggar and Stuart Whitman, and direction from Alfredo Zacarías that shows no sign of intentional humour. Eggar plays Jennifer Baines, who attempts to track down and destroy an ancient evil force that possesses people's left hands (starting with her husband Mark, played by Roy Jenson). Whitman is Father Cunningham, the initially sceptical priest who eventually helps her on her mission.
Demonoid immediately displays its trash credentials with a marvellous pre-credits sequence that delivers both gratuitous nudity and gore: a woman wearing cult robes fights against several men, but is overpowered, her clothing torn open in the process, exposing her ample breasts. After she is shackled, one of her assailants hacks off her left hand, the severed appendage crawling across the floor before being skewered and placed in a special metal case. It's a great way to start things off, and is just one of many fun scenes in this very daft horror. Each time someone is possessed, they are driven to remove their hand, which results in some truly memorable moments: Mark's badly burnt reanimated corpse slams his wrist in a car door, a gun-toting cop tells a plastic surgeon 'either you cut my hand off or I'll kill you!', while the very same surgeon severs his own hand by placing his arm on a railway track. Special affects are bloody but wholly unconvincing, which only adds to the charm of the piece.
The final act features a supposedly tense chase with zero sense of urgency, and sees Father Cunningham burning off his own possessed hand with a blow-torch, later scattering the ashes in the sea. It looks like the 'devil's hand' has been vanquished once and for all, but a delightfully silly epilogue sees Jennifer attacked by the five-fingered horror, which has somehow returned from the ocean.
Demonoid immediately displays its trash credentials with a marvellous pre-credits sequence that delivers both gratuitous nudity and gore: a woman wearing cult robes fights against several men, but is overpowered, her clothing torn open in the process, exposing her ample breasts. After she is shackled, one of her assailants hacks off her left hand, the severed appendage crawling across the floor before being skewered and placed in a special metal case. It's a great way to start things off, and is just one of many fun scenes in this very daft horror. Each time someone is possessed, they are driven to remove their hand, which results in some truly memorable moments: Mark's badly burnt reanimated corpse slams his wrist in a car door, a gun-toting cop tells a plastic surgeon 'either you cut my hand off or I'll kill you!', while the very same surgeon severs his own hand by placing his arm on a railway track. Special affects are bloody but wholly unconvincing, which only adds to the charm of the piece.
The final act features a supposedly tense chase with zero sense of urgency, and sees Father Cunningham burning off his own possessed hand with a blow-torch, later scattering the ashes in the sea. It looks like the 'devil's hand' has been vanquished once and for all, but a delightfully silly epilogue sees Jennifer attacked by the five-fingered horror, which has somehow returned from the ocean.