Dead Man’s Hand (2007)

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s something halfway interesting about low-budget horror film Dead Man’s Hand, with a young man inheriting a run-down casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas. As a setting, it’s intriguingly creepy—while Vegas is about the glitz and the fancy destination hotels, there’s something unnerving about the unseen, unlucky, unglamorous underbelly of the city filled with (as the expression goes) broken dreams and bankruptcies. But there I go finding far too much promise in a premise, because Dead Man’s Hand quickly takes a turn for far more conventional material. As our young protagonists get to the casino, we don’t get much more than a take on the haunted house theme: There are vengeful spirits in the casino, and they take aim at anyone who steps in. (Never mind their flimsy motivations or tenuous connection to the protagonist and even more so his friends.) Perfunctory characterization isn’t enough to get us to care, and the schematic nature of the film quickly betrays the limited creative ambitions of shlockmaster director Charles Band. Feeling long even at somewhere around 80 minutes, Dead Man’s Hand is a generic horror product, fleetingly interesting and not even competent enough to be scary. Connoisseurs know that nothing good now carries the Full Moon production label, and this is no exception.