Like its eventual double bill mate, Ralph Brookes’ Bloodlust! (1961), William J. Hole Jr’s The Devil’s Hand was shot in 1959 but sat around taking up shelf space until 1961 when it was finally foisted off on a public that had done nothing to deserve it. And like Brookes’ film it’s not hard to see why it was shelved for so long. It’s an early example of the “Satanism in the suburbs” sub-genre, soon to be popularised by the success of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) (which is actually set in a city, but the suburbs soon proved a popular haunt for devilry in all its forms with filmmakers), but other than that, it’s really not all that interesting at all.

Rick Turner (Robert Alda) is haunted by dreams of a beautiful young dancing in the clouds. After waking from one such dream, he goes for a stroll and finds himself outside an innocuous looking doll shop in the window of which is a doll that he thinks looks just like the woman of his dreams (it really doesn’t). The next day, he takes girlfriend Donna Trent (Ariadna Welter) to the shop where they meet owner Frank Lamont (Neil Hamilton) who seems to know Rick and that he ordered the doll. He also has a doll that looks like Donna (again, it doesn’t…) and when she and Rick leave, he takes it to the temple he’s got stashed away in a back room and stabs the effigy with a pin. Donna collapses in pain and is rushed to hospital where she is confined to bed for rest. While she’s recuperating, Rick takes the doll that supposedly looks like the woman he dreams of to one Bianca Milan (Linda Christian), who does indeed look just like his fantasy woman. It all turns out, as if you couldn’t guess, that she’s a member of a cult that worships Gamba, the Great Devil God and is using her witch-like powers to ensnare Rick – and indeed he rather too willingly gives in to her sexy charms. With a recovered Donna under threat of being sacrificed, Rick has to break the spell that Bianca has over her and save the day. But is he up to the task?

The Devil’s Hand is directed with no pizzazz or passion at all. Hole Jr, an undistinguished director of forgotten B films (his best known is probably The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959) and what does that say for a man’s career?) and episodic television, seems to be a graduate of the turn on the lights, plonk down a camera, point it in the direction of the actors and shoot what’s needed to get the story to the next scene and nothing more school of directing. It doesn’t help much that writer Jo Heims (who later went on to much better things when she had a hand in writing Play Misty for Me (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971) for Clint Eastwood) comes up with her basic pitch (man is ensnared by a witchy cult) and then… does nothing with it. There’s no subtext here, no development, no character progression. Just one very simple idea spread very thin indeed over 71 very dull minutes.

Like so many of these things, The Devil’s Hand doesn’t paint the most enticing portrait of devil worshippers and their practices. At the sleazier end of the genre, you could rely on a spot of nudity and some cod-Latin mumbo jumbo, but here the ceremony consists of a group of very ordinary-looking people sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying from side-to-side as one of their number performs an energetic dance to a random bit of flute and bongos. They threaten a human sacrifice twice but even that never materialises. It makes you wonder what the Christian church has been so worried about all this time – the only danger you’re in from this lot is dying of boredom. When the potential sacrificial victims are carried in, it’s by middle-aged men in business suits – both film and cult were too impoverished to afford ceremonial robes it seems.

On paper at least, the cast is quite interesting. Mexican actress Linda Christian makes for an alluring witch and can lay claim to being the first ever Bond girl – she played Valerie Mathis, a combination of Vesper Lynd and René Mathis, in the episode of CBS’ Climax! (1954-1958) drama strand that featured Barry Nelson as “card sense Jimmy Bond” in an adaptation of Casino Royale (1954). Her sister Ariadne Welter plays Donna (she had such a dismal experience on the film that she vowed never to work in American films again); Robert Alda is the father of actor Alan Alda and a veteran of genre fare like The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) and Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950); and Neil Hamilton, having enjoyed a career that stretched back to 1918, was about to become a household face when he took on the mantle of Commissioner Gordon in television’s Batman (1966-1968).

Sadly Heims’ script gives them very little to work with. Christian is having fun trying out her femme fatale act and gets the last word in a very silly “twist” ending, but Welter goes missing for much of the film and Hamilton has little to do but stand around looking a bit sinister (how does his shop, which seems to exclusively sell fetish dolls for the black magic trade, ever make any money? Are there a lot of vengeful witches in his part of town?). Alda draws the shortest straw though. Rick is a deeply unpleasant character – while his girlfriend is in hospital, he’s off canoodling with a sexy witch and at the climax goes back to Donna with barely a pang of guilt. He may have been under her evil influence, but a smidge of remorse might have redeemed him a bit.

The best one might be able to say about The Devil’s Hand is that at least it’s the better half of the double bill it shared with Bloodlust! It’s been knocking about on American television and home video for decades without ever picking up any kind of cult following. Understandable really. Even the highly inappropriate bit of light late 50s pop that turns up as the main titles music (it suggests we’re about to watch a comedy or a teen musical) was a flop – it was released as the B-side to the single Peek-a-Boo by Baker Knight (father of actress and singer Tuesday Knight) on the prestigious Chess label in July 1961 and sank without trace.

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