The Severed Arm (1973)

Memorable, crazy movie

Good concept, poorly executed.

Fantastic!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Tom Alderman's THE SEVERED ARM took me by surprise. Not having seen this before, and based on the title alone, I expected something along the lines of Michael Caine's THE HAND or THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS. And there are also dozens of other medical horror movies where a person loses their arm or leg, and said limb somehow does not die. Many times the limb actually goes on to commit murder or other mayhem until it is stopped by police or whoever. Speaking for myself, I have never been a fan or medical TV shows like ER. But I do appreciate a good feature length medical thriller. I am a big fan of THE INCREDIBLE TWO HEADED TRANSPLANT since that was my first exposure to the medical terrors growing up. Anyway, getting back to THE SEVERED ARM, I was expecting a medical thriller. It turns out that the director wanted to do a little something different then what people expected. When this movie came out in the early seventies, the Itallian giallos were at their peak box office success and the movie going public craved new genre fare, thanks to the successes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Well, director Tom Alderman studied the works of Argento and Bava well. Basically THE SEVERED ARM is a US made giallo. It has all the elements of the genre; like the gloved, killer whose face is never shown, the police procedural parts are here, the kiler uses a device to alter his voice when calling his victims or the authorities. It does have some cheesy parts but it is a pretty decent thriller for a low budget independent nature. I will point out here that obviously this movie lacks the beautiful cinematography that is done in the Giallo masters overseas. And there is no rousing giallo-esq score. The music here is a big disappointment. It is pretty much all sythesezer music (synthezer music would break thru would get big in the 1980s) but here it is terrible and out of place. One other other negative point to mention is that my copy the movie is very poorly lit and it is hard to make the action sometimes in the darn fuzz. If you like Giallo thrillers, you may want check out THE SEVERED ARM; it even has a Dario Argento type twist ending....

When a half-dozen friends become trapped in a cave for a fortnight, they contemplate cannibalism as a means for survival, amputating the arm of one of their companions but then live to regret that decision years later. David G.Cannon is essentially the star, the anti-hero who conjured the great idea, Paul Carr is his policeman buddy, and John Crawford the surgeon whose limb lopping lunacy lands him top of the list when vengeance comes knocking. Former one-time "Gidget" Deborah Walley has a sympathetic supporting role and whilst overall the acting is serviceable, the direction and narrative is weak and full of contrivances; it's essentially a conceptual outline of a movie without the logic or detail and it suffers accordingly.There's a couple of memorable amputation scenes that work effectively and the climax is, while not entirely unexpected, still reasonably effective. Overall the film is clumsy, lacking suspense at the crucial moments and threadbare on plot detail. Great title, mediocre film.

I watched this AFTER reading the reviews and I have to say, most of them are right. This film is badly written, the dialogue is puerile, the acting is at best on a par with a local community theatre production at christmas!It seems a pity that a story such as this, could be a great film. What they have done to it has made it into one of the worst films I have seen for a while. The way they condense so much information into the first half-hour is irritating and from then on it just gets worse! I love the old so bad they're good category but this doesn't even fall into that. This should be in the 'So bad -AVOID' category.

SPOILERS!This is a horror movie that attempts to build suspense but doesn't quite get there. A group of amateur spelunkers get trapped in an old mine for weeks. They somehow survive on one canteen of water for that entire time, but finally hunger gets the better of them. They decide to draw lots and eat someone's arm. Not everyone agrees, but they do it anyway. Sure enough, no sooner do they eat the arm and they are rescued. The group decides to keep the deed a secret. Any accusations by the unwilling victim will be dismissed as the babbling of a madman who was injured in the cave-in. The cave-in is blamed for his missing arm.Five years later the leader of the group receives a severed arm in the mail. The group reforms to discuss the event. One by one they are attacked by a hatchet-wielding killer. Some are maimed; others are killed. Soon we meet the one-armed man's daughter, whom we assume is the real killer. It becomes apparent that she isn't, but we're pretty sure it isn't the obvious choice. At the end we find that we were right - it's the one-armed man's son, whom we never knew about until now - with the help of the daughter. The one-armed man is in a catatonic state because of his arm. Seems unlikely, but that's the way it is. Rather than maim or kill the last survivor of the group, they lock him up in a small room with nothing but a knife. When he gets hungry enough, he will eat his own arm. The end.This is the darkest movie I have ever seen. I don't mean dark noir; I mean dark no lighting. Over 99% of this thing was shot at night or in the dark - even the majority of the interior scenes are dark. It's really frustrating not being able to see.Some bad movies are amusing to watch. This one is just bad.