Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A vacationing couple (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni and Diego Ribon) head up into the Alps and end up running into a lady who begs them for help from some attacker. They drive her to a small village, she runs away, they meet a local crazy with a voicebox who warns of witches, they go camping, run into the woman again and get attacked by her. Oh, and this femme fatale has a large claw that extends from her groin and tries to kill people. This Italian film is heavily influenced by THE EVIL DEAD, but you can see director Andreas Marfori just doesn't have the talent to pull it off. It is like he watched Raimi's film with no translation. It is a shame as the film has many things going for it (nice camera work, great locations, tons of gore), but Marfori just can't get it to gel thanks to his incredibly wonky staging. He also overdoses on the use of the steadicam. The final scene with Coralina walking away from the carnage while followed by the steadicam goes on so long that it becomes a joke. Just when you get tired of it, the director then cuts to her continuing to walk with the camera in front of her for another minute or so. Jeez, such a shame.

I'm tired of reading reviews by people who constantly wanna compare this film to other films, and then say this is a step down. Yes, we all have seen The Evil Dead, and if we have seen this trash gore job, we know it's an Evil Dead rip-off. Basically, all low-budget horror films are rip-offs of other better horror films. Sorry. Anyway, Evil Clutch was just re-released on one of those Toxie's Triple Terror DVD sets and I watched it the other night. I saw this before about a decade ago on Cinemax when Cinemax had Troma Sunday Nights, or something like that.This is basic low-budget horror made to appeal to the gore fans. The story is kind of hard to follow and the first half is very boring, filled with long, pandering shots of the location it was filmed on, and endless babble between the oh-so-boring lead couple. The second half is relentless with the gore and violence, it's mean-spirited, nightmarish, ugly, and has people running around screaming, squirting blood, chopping limbs, and acting in a chaotic manner. I enjoyed this film for the fact that all it wanted to get across in the second half is violence and hysteria. The story never adds up but it's an okay view for the gore or '80's horror fan. I must agree with that one guy one here who said it had to have been shot by two directors. Features severed hands, chopped off heads and a scary vagina. Two and a half stars.

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