Evil Clutch (1988)

Simply Perfect

Memorable, crazy movie

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Up until yesterday, it was Demon Wind (1990) that held the coveted top spot on my list of most blatant and bloody awful Evil Dead rip-offs, but that pile of dung has now been pushed into second place by Andreas Marfori' s Evil Clutch, a cheap and nasty Italian imitation of Sam Raimi's cult classic so flagrant that it even has the nerve to refer to its demons/monsters as 'the evil dead'!After perhaps the most tedious credits sequence ever committed to film—a seemingly never-ending series of Polaroid snaps with a couple chattering inanely about their travels around Europe on the soundtrack—it's straight into Raimi mode for the first of countless hand-held low-angle tracking shots, which follows a young couple into a barn where they begin to make out. The bloke doesn't seem to be put off too much by the fact his bird is a bit of a minger, but when the gnarly pincer that has been hiding up her snatch tears off his junk, he's clearly wishing that he'd had higher standards.Now, at this point, you're probably thinking to yourself 'Hey! This film actually sounds pretty cool', but trust me, it isn't, because after the 'claw in the cooch', it all goes rapidly downhill: Cindy (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) and Tony (Diego Ribon), the annoying couple who were yakking over the opening credits, make an appearance and spend most of the first half of the film wandering aimlessly around the Alps engaged in further dull conversation, occasionally bumping into a strange man with an electronic voice-box who tells them weird stories, and the woman who owns the vagina with the vice-like grip who turns out to be a witch. Any semblance of a plot vanishes completely.The second half of the film is a little more lively, with quite a lot of cheap-jack gore on display, including crushed hands, an exploding decapitated head, some chainsaw gore and a fish-hook in the face, but I found that no amount of unconvincing severed body parts and bloody wounds could possibly compensate for Marfori's derivative visuals and incomprehensible script, the dreadful acting, dismal lighting, or Cataldi-Tassoni's irritating non-stop hysterical screaming.

EVIL CLUTCH***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS***This Italian film (originally titled Il Bosco) has that wonderful atmosphere of the better Italian films from the 70's and the 80's, including the wonderfully disturbing English dubbing. It is probably influenced by the highly popular Evil Dead, but definitely not a rip off. If we were to say that, all vampire themed films would be Dracula rip offs and fortunately certain themes can be explored in many different ways. The Italians have very often taken some inspiration from certain American films,only to take the themes to new and higher levels. And one thing sets this one apart: there is none of the distracting humor that made Evil Dead way too funny to be terrifying. An American girl and her Italian boyfriend take a vacation in the Alps and are lured in a web of inescapable horrors. That seems a simple enough plot, but of course there is more to it than that. Evil Clutch builds the tension tantalizingly slow by using long shots of seemingly trivial happenings, but as the film progresses it becomes clear that there is a very specific need for this, as the horror, when it shows itself, is all the more terrifying. A good example is the meeting with the writer (who disturbingly speaks with an electronic voice device due to an operation) that gets more claustrophobic as it goes on. In the last half hour the slowly built tension in unleashes in a never-a-dull-moment stream of horrifying events that keep my eyes glued to the screen and **spoiler alert** the climax is not the ultimate gruesome gore laden scenes, but what comes after that: our heroine fleeing from the place of horrors in a long and stunningly acted scene of absolute fear, thus going back to the slow pace of the beginning of the film, but in entirely different circumstances. A much overlooked film, which can be corrected now that it is released on DVD as part of the Toxie's Triple Terror volume 2 set.

I like analyzing films like this because they're simple in style, but challenging to separate the faults and things the filmmakers did right from one another. The good things first: "Evil Clutch" tries to take itself seriously and does okay at it MOST of the time, has some good gore, gets pretty weird and imaginative at times (even if it is in that school of "Evil Dead" rip-offs, that being a film that ripped off the 1971 "Equinox" itself), and has almost non-stop scenes that are fun to watch when you're in a very anti-yuppie mood (which I always am). Leave it up to yuppies to not listen to the only likeable character when he warns them about the demonic happenings abounding in the woods, including one of the greatest lines of dialogue: "Do you really think that you're so far from horror?" Now for the not-so-good things: What would have been a good, dark splatter film is spoiled by some very laughable creature effects that are on par with Ed Wood's octopus from "Bride of the Monster", the stupid idea that we're supposed to believe that the wussed-out yuppie heroine can make a bunch of torches before a zombie walking toward her can come about seven inches closer to her, and a slow pace that would have been more interesting if the viewer were only given some people to root for other than the sadly under-used weird guy who warned those yuppie jerks not to go out into the woods in the first place. A fair movie, not terrible, but not even close to great by any means. Out of curiosity, I would like to check out the uncut version, but I've got to wonder if a bloodier version would elevate the quality of the film in any way other than a higher gore quotient.

This Eurotrash film has a pretty potent opening scene wherein a furry arm with razor-sharp claws protrudes from a woman's vagina to emasculate her lover after they have sex.From this point forward, the film becomes an ambling, anything-goes free-form scribble...perhaps the story is horribly underdeveloped, or maybe the editing is atrocious, or possibly the copy I acquired is cut to ribbons...it's hard to say. For all it's worth, it vaguely appears that a young vacationing couple has had the misfortune of encountering a witch/succubus of some type. After numerous macabre events unfold, they end up in a supernatural quandary strikingly similar to the one presented in THE EVIL DEAD. My use of "similar", it should be noted, is in direct reference to specific situational issues and their stylistic execution, but certainly not pertinent to quality. This film is strictly amateur-hour stuff, but it's definitely lightly peppered with moments of murky atmosphere, and it serves up a heaping helping of pretty sickening gore. EVIL CLUTCH is not a good film, but it does encompass a peculiar surrealism...certain viewers may actually appreciate the undisciplined tangle of creepy images, and the fact that they are defiantly inadherent to any button-down structural format.4/10