Severed Ties

"When scientific madness gets the upper hand... and arm!" Young but somewhat crazy scientist Harrison Harrison (yes, you read that right) is experimenting with human limb regeneration. When he loses his right arm in an accident he injects it with a plasma, a new arm does indeed grow but it is part reptilian, it can detach itself and has a mind of its own ("Part lizard, part psycho, part me" Harry says). This film reminded me of the likes of "Basket Case" (1982), "Brain Damage" (1988) and "Re-Animator" (1985), only they are classics and "Severed Ties" most definitely is not. Made by Fangoria Films, unfortunately their skill at producing horror magazines did not translate to making movies, this is a horror comedy that overall is a disappointment. Oliver Reed stars as some kind of Nazi and is Harry's reluctant step dad. He is one of my favourite actors, sadly the 1980's and 90's saw him appear in plenty of bad movies. This is far from being the worst but even so it rates as one of the poorer movies on his filmography. Elke Sommer plays Harry's mother, she was still looking great at 50 plus but I'm afraid here her acting doesn't match her looks. The plot does have a few eccentric characters,Stripes (Garret Morris) being one of the better ones, but it's not enough to make this a riveting watch. At least the special effects, courtesy of KNB, are good. There's not a great deal of gore, apart from a man having his face ripped off and a woman having a finger sawn off, I had hoped for more. This appears to be a little known movie, I have it on VHS but to the best of my knowledge it has never had a disc release. A blu-ray release would certainly make it look better, maybe one day it will happen and peoples' generally low opinions of it may improve. This movie had good ingredients but sadly the end product was disappointing,