Home
Home

The Severed Arm (1973)

DVD Cover (Brentwood)
Add to Collection
Sign up to add this to your collection
Add to Favorites
Sign up to add this to your favorites
User Lists:
> Public Domain Films
Overall Rating 48%
Overall Rating
Ranked #8,571
...out of 20,324 movies
Check In? Sign up to check in!

Trapped in a cave, five men cut the arm off of another companion in order to ward off starvation. After they are saved, their victim seeks revenge on them one by one. --IMDb
User Image
Review by Chad
Added: March 13, 2005
To start up our movie, we witness Jeff (David G. Cannon) receiving a package. He's not really expecting anything from anyone, but decides that it must be an early Christmas present and opens it up. To his horror, the package contains a human arm, dismembered at the shoulder. He pays a visit to his doctor friend Ray Sanders (John Crawford), and goes over what we just witnessed with him. This leads them to believe that Ted (Ray Dannis), who has just been released from the mental asylum, is making good on the vengeance that he swore against these men.

This brings us to a flashback scene. Six men are going on a spelunking trip, lowering themselves down into an underground cave to explore and collect rock samples. Included in the group are the aforementioned Jeff, Ray, and Ted, along with a cop known as Mark (Paul Carr), a radio DJ known as "Mad Man" Herman (Marvin Kaplan), and a construction contractor known as Bill (Vince Martorano). After they poke around in the cave for a bit, Herman starts to hammer on one of the support beams that is holding up the cave, trying to make a joke out of the situation... however, the joke quickly turns sour when his actions result in a cave-in. The men are now trapped in this cave, and to make the situation even worse, nobody is expecting them back for another two weeks, so there's little hope of being rescued before then. One of those weeks pass by, the men have no food or water left, and they're slowly starving to death. Jeff brings up the idea of cannibalism, saying that they could all draw straws and then eat an appendage off of the loser in order to stay alive. The men reluctantly agree, and start drawing straws... with Ted drawing the shortest straw. As Ted pleads with the men to not go through with this, they ignore him and hold him down while Jeff cuts off his arm with a hunting knife. Just after the arm has been removed, however, some men up on the ground are heard digging them out... they've been rescued. The group decides that it would be in their best interest to cover this up and claim that his arm was damaged in the cave-in, and that his ramblings about them cutting it off are the result of him going insane from starvation. The men return to their lives and careers, while Ted is admitted to the insane asylum.

Now, five years later, Ted has been released from the asylum, and Jeff has received an arm in the mail. After Ray is attacked in his own home and has his arm cut off, it becomes pretty clear to the rest what Ted is doing... but can they stop him before he picks them off, one by one? With the help of Ted's own daughter Teddy (Deborah Walley), they make a valiant attempt.

While one would expect this to be a gory, mindless slasher of a film, it actually turned out to be a pretty well-crafted tale of revenge with little in the way of gore. This lack of gore can partially be attributed to the censored release of the film on each of the many DVD releases (you'll have to track down the 1982 Video Gems VHS release to watch it uncensored), but even with the blood and gore severed from the film (sorry, couldn't resist there), I don't think that it changed the tone of the film very much. While the storyline does tend to drag in spots, and there are a couple of major holes in the plot to be found, the movie as a whole turned out to be better than I expected. I particularly enjoyed the twist ending (you just knew that there would be one), as it was a nice, unique way of giving the villain of the film his due punishment in an almost Hitchcock-like moment.

Watching the film, one can tell that it was pretty low budget even by 1973's standards. However, the director made good use of what he had, and the result was a movie that felt much more professional than it should have. There's a few mistakes that seem to be typical of low-budget films shot by first time directors... some scenes are much too dark, obscuring nearly everything that is being shown on-screen, while others could have used some editing work to remove parts that didn't really go anywhere and slowed the film down. However, with these rookie mistakes aside, the movie is pretty enjoyable for what it is. Just don't go in expecting a gore-fest, and you may get a bit of enjoyment out of this one as well.

Overall, I'd recommend this one to fans of the old-school style thrillers. Not because it's an overly great movie - this one would fall more under the average category - but because of the price. You can purchase the movie on its own for a buck, or as part of a huge collection of classic films for twenty. Combine that price with a decent enough film, and it's well worth a viewing... because even if you end up hating it, it's only a buck missing from your wallet. 5/10.
Sign up to add your comment. Sign up to add your comment.
Recommended Movies
Pigs Scream Bloody Murder The Gore Gore Girls Psycho From Texas The Toolbox Murders The Sierra Nevada Murders Serial Bloody Birthday Murderlust Don't Look In The Basement Sisters Of Death The Black Mass B.T.K. Gorgasm Bundy: A Legacy Of Evil Nurse Sherri Black Dahlia The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Layout, reviews and code © 2000-2024 | Privacy Policy
Contact: Join us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Review Updates