Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Forumrxes Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Michael Ledo Matthew Dragna (Scott Whyte) inherits the Dragna Mysteria Casino which is run down and haunted. He checks out the property with 5 other people. The ghosts who haunt the place were victims of his uncle. Matthew must gamble for his life against Sid Haig and Michael Berryman. You would think a film which top bills Haig and Berryman would be a smash. It was not. Their time in the film was limited and they didn't appear until the 45 minute mark. There was an attempt to make this an 80's style comedy horror, but the writing was simply substandard with fake sex and male debasement being passed off for adolescent comedy. Not overly funny or scary. Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity. Charles Band let down.

dwpollar 1st watched 8/4/2012 – 4 out of 10 (Dir-Charles Band): Mediocre scary movie about a haunted casino inherited by an only relative of a great uncle that just happens to have killed five people in the casino and their ghosts are bothering the inheritant and his five friends. The movie starts with what appeared to be an insurance person with an inspector checking out the abandoned Mysterion Casino in Las Vegas for the inheritant, played by Scott Whyte with his girlfriend played by Robin Sydney. The initial visitors get gruesomly murdered by some unknown beings, and then we hear about the inheritant's story as the six friends are camped out in Vegas looking to check out the place. The acting is OK and the storyline is interesting, but I think the movie fails because of it's slow pacing and lack of humor. Director Charles Band is a veteran of low-budget schlock movie-making who sometimes surprises with his combination of the gruesome with tongue-in-cheek humor, but this one kind of just lays there and does very little. There are no writing credits listed in the movie but that was probably done by Band as well, and it seems like it was done off the cuff with some subplots just abandoned. Some of the special effects were interesting and I liked the way the card playing ghost dealer tried to keep the inheritants by making them lose limbs if they lost. The ghost characters came across like in "The Shining" as real people imagined or seen at times and not at others. Sid Haig, with top billing, played a rival casino mobster-like ghost who ofted the grand-uncle in the late sixties with an attached personal vengeance against him, but is just OK in the role. The words mediocre and OK are used a lot in this review because that's what the movie was for me. Not horrible, but just OK – which doesn't make for a very worthwhile movie-viewing experience.

as_thomas You'd have thought that a movie featuring the ever watchable Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding from 'Devil's Rejects') and Michael Berryman (of the same, but also the original Wes Craven's 'Hills have Eyes') combined with a synopsis of a derelict Vegas casino populated by the undead spirits of the criminal underworld, would leap out of the shelves at you like a rabid marmoset, tearing at your attentive glands and filling your pants with excited droplets of uric acid.You couldn't be more wrong if you were to wear the skin of Mick Hucknall in an Arizona sandstorm. This is a woefully bad movie that would soon have you multi-tuning to QVC for escape if it was aired on Zone Horror. As is traditional to hawk it to the bored younger attention span-deficit generation, we get the usual fare of irritating teenagers of various personalities, i.e. geek, foxy, rebel, good guy/gal, stoner, etc. Amazing how so many demographics end up as friends. The main protagonist, who inherits the casino from his dead mafia great-uncle has more plank on display than a whole aisle at B&Q. His simpering girlfriend seemingly spends the entire movie stuck to him like an icecube to a dog's anus. The rest of the cast would fail a screentest for a porn flick such is their inherent disregard for imparting dialogue with any enthusiasm.The effects are laughably poor. At one scene the 'foxy chick' encounters an equally sexy female ghost who, prior to dispatching the hormonal annoyance, metamorphoses into a rotten fairground corpse, replete with -get this- eyeballs that roll like one-armed bandits, displaying two death skulls. The soundtrack is hideously inappropriate and seems to have been hived from the abortion floor of 'Diagnosis Murder'. As we'd expect, our plucky heroes & heroines consistently ignore the basic rules of not getting snuffed in a horror movie. Though for this watcher's eyeballs, thankfully none of them did, as it would clearly have prolonged the agonising torment.Which brings to us to Haig. Clearly this was an easy payday for him, cashing in on his past travails presumably to refurnish his Fresno apartment. Although eminently watchable as always, Haig doesn't even appear to make any semblance of effort ...and he doesn't really have to, surrounded as he is by graduates from a drama school for morons. Sid's no doubt got a few pay days left yet, such is the cultish currency of his demented Spaulding from the great 'Devil's Rejects'. Anyone who's seen his terrifying warning to the small boy in a car he's about to jack will lament the day that he featured in this bucket of bilge. Berryman is simply just himself, locked in that hanging prune of a face, with a lacklustre old look like decommissioned furniture.In all 'Dead Man's Hand' is something that could (and should) have been circumcised without anaesthetic in order to fit an episode of 'Tales from the Crypt'. Possibly one of the worse and least scary horror movies of the last decade, to rank alongside the stupendously vile 'Catacombs' starring Pink. One can only lick our lips and think of the untold mayhem Rob Zombie could have wreaked with such a storyline. Then again, we probably would have been treated to another scene of Sheri Moon's gyrating bare bottom ...not that we're complaining, eh lads? I'm so sickened by this movie that it will be immediately returned to Poundland for a full refund.

cllangkjaer In my opinion Dead Man's Hand is mostly made for the younger audience that are just getting started in the Horror genre. I have been following Director Charles Band since his Empire and ealier Full Moon days and growing up watching movies like Trancers and Dolls which are filled with charm in my opinion, then you know of the quality he can produce. But like I started out, this movie and the once he have directed and produced since 2000 are more or less made for a younger and newer audience. I'm sure I can follow his trail of thoughts, because as a director and producer, I could imagine you really needs to keep up with what is hot and what people what to see. It is a business after all. These Movies really need to be seen in the light that Full Moon is not as big as they were back in the day – due to the 2nd collapse of he's company in the late 90's these productions are made for under half of what the budget where on the pictures he made doing he's collaboration with Paramount Pictures. After reading a couple of reviews on Dead Man's Hand and a few of the movies Charlie has done lately. I think it is a shame that people keep comparing Full Moon today to what Full Moon use to be, Instead of looking at Charlies company in the light of today. A consistent felling all over is, that the films he makes today are to short. Dead Man's Hand has a 75 min running time. If you take a look, at his most loved films, like Dolls and Trancers, they not much longer than this. Dolls is a 77 min feature. Though I do agree that they are short, I still think that they work marvoulsly. I do think the idea of a haunted Casino is a really good idea and Dead Man's Hand does have some of the better special efx. compared to the movies, Full Moon has done lately. The story line is a little thin, but hey this is a horror movie right? Still it is an interesting little movie and I think Charlie managed to make it look well. About the DVD, it is nice to see that Charlie is back shooting on 35mm and the transfer is done nice and clean. The stereo sound is done well and set a good mood for jet another late night of horror. The DVD also includes a nice behind the scenes program and a trailer for the upcoming Decadent Evil II.