The Severed Arm

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.

These five dudes go hiking and then get trapped in a cave after one of them chips away at the fragile structure seemingly holding it all together. Boom, cave-in. They have no food and little water, yet somehow they all survive for a couple of weeks. And then and only then do they draw straws to see who's gonna have to lose an appendage so they can eat something. (Probably raw, since there'd be no sure way for the smoke from a fire to escape the cave.) Anyway, they are quickly rescued after making that fun decision. Five years later, one of them gets a severed arm in the mail. OMG could it be the guy they ate part of? Nice twist at the end, although it won't be a surprise if you've been paying any sort of attention. Protagonists are all kind of stupid.

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.

"The Severed Arm" has a very low score on IMDb and the reviews are generally unfavorable. Oddly, I actually liked the film and thought it very unique and worth seeing. I could be wrong, but I was surprised as the title sure makes it sound like a terrible film.

The first part of the film is told as a flashback. A group of six guys go exploring in a creaky old cave. Unfortunately, one of the guys is a stupid idiot and he causes a cave-in...and they are trapped for two weeks. Not surprisingly, they are starving when one of them insists that they only way to survive is to eat PART of one of them. He insists that they draw lots and the loser is eaten...in part. Not all of them are in agreement but he pushes them to do this. After ripping off the poor loser's arm, a rescue party arrives--and the folks all agree to lie about what happened and say that the man with the missing are was injured and they HAD to do surgery on him!

Five years pass. Now bad things start happening to the five who perpetrated this arm-carnage. Some are dismembered...some are killed. But there is a special punishment for the ring leader!

I thought the film very original, quite clever and set a wonderful and tense mood. Is it a great film? Nah...but for what it is, it's surprisingly watchable. Also, I was glad that the who arm ripping off angle was not overly gross and gratuitous!

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....