The Severed Arm

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.

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....

although the movie's acting and directing were very amateur, the plot was an amazing concept. the films script was cheesy, but the story in general was genius. the whole time watching the film, i was thinking to myself that if this movie had th chance, it could be very good. again, its not the story that was bad, it was the acting and directing. i mean if u look a the basic idea, a group of people stuck in a cave, fighting one another for each others flesh, thats a winning plot right there, just ready for any big time producer to bite into. if this move is redone today, with a larger budget and a better cast and crew, this could be a very popular film. too bad it just wasn't done right the first time around.

A group of men exploring an old mine get trapped in a cave in, and after weeks of starvation decide to draw straws, and have the unlucky loser serve up an arm for lunch. After much scuffle the unlucky winner is soon liberated of the offending appendage, and Murphy's law being what it is they are rescued mere seconds afterwards. Fearing for their reputations everyone except obviously the victim agrees to lie and say that they had to cut his arm off because it was crushed in the collapse, but being quite perturbed because he can no longer clap and can only row boats in circles he vows revenge. Things start off a few years later when the man whom first suggested the idea receives a severed arm gift wrapped in the mail, and with few exceptions that's where this movie's creativity ends.

Not particularly bad but overall pretty slow and boring, although there is a little bit of a haunting surprise at the end it's not enough to make it worth while. Be weary of the severely edited 83 minute version missing all the gore, its like the editors took a hacksaw to the film stock and made an already extremely weak movie worse.

3 out of 10, strictly blood and guts, although it doesn't do that all that well either.

One of the unfortunate heroes hints at the sixty sailors lost at sea;but there's also a French nursery rhyme ("IL était un petit navire" =once upon a time a little ship )which goes like this :

"They drew straws To know who would be eaten.

The lot fell on the youngest, The cabin boy who set to crying Next they ponder with what sauce The poor child will be eaten."

With gore kept to the minimum,the scene in the cave (which follows the plot of the folk song ,so to speak ) ,and the terrifying ending (which will make your hair stand on hair ) make stuff like "saw" almost look like fairytales. Remember it was made in the early seventies!

There's a slight sag in the tension towards the middle of the movie which has a tendency to become repetitive ,but it regains its strength in the final sequences .

A must for horror movies!