Woodyanders Review of The Severed Arm

The Severed Arm (1973)

An extremely dull and sub-par 70's low-budget horror revenge stinker

[2/10 · 7 April 2007]

Six starving, desperate geologists are trapped in a cave for two weeks. Five of these guys cut off the arm of a sixth luckless dude and eat it. Shortly after the limb hacking incident, the men are saved by a rescue party. Five years later the understandably embittered fellow who got his appendage severed vows revenge. He begins killing the other five guys by cutting off one of their arms with a hatchet. While the sound premise certainly has plenty of potential, it's unfortunately undermined by a very dull and uninspired execution. Thomas S. Alderman's drab, listless direction and hideously talky'n'tedious script suck all the fun and vitality out of the solid story. The tame, unconvincing gore f/x, Philllan Bishop's shrill, unmelodious droning synthesizer score, the sluggish pace, Bob Maxwell's dark, bland, ugly cinematography and a real groaner of a would-be startling surprise "twist" ending are all likewise uniformly awful. Familiar 70's B-feature faces Deborah ("Benji") Walley, Paul ("The Bat People") Carr, John ("Outlaw Blues") Crawford, Vince ("The Candy Snatchers") Martorano, and Marvin ("Fangs") Kaplan sleepwalk through their insipid parts, thereby failing to bring any energy or conviction to their boring and flatly drawn characters. Early in the film one character gravely intones, "Something's really rotten." I wholeheartedly concur; that something really rotten is this incredibly feeble and worthless chunk of atrocious cinematic offal.