What Not To Watch: Blood Hands

This review of 1990’s Blood Hands starring Sean Donahue is more than something to read while you are taking a dump or looking to kill some time when you should be working. This Blood Hands review contains a valuable life lesson…

• Day Drinking: Four guys are hanging out in the middle of the day admiring their buddy George’s kickboxing medal and drinking some beer. In addition to George, there is Fred, Walter and the ring leader James. The guys are drinking a lot of beer. So much beer in fact that they run out. So the inebriated foursome make the bad decision to take a drive down to the liquor store to replenish their supply. Some how they manage not to get into an accident as they swerve all over the road, while regaling one another with tales of banging ugly chicks. When they arrive at the liquor store they are rowdy and making a scene, one of the employees alerts the owner of the establishment and the owner asks them to take their business to the bar down the road. When the four drunkmen refuse, the owner makes the bad decision to show off his black belt skills. James and friends fight back and the owner of the liquor store ends up dead on the floor. James tells his friends not to sweat it, because it was self defense… still they high tail it out of there and head back home to continue their day drinking… but then their car overheats on the drive back. Now instead of pissing in the radiator Red Dawn style (they sure as hell drank enough, pissing should not have been a problem), they decide they need to get some water and they knock on the door of a nearby house.

• Killing Spree: A woman answers the door, but not just any woman… this woman used to date James decades ago. She had since moved on, married a sad sack and had a kid. The woman was actually preparing a big birthday meal for her son when she answered the door… now all the guys wanted was some water for their car, but for some reason this woman makes the bad decision to let the men inside and invites them to sit down (there wasn’t a hose out back they could have filled up their empty container with?) She then makes another bad decision  with four men in the house (three of whom she has never met in her life), she announces she is going to go to the bedroom to change her clothes… James sees this as an opening and tries to put the moves on her. She is having none of it… but James isn’t going to take no for an answer and he has his three buddies to help him. Things aren’t looking good for this woman, but just then her husband returns home from the bakery with a birthday cake… he gets out of the car, hears his wife scream, drops the cake and heads into the house. The result the husband and wife end up dead and the body count is now up to 3. The James Gang takes off and fly by another car that is heading to the murder scene…

• Bloody Birthday: When Steve (Sean Donahue) and his girlfriend Tracy pull into the driveway of Steve’s parents house, they immediately realize there is trouble when they see Steve’s birthday cake dropped in the driveway. Steve rushes into the house to see his dead mother and father lying on the floor. Tracy meanwhile finds the kickboxing medal that belonged to George. But she makes the bad decision to keep this key piece of evidence to herself instead of sharing it with the police who are investigating the murders of Steve’s parents. Days later when the cops are getting nowhere with their investigation, the detective assigned to the case goes back to the scene of the crime to see if he missed anything (something he would not have had to do if Tracy didn’t make that bad decision). Unfortunately, George realizing he lost his medal also returned to the house (with his buddy Fred tagging along for immoral support) to recover the medal before the police found it… what ends up happening is George and Fred get into a brawl with the detective that sees all three men fall into the swimming pool and ends with George and Fred bashing the back of the detectives head repeatedly into the edge of the pool… now the body count is up to 4 and George and Fred are cop killers.

• Go For The Gold: After hearing about the cop that was killed, Tracy decides to let Steve in on her little secret about the medal she found the day of the murder. Steve immediately makes the bad decision that he is going to take the law into his own hands since in his opinion the guys who killed his parents don’t deserve to be locked up, they deserve to die. Tracy then pleads with Steve that he needs to turn the medal into the police… WHY DIDN’T SHE DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?! Now thanks to Tracy’s bad decision, her boyfriend is on a killing spree of his own as he spends the rest of the movie hunting down the four men responsible for the deaths of his parents.

So what have we learned today?

One bad decision leads to another. 

Each and every character in Blood Hands makes bad decisions. There is not a voice of reason to be found. Every single character in the movie was guilty of a crime and the movie itself was guilty of being a piece of shit. Shitty acting. Shitty story. Shitty fights.

I am guilty of bad decision making too… years ago I watched Sean Donahue in Fighting Spirit, despite being advised against it and I hated it. Then I foolishly watched him again in Parole Violators. And now those bad decisions led to me making another bad decision when I watched Blood Hands. I hope I have learned my lesson and I won’t go down the Sean Donahue road again… but history has proven otherwise.

Now I am going to make what I know is a good decision and include some Bonus Bullet Points, featuring what few highlights were contained in Blood Hands…

• Favorite Quote: “Are you calling me a moron, you stupid asshole?”
• Montage Alert: After Steve kills Fred by burning him alive, he gets cocky and makes the bad decision to try to take out George and Walter at the same time… Steve ends up getting his ass kicked. But his injuries weren’t so severe that a well placed montage couldn’t fix them.
• Favorite Death: Steve ties Walter to some railroad tracks and watches with glee as the train runs him down. Walter was played by Jim Gaines (Black Fire), who I am now 100% convinced is in every action movie shot in the Philippines.