Review of The Amazing Exploits of the Clutching Hand

Three hundred minutes! This ridiculous endless serial runs FIVE HOURS. Why? Why! WHY?!?! A real clutching hand must have used to get cinemas to run this bewildering epic. It is so silly and accidentally hilarious that I am sure even the simplest audiences marooned in suburban fleapits with this drivel must have been hooting at the screen. There is about 800 fights and all of them hilarious. I mean truly laugh out loud knee slapping howlers. They are POPEYE type fights with middle aged men in suits each with hats jammed on their heads fight like pussycats, swinging wide and 'thwapping' each other and missing by a mile. The incredulous bad dude: The Clutching Hand, with his muffled stupid 'orders' to each numbered henchmen over a primitive 1936 pedal TV just needs a good slap in reel 2 and we all could have saved ourselves several months of groan worthy slumping on the lounge. There is a great poverty row mansion with sort-of antiques, scenes filmed at 4.55pm of an afternoon in a hurry, pointless car chases and about 900 guys who all look the same. Lead thesp Jack Mulhall looks and acts like Stanley Holloway from MY FAIR LADY. He is like the praying mantis professor in A BUGS LIFE, rolling his eyes and A-C-T-I-N-G like this is Shakespeare. It's more bad than Bard. I just couldn't believe how this thing droned on and on. Then I saw it was reduced to 77 minutes as a feature in 1937. THAT just goes to show you how much superfluous footage was in this serial.THE CLUTCHING HAND is a 1919 level 'face at the window / Snidley Whiplash" melodrama serial with sound...If you have to watch ANY of it then I recommend Chapter 2 and 14 and 15. That will take up 70 minutes, and that is enough.