In short: The Severed Arm (1973)

One fine day, Jeff Ashton (David G. Cannon) has a rather awkward package in his mail. It contains a severed arm. Most people would be taken aback by this sort of thing, but Jeff has an additional reason to panic a little: some years ago, he and a group of friends were visiting an old mine, where they got trapped in a cave-in. After a couple of weeks, starvation set in. Jeff manages to convince most of the gang that cannibalism was the solution to their problem, but because they weren’t barbarians, his plan was to cut off one extremity of everyone in turn. Ted (Ray Dannis), drew the short straw and lost an arm. Only moments later, rescue came. The others pretended Ted lost his arm in the initial cave-in, and the now one-armed guy has been bopping in and out of mental health care facilities ever since.

So it’s no surprise that Jeff assumes this very special package to be a sign of Ted now seeking revenge on his former friends. Indeed, one after the other of them get an arm hacked off, the mysterious one-armed perpetrator seemingly not caring if they live or die in the process, as long as the killer gets their arm.

Tom Alderman’s The Severed Arm is one of those local/regional US movies of the 70s that I find rather more effective than it should be on paper. The budget is obviously low (as the seat of one’s pants); half of the actors are the sort of people who have long careers in mostly very minor parts, the other half only have one or two credits; the script has obvious logical flaws (like nobody noticing that Ted’s arm was cut off just a minute ago instead of several weeks as the friends tell); and director Alderman – whose last of two films this is – is clearly inexperienced.

However, most everyone involved seems to have put quite a bit of effort in. Thus the actors apply themselves to the material much more than most name actors would in the situation, and Alderman does his utmost to avoid the nailed-on camera and bland staging not atypical of this sort of film. In fact, the director puts a lot of imagination particularly into the staging of the suspense scenes, using chiaroscuro effects, Dutch angles and every other play of light and darkness he can come up with, often achieving a feeling of aesthetic intensity that’s at least related to the giallo or early US slashers. You could certainly argue that this is a proto-slasher, at least on an aesthetic level.


An additional charm are the film’s – very 70s – little eccentricities like placing one of the victim’s as a low rent “comedy” radio DJ going by the nom de plum of  Mad Man Herman (played by Marvin Kaplan as the unfunny Marx Brother). And then there’s the obligatory 70s downer ending that involves an improbable plot twist, dubious acting, and a horrible fate for everyone, turning this into a film I find physically impossible not to love a little.