The Severed Arm

If there's one thing in the world you should never be scared of or feel threatened by, it's a severed limb, even if that limb is sentient.

Like, this is the single most unterrifying concept I could've ever conceived of, and it's just so gloriously stupid. What the fuck is an arm gonna do to you? Gesture at you menacingly? At worst, it's gonna give you the finger. I will give this box art this much credit: I've never seen anything so simultaneously awesome a concept and hideous an execution, so, kudos, I guess? Like, when you look at this picture, the image you see is an arm on the front, but that arm is extending from the back of the box cover and is attached, very un severedly might I add, to a human man. There's also the obligatory terrible screenshots, a weird unholy yellow stripe across the bottom giving us the cast, and why this has to be "uncensored" is beyond me, because unless that arm is going to get up to some rather unfamily friendly hijinks, or involved in a fisting orgy, I can't for the life of me figure out why this would need to be censored in the first place.

But hey, you know, ugly as this may be, at least they tried, right? They thought this would make a cool image, and they tried something, and I gotta give credit where credit is due. Even if the concept of a severed arm is not now, nor will it ever be or has ever been, terrifying in and of itself. In fact, if I were to meet a sentient severed arm, I'd likely befriend it and then we could have a host of wacky adventures together. Think of all the awesome high fives you could have with a sentient severed arm. That's not scary. That's cool.

All joking aside, this is TERRIBLE. But maybe not for the reasons I've led you to believe thusfar. Allow me to explain, in hilarious detail.

The plot of this movie, as the back of this monstrous box art tries to convey to us, is that five men get trapped in a cave, no real explanation as to why they're in this cave, at least not in this description, and then eventually they decide to eat one of their friends to survive. So they partake in everyones favorite G-Rated activity, cannibalism, but then are miraculously saved! Again, no description of who saves them, not from this blurb anyway, but they still have to live with the fact that they have done an unspeakable thing to one of their friends.

Wikipedia describes the opening of this movie as a man receiving a package at home, and when opened, discovers inside is a severed human arm. This raises a number of questions.

Did they not eat all of their friend? If they didn't, who sent this? Was it the arm itself? Did Ted, yes, their friends name is actually Ted, the literal least terrifying name for a villain ever, package himself into this box and somehow get himself shipped off? That's pretty impressive for just an arm, I gotta hand it to him. Yes, yes, I really am that funny. And if Ted didn't have any doing, who did? Why did someone do this? I'm gonna assume, even without reading the rest of the description from wikipedia before finishing this paragraph, that it was Ted, because for it to be anyone other than Ted would be really fucking stupid. So now, let me go finish reading the wikipedia page.

Well...uh. I was kind of right?

Okay bear with me, this gets weird. Here's a screencap from wikipedia about the climax of the movie. Spoiler warning, if you actually give a shit.

Okay, so...yeah. I don't really know, man. Apparently the killer is not Ted, but is his daughter, Teddy (who names their daughter Teddy?) and her plan was for her brother Roger, who was masquerading as their father Ted, who apparently wasn't even completely eaten because they say he's in a catatonic state which means they only SORT OF dabbled in cannibalism and didn't commit to it. How bad could you feel for eating a few toes? You know what, nevermind. I don't wanna know the answer to that, precisely because I know someone will tell me; anyway he was supposed to kidnap everyone and then kill Jeff because he was the leader of the cave group and was the one who suggested cutting off and eating Teds arm. Jeff is then sealed in a room to starve to death, with only his own severed arm to eat. This raises another question, because...well...who's arm was it they sent through the mail?

Okay, say his daughter and son came up with this plan, as they're telling us. That means they sent the arm to Jeff, but didn't Jeff and his friends EAT the arm? Or did they only eat PART of the arm? And if so, why did anyone KEEP the arm if it couldn't be re-attached? They're not tonsils, that's not something you just request to keep. And if it's NOT his arm, does that mean it's his OTHER arm? Did they saw off their catatonic fathers other arm and then mail it to his friends? Or worse, was it just someones random arm? And if so, WHO, and if so, HOW did they get it? There's a looooooot of stuff here that makes no sense.

And frankly, as far as I'm concerned, if they didn't even eat his entire arm, or moreso his entire person, then why didn't they visit their friend? Did they just assume he was dead and leave him in the cave when they were rescued? Talk about shitty friends. First they get you trapped in a cave, then they try and eat you, then they leave you for dead. Ted deserves better than this, goddammit.

But you know what makes even less sense? The fact that there's alternate box art for us to gawk at! Like that horrible mustard shart that I posted right above. The one with the even worse generic images on it, featuring, as far as I can tell, the genuine reactions of people having to watch this movie, along with a semi clip art-esque image of a man holding an axe, which is not how they cut Teds arm off, by the way. The blurb on the wiki says they do it with a knife, and Jeffs arm towards the end is lost after he falls off a cliff with only his wrist being attached to a rope. So where's this goddamned axe wielding come from? Yet another misstep in an already terrible fuck up.

But you know what guys, there is a bright side, because there's a third box, a savior for us all from this nightmare.

This...is genuinely AWESOME. Not only does the blurb give you a lot more context without spoiling anything, not only is the whole box devoid of terrible screenshots, but the font and the artwork is fantastic, and frankly, that's a rad color purple. So it's nice to know that somewhere out there, even when everyone else is cutting corners, or cutting arms, that someone is trying to do their goddamned job and make something you'd want to look at. This looks like something out of an old EC Tales From The Crypt comic, that's how great it is, and it wouldn't surprise me if that was what it had been likely inspired by.

There's so little talk about this film that the wikipedia page has no "reception" section. That's how little interest this apparently "genre altering movie" has had on the industry. There's so little talk about this film that it has no rating on Rotten Tomatoes, aside from a meager 12% audience rating. There's so little talk about this movie, that NOBODY KNOWS WHO OWNS IT. And I quote, thusly:

The film was released on VHS and DVD by various companies, the legality of which pertaining to official licensing rights is in question. In addition, most current releases feature the edited TV version of the film. The fully uncut version was released on VHS by Video Gems in 1981.

These facts, when put together almost make this an otherworldly entity; something that somehow just happens to exist, and was made by somebody at some point in time, and we have some sort of knowledge about. The lack of factual information surrounding this feature is genuinely more interesting than likely the feature itself, and especially more interesting than most of its box art companions.

Frankly, it's a shame that this box art has to be attached to such a dumb movie. This thing could be a metal album cover. In fact, the title "The Severed Arm" could be a metal band, and this could be their debut album cover! But alas, we do not live in the universe where good things happen; where the right people are in charge making the correct decisions, and where the beloved hair metal band, The Severed Arm, does exist. No. We live in the world where The Severed Arm as a shitty movie exists with two shitty box art variants. That's the world we live in.

And that's the world we're leaving to our children.

Save them from Global Warming? No. Save them from The Severed Arm.

(seriously though, can we do something about global warming? like really. like it's kinda ridiculous I even have to say this at this point.)