By BILL COSFORD lldrultl Movie nlvr The Hand which wants to be a stylish horror movie is actually pretty creepy on a couple of levels There’s the plot itself which deals wjth the murderous animation of a severed limb And there’s the pace of- the story which never moves quickly but slows from an opening lope to an agonizing crawl with the result that the whole thing seems to b about five hours long This is always bad news for hor-roj- movies and The Hand is no exception Despite some clever special effects and the engaging presence of Michael Caine in a central role writerdirector Oliver Stone never does manage to throw a good scare into us He fills two hours but his film just creeps Caine plays an artist who draws a popular comic strip for newspapers at least until his drawing hand is lost in a “freak auto acci-dnt” The hand is never found Caine’s character is fitted with a prosthetic device and then strange things begin to happen 'Strange but hardly shocking The only truly menacing event the hand accomplishes is to hurl the family cat through a window when the murders begin they are telegraphed so far ahead of time that suspense dies early Movie Review Meanwhile the hand itself wanders about occasionally popping up in Caine’s blackout dreams occasionally intruding on the action to grab a likely throat You can tell the hand is on the way because the soundtrack adds a decibel or two and shifts into the "hand theme": much heavy breathing (breathing? a hand?) much eerie electronic sound a few thumps In one scene Caine is searching a field near the scene of the accident in hopes of finding the lost hand and it begins to track him This is Stone’s first film as a director (he wrote the Oscar-winning script for Midnight Lxpress) He did not give himself very much to work with THE HAND ts rated R (vulgar language nudity implicit sen violence) — - : — - - OPENING REX