Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

mushroomginseng 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....

andybob-3 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.

trspamfile The other reviewer absolutely hit the nail on the head when he said that you might watch this expecting a 70's "so bad it's good" film, but even then you'd be disappointed, as it's truly irredeemable. Don't even bother watching it for fun. The acting quite honestly is about on par with porn -- I say this without exaggeration. The cinematography looks like something shot by a community theater, and the characters are the most unlikeable ever written. There's even a blatant rip-off of the old "we've traced the call and it's coming from your other line" story, with no variation.If I didn't know better, I'd think this was a spoof.

paulgeaf I watched this AFTER reading the reviews and I have to say, most of them are right. This film is badly written, the dialogue is puerile, the acting is at best on a par with a local community theatre production at christmas!It seems a pity that a story such as this, could be a great film. What they have done to it has made it into one of the worst films I have seen for a while. The way they condense so much information into the first half-hour is irritating and from then on it just gets worse! I love the old so bad they're good category but this doesn't even fall into that. This should be in the 'So bad -AVOID' category.