Demonoid has a great title and it had a good one sheet but don’t be fooled.  The sword-wielding devil is barely in the move and the women at his feet may have appeared on the cover of every heavy metal album in the 80s but they’re not in the movie.

Exploring a recently uncovered tomb in Mexico, Jennifer (Samantha Eggar) and Mark Baines (Roy Jenson) are intrigued by a number of bodies that are missing their left hand.  Their guide explains that, centuries ago, men, women, and children were sacrificed to the Devil by having their left hands cut off.  When Mark and Jennifer discover a casket with a severed hand, they decide to take it back to the hotel with them.  Of course, the hand is not dead.  It springs from its casket and possesses Mark.  This leads to Mark fleeing back to the United States, trying to find a way to get rid of his possessed hand.  Unfortunately, the hand has a mind of its own and, even after Mark ends up getting set on fire, the hand continues to live and possess one person after another.  Jennifer teams up with Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman), trying to bring an end to the hand’s reign of terror and giving the audience a chance to wonder how these two actors went from being Oscar nominees to co-starring in Demonoid.

Demonoid is a strange film that starts out as a leisurely travelogue of Mexico and then suddenly turn into a cinematic Grand Guignol, with person after person trying to figure out how to chop off their left hand without doing permanent damage to themselves.  Because the hand is immortal, it has no problem trying to kill whoever it is currently attached to, which leads to not only several scenes of actors fighting with themselves but also several detached hands running across the screen.  A detached but moving hand is creepy the first time you see it but it becomes progressively less so the more time that you spend with it.  The plot is ridiculous enough to be initially intriguing but ultimately, Demonoid is a handsy bore.