WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

BA_Harrison 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.

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.

HumanoidOfFlesh An American woman played by Italian actress Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni of "Opera" fame is vacationing in Venice and decides to go with her local boyfriend on trip to the Alps.They run into a witch who says she was attacked and they give her a ride into town.There they meet a crazy guy on a motorcycle who speaks using a electrolarynx.They hike into the mountains and run into both of these people again up there.They also meet a zombie,who is chasing 'em without reason and promptly uses a fishing pole to catch a girl.The funniest thing is titular 'evil clutch'-a giant bloodthirsty claw protruding from witch's vagina.Hell yeah!This cheap and silly Italian "The Evil Dead" clone offers few amusing moments and plenty of grue.Lovers of bad cinema will be pleased with such oddity.

Thomas Langlotz First of all I was surprised to see that this film is not one of those typical TROMA-releases. It's an italian production and (sad but true) not one of those splatter-comedies like "Class of Nuk'em High", "The Toxic Avenger" or all the other funny flicks that made TROMA so popular. While watching this film, you won't even have a single chance for a smile. It's completely different from the flicks mentioned above. The story is one of the worst ever and the acting is nothing but amateurish. The only thing this film can offer is gore!!! So, if you're a fan of Ittenbach's "Premutos" or Schnaas' "Violent S***"-Trilogy this one's the right one for you! Decapitation, chainsaws, Zombies...- all that stuff a real gore-fan could expect. If you're not related to this kind of film, you better don't buy or even rent this splatter-flick.