Welcome to Curse of the Stone Hand, a film that dares to ask the question, “What if a horror anthology were edited together by someone who’s never seen a horror film, used leftover reels from 1940s Chile, and thought John Carradine muttering into a glass of scotch counted as plot development?” The answer: a cinematic Frankenstein so clumsily assembled, it makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Citizen Kane with bats.
Jerry Warren, that thrifty necromancer of public domain footage, returns to the grave-robbing scene once again, this time mummifying two obscure Chilean thrillers into a barely coherent shambling corpse. It’s not so much a film as a hostage situation—two perfectly innocent movies forced to wear the same bad toupee and speak only when dubbed by Bruno VeSota’s narration.
Plot? Like a Haunted Puzzle Missing Half the Pieces
The “plot” begins with a cursed house, because of course it does. A gambler moves in and discovers a set of creepy stone hands in the basement. Now, you might assume those hands will do something—strangle someone, gesture ominously, high-five the devil. Nope. They mostly just sit there like the prop department forgot they were needed in another movie. Yet somehow, they are cursed, because the film says so. The gambler ends up financially ruined and tricked into joining what he thinks is a gambling club, but turns out to be… wait for it… a suicide club. Surprise! You’re betting your life, which feels oddly appropriate if you’re still watching this movie at this point.
But that’s just the first story. Next, the house is passed down to a new family—because the house, unlike the audience, still has life in it—and now the new son becomes obsessed with those same dusty stone hands. This somehow gives him hypnotic powers (because magic basement decor), and he uses them to seduce his brother’s fiancée in what can only be described as the most aggressively PG mind-control sequence in horror cinema. She eventually snaps out of it, probably from boredom, and the hypnotic villain gets killed, possibly by a falling production schedule.
The Editing: Satan’s Jigsaw Puzzle
Let’s be clear: Jerry Warren doesn’t “edit” films in the traditional sense. He franken-edits. He stitches together scenes from other movies like he’s throwing ham into a fruit salad and calling it a gourmet casserole. Warren’s idea of narrative cohesion is tossing together different actors, decades, and even film formats with the confidence of a man who knows you already bought the ticket and there are no refunds.
Warren doesn’t just bridge two unrelated Chilean movies into an anthology—he also bookends it with brand-new footage so lifeless, it makes your average DMV instructional video feel like Pulp Fiction. John Carradine slouches around as “The Old Drunk,” whose scenes appear to have been filmed in someone’s backyard during a fog machine malfunction. Bruno VeSota, meanwhile, pops in as the narrator, delivering lines with all the urgency of someone who found the script five minutes before lunch.
Performances: Ghosts of Movies Past
The Chilean segments are actually the most watchable parts—if only because the original filmmakers at least seemed interested in telling a story. Carlos Cores and Judith Sulian try valiantly to emote through the fog of bad dubbing, while Chela Bon and Horacio Peterson do their best to bring passion to scenes now serving as awkward narrative filler.
Meanwhile, John Carradine—once the proud master of gothic gloom—is clearly two steps past caring and three drinks into the scene. His scenes feel like Warren just wandered into Carradine’s living room with a Super 8 and started filming between naps.
Katherine Victor, a Warren regular, appears as “Connie’s Sister,” which is about as defined as her character gets. She mostly reacts to things, occasionally with appropriate confusion, which means she’s the most relatable figure in the entire film.
The Hands Themselves: Static Props of Doom
Let’s talk about the titular stone hands. Are they demonic? Haunted? Radioactive? They just kind of sit there in the basement, like a creepy art piece from a cursed Pier 1 Imports. Their supernatural function is never explained. They don’t grab anyone. They don’t move. They just…exist. Apparently that’s all it takes to drive people to murder, madness, and mind control. Which is ironic, because watching Curse of the Stone Hand can have the same effect.
Final Thoughts: Jerry Warren Strikes Again (and Misses)
At 63 minutes, Curse of the Stone Hand feels longer than the Chilean dictatorship that funded the original footage. It’s not just bad—it’s inept in ways that defy geometry. A film that relies on public domain storytelling and the patience of saints, it is both a cinematic pothole and a time capsule of what happens when the urge to create collides with the complete absence of vision.
Like being haunted by a ghost who only moans in stock footage, Curse of the Stone Hand is Jerry Warren at his most Warren: cheap, incoherent, and aggressively dull. The hands may be stone, but the real curse is trying to sit through this mess without turning to stone yourself.
Rating: 1 out of 5 Dead Hands
And that one point is just because we feel sorry for the basement. It deserved better.
