Was it All a Dream?
Sex is a crude, disgusting thing, and Evil Clutch has "sex" written all over it. It's a full-on nasty, gritty, down-and-dirty assault on the glamour of sexuality and the fetish of... domination, I'd have to say. Featuring a witch with a claw-hand where a vagina should be (and only comes out when she's getting fresh with one of her fellas), her creepily obsessed father who follows her around without letting her know, her zombie sex-slave who she keeps chained in a kind of horse-pen hidden by foliage and dark shadows, the slave chasing around her other lovers and killing them in a playfully aggressive way, and the world's strangest plant ever- one that only seems to eat testicles. Is the witch killing the men to feed the plant? Does the plant give her powers? And most importantly, what the hell does she mean when she says, "It's not all over! It'll never end! One day, all of this will be destroyed!" I have absolutely no idea but I think I like it. Kind of like a Rita Repulsa rant, only with some kind of nightmare-connotation. It's schlocky as all hell, and in any other film, I would have groaned and rubbed my eyes to check that they were really seeing what I thought they were seeing. But this is the real deal.The plot begins with a creepily romantic montage of photographs, acquainting us with the main characters- a new couple who met in Europe. Him undoubtedly Italian (the hunky and quietly intense Diego Ribon). Her Italian but posing as American, I believe (the lovely Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, from Argento's Opera and Lamberto Bava's Demons 2). Some plot summaries make mention of her being a college student, so perhaps she met him studying abroad. They're a happy couple, but when they meet the witch, things begin to get strange. Their plan to head into the mountains for their camping vacation is detoured by a stop into a local village, which is completely vacant of people. They then meet the witch's father, a man who uses an electronic machine to amplify the vibrations from his throat. In place of a voice, he has a disturbingly sharp-pitched robotic buzz. He tells the two vague clues that there's curse that hovers over the area. Then, he tells them a story about a couple like them who are making out on the beach when the man suddenly, inexplicably gets the impulse to kill his girlfriend and bury her in the sand.It's moments like this that make Clutch something worth seeing. It's so bizarre, you can't help but be transfixed by it. I've never been able to forget it and whenever I watch it, I can't take my eyes off it. Maybe that's because it's compellingly bad. It's hard to tell with Italian horror movies. And after seeing at least two dozen by now, I have to say- the more confusing, the better. As long as something's happening, it doesn't matter how insane it is. And Evil Clutch is never at a loss of things to show you. It's the closest film I've ever seen that came to real insanity. Not because it's convincing at showing us characters losing their minds. But rather, because it follows a progression of a movie with no sanity or logic or sensibility. Which makes it feel like a pretty real horror. It's almost Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like in its' long sequences of people walking or running off alone, not knowing where they're going but looking for anything they can find that looks like a way out. The film is highly skilled at dragging out scenes of driving and walking, adding music or taking it away, and making them almost too real.The freak-factor of Clutch is essential to how unpleasant a film it is. And what I can only hope were expectations on the part of some that seeing the couples together at the beginning of the movie would provide "guys" with gratuitous "T" or "A." Neither are here. Which I have to say is another thing that makes the horror more pure. There are only suggestions of sexually-driven acts of violence. One spectacle, a death scene, that almost resembles a wrestling match- one guy taunting (with a high-pitched cackle) and humiliating the other, knocking him down, then choking him before finishing him off. It's almost him saying he'll punish (the victim) for taking his woman. Again, in any other movie I would have groaned. It's a stupid idea if you see it that way. But it's "too" creative and detailed. And too animalistic to feel like a typical zombie or serial killer dispatching. As this is happening, there's a quietly piercing electric rock guitar wailing and a neatly rumbling drum-machine beat chanting this on. And as the attacker finds the victim, he laughs at him and grabs him in an aggressively sexual way. There's absolutely no mistaking what's really going on, under the grunting.It's a stunning film in many ways. All of them unappealing. But effective as some of the darkest, most deeply disturbing horror I've ever experienced. I might feel that this is was just a strange film and not something much more, were it not for the finale. The finale kind of puts a cap on the weirdness, as the camera angles get so uncomfortably close to every detail of what's happening than you'd ever want to be. I was speechless as I watched blood-gushing brains, fish-hooks tear into skin, and the greatest zombie meltdown sequence this side of 1986's Street Trash. Again, like 1974's classic Chainsaw, what makes this ending work is that every second is played out in graphic detail until it almost becomes agonizing. I enjoy that and so rarely get to see it in horror. The astonishing finale with an exhausted, terrorized Tassoni trying to find a way out of the maze-like woods, plays a lot like the hedge sequence from 1980's The Shining, only all in one shot.
Bruno Fleischmann
This was a disappointment. After reading something like "the most extreme excursion into horror in Troma's history" on Troma's website, I was fooled into thinking this would be a strong Italian gore flick. I have expected lack of plot but also the promised gore. What I got was one castration that wasn't overly graphic neither impressive, guy named Tony being repeatedly mutilated by a zombie, Tony's unconvincing rubber head and the final demise of demons via chainsaw and sunlight. There is not as much gore as the promotion promises and Evil Clutch can't be compared to blood soaked splatterfests by Andreas Schnaas. The impact of the violence on display is somewhat weakened by ridiculous reactions of actors, especially the guy who plays Tony, but I don't want to complain about acting in low budget Italian horror movie. The thing that annoyed me was the lack of characters, there are only five people in the whole movie. This leads to overlong scenes of two tourists being chased and tormented by three demons. All characters have very little to do in the second half of the movie. If there were more possible victims of demons popping up just to be massacred, the actor playing bald headed zombie wouldn't have to kill Tony in such ridiculous fashion-first crushing his hands with a stone, then letting him go, later ripping his head off and carrying it around in endless shots that allow viewers to see how fake that artificial head is. It is sad that the makers didn't use their equipment and props more effectively.
EyeAskance
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
