‘The Beast Hand’: Splatter movie has more soul than guts

You probably know what to expect from a film with a title like “The Beast Hand.” One of the posters for Taichiro Natsume’s low-budget pic features a lurid, blood-flecked montage straight out of the 1970s, with ad copy promising a “pure love splatter horror masterpiece.” But the movie itself is a curious creature, closer in tone to downbeat dramas like Hiroshi Shoji’s “Ken and Kazu” (2016) than to gonzo cinema.

Osamu (Takahiro Fukuya) is an ex-con, scraping by as a day laborer while living in a dilapidated shack that’s falling apart. In a familiar film noir setup, he gets an unwelcome visit from a criminal acquaintance, Akira (Yota Kawase), who is on the run from his parole officer and eager to pull off another job.

This brutish bully is also keen to track down his ex, Koyuki (Misa Wada) — never mind that she’s undergone extensive plastic surgery in order to get away from him. Osamu finds himself forced to play kidnapper to the unfortunate lady, with whom he also has past history, though this gives them a chance to get, um, reacquainted.

Naturally, the heist goes wrong, and Osamu is relieved of his left arm by a sword-toting gangster. Koyuki takes him to her go-to black market surgeon (played by the director himself), who uses regenerative medicine to craft him a new limb. The only catch — as you’ve probably guessed — is that the appendage has a mind of its own, turning the meek Osamu into a rampaging monster.

This transformation happens so abruptly, I initially wondered if the film had a missing reel, in the manner of an old-school “grindhouse” flick. “The Beast Hand” takes another unexpected turn when it embarks on a more melancholic (and rather sluggish) second chapter, in which Osamu and a now-pregnant Koyuki try to start a new life together while evading the denizens of the criminal underworld.

Although Natsume directed and co-wrote the screenplay (with Yasunori Kasuga), the film is really the passion project of its producer and star, Fukuya. A straight-to-video veteran who still dreams of becoming Japan’s answer to Tom Cruise, the actor quit his day job in order to make the movie, blowing his savings on the first half and then turning to crowdfunding to finance the rest.

Maybe that’s why the desperation of the protagonists feels so plausible. Whereas their co-stars embrace the pulpiness of the script, Fukuya and Wada dig deeper. The latter is no less remarkable than she was in Gen Nagao’s “Motion Picture: Choke” (2023), turning a character who could have been a passive victim into the beating heart of the movie.

It’s hard to imagine that Japanese cinema will supply a more memorable sex scene this year than the mad, desperate coupling between Osamu and Koyuki, exchanging slaps to each other’s face as they scramble to remove their clothes. I certainly can’t think of another Japanese actress who could have pulled it off.

While “The Beast Hand” doesn’t entirely skimp on carnage, genre fans may come away feeling short-changed. This misshapen mongrel of a film is a rare splatter movie that cares more about its protagonists than delivering the requisite gore. Like its hapless hero, it seems to wish it was something else.