Evil Clutch

Italy / 1988 Directed by Andreas Marfoni Starring Coralina C. Tassoni Diego Ribon Elena Cantarone Color / 85 Minutes / R Format: DVD (R0 - NTSC/ 3-disc set) Brentwood Home Video

Dialog from the film You Go, Girl! MP3 format - 0.3 MB

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		Review by Brian Lindsey

4     3   10 = Highest Rating

Young college-age Italian guy Tony (Diego Ribon) and his American girlfriend Cindy (Opera's Coralina Tassoni) are vacationing in Venice when they decide to go camping in the Alps. Their leisurely drive up into the mountains is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a frightened, distraught woman along the roadside. The woman, Arva (Elena Cantarone), claims she was attacked by someone in a nearby cemetery. Tony checks out the graveyard and finds nothing, though the place gives him a distinctly uneasy feeling. Not pressing Arva for more details, the couple drives her to the nearest village to drop her off. Here they encounter a weird dude, in raincoat and Sky Captain goggles, riding a motorcycle. Arva runs away at the sight of him.     The strange, funny-voiced man introduces himself as Algernoon, a writer of horror stories who retired to this remote village after throat surgery forced him to use an electronic voice box. For some inexplicable reason Tony and Cindy decide to hang out with him for awhile as he gives them a walking tour of the town's crumbling alleys and narrow streets. He tells them that the forest beyond is said to be haunted by demonic spirits that once held sway here, long ago when the villagers were completely cut off from the outside world. He also tells them a scary story, based on these legends, which is illustrated flashback style by Ribon and Tassoni playing doomed lovers. (In other words, a cheesy way to pad the film.) Tony and Cindy finally get creeped out and split from the village. Keen to focus on the romantic holiday time they've yet to share, the two eventually pull off the road and unload their gear to go hiking into the woods in search of a good camping site. But just before they set off Algernoon appears on his motorbike to give them a cryptic warning. Cindy angrily yells at him to go away and leave them alone, upon which she and Tony head off into the forest.     After hiking for hours the couple meets Arva in the woods. (It doesn't occur to them to ask her what she's doing, or how she got there.) She offers to guide them to a nearby abandoned house where they can more comfortably spend the night. While Cindy steps outside to watch the sunset, Arva hints to Tony that she's open to a three-way and even whips out some cocaine. Tony is more than receptive to the idea, but strange occurrences derail any party plans. (Damn it, the movie was finally getting interesting!) He finds out the hard way that Arva is actually a demon-possessed witch — with a clawed, hairy, three-fingered arm sprouting from beneath her skirt! One of her previous victims, a man (Stefano Molinari) she lured to his doom with her sexual wiles, has risen from the dead as a reanimated corpse and now thirsts for the young couple's blood...     Evil Clutch (aka Il Bosco, "The Forest") is a shameless Italian rip-off of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, complete with dilapidated house in the woods and off-kilter Steadicam shots, floating a foot off the ground, to provide the demonic POV. There's no Book of the Dead to unleash the evil entity — here it's already loose, in the form of Arva the Succubus — but the basic setup is the same. It's a cheap production in which most of the budget apparently went for gory makeup effects. They certainly didn't spend much on actors; there are only the five aforementioned characters in the entire film. Unlike Evil Dead this leaves us with a serious dearth of potential victims, meaning that a good chunk of the first hour is padded with long, boring walking scenes. (Cindy and Tony should've brought along some friends to get bumped off.) Director Andreas Marfori does use the Steadicam well, if derivatively, and manages a couple of spooky shots (all involving Molinari's zombie), but the wretched dubbing, awful acting and laughably bad dialog ("Oh, you fucking creatures! Don't think you'll get me so easily!") effectively counteract any goosebump potential. I'm still scratching my head over certain elements of what passes for a plot here, especially Tony and Cindy's examination of some flammable goo they come across that serves no purpose whatsoever in the story. (Maybe it was just too dark to see what the hell it's supposed to be; see DVD description below.) Any consideration of logic, however — even within the context of a supernatural horror tale — takes a backseat to this flick's raison d'être: GORE. Sparsely used during the first hour, the filmmakers really ladle on the grue during the third act. Crushed, chopped off hands, an exploding severed head, zombies vomiting blood and bile — things get pretty squishy indeed. (One ridiculous scene has Arva's zombie-servant chuckling maliciously as he picks up Tony's fishing rod, casting the line like a pro to hook Cindy in the face!) And you can rest assured that, even in a derelict house devoid of furniture, one is likely to find a working chainsaw with some gas in it.     While diehard gorehounds may find Evil Clutch an acceptable hors d'ourve, for the rest of us it's merely proof that imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism.

Brentwood Home Video, a cheapie DVD company known for their multiple-movie packs and crappy, sometimes virtually unwatchable transfers, has recently been licensed by Troma to release a number of the latter's film titles. Thus Evil Clutch comes to DVD as part of a 3-disc set, Toxie's Triple Terror Vol. 2, the second of seven planned box sets. (Like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, Clutch wasn't made by Troma but rather picked up for distribution.) Though the Troma mascot, the Toxic Avenger, may appear on the cover this is a Brentwood product; fortunately the discs aren't loaded with the typical Troma promotional crap, so we aren't subjected to the painfully unfunny antics of Lloyd Kaufman acting like a genital-and-excretory-obsessed 12 year old. The colorful packaging is actually fairly attractive. The three DVDs come in their own individual "slim-line" cases of the type used in Blue Underground's Mondo Cane collection. Since the films are allotted individual discs they don't suffer the compression problems of Troma's own Triple B-Header line (which cram three movies on one DVD). I'm afraid that's where the positives end, however.     Though presented full-screen, Evil Clutch doesn't appear to lose much, if any, visual information. For all I know it was shot that way as a direct-to-video release. (I have no idea what the correct aspect ratio is). Colors look muted and muddy. The real problem is that the transfer is way too dark. In some scenes you can't make out what's being shown or what's going on — an experience akin to spelunking without a flashlight. Some 10 or 12 years ago I watched (and taped) roughly half of this film on Cinemax and the print used for that cable broadcast was significantly brighter. The DVD version looks like shit in comparison. I strongly recommend you crank up your TV's Brightness control, or switch to "Sports" mode, when watching this disc; it'll help somewhat. (Though, of course, you shouldn't have to in the first place!) As for audio, it seems to be a weak stereo track ("Ultra-Stereo"?) that's inferior to many mono mixes I've heard, with some low-level hiss present throughout. (Some of Tony and Algernoon's dialog is quite hard to understand but I attribute this more to thick accents rather than the disc itself.)     The other movies included in Toxie's Triple Terror Vol. 2 — also full-screen — are Beyond Evil (1980), a supernatural thriller starring John Saxon, and Chillers (1987), a Z-budget horror anthology starring no one you've ever heard of. Evil Clutch is easily the superior of the three — and that ain't sayin' much. Trailers for Evil Clutch and Chillers are the only extras. The latter flick, ironically, features the best-looking transfer of the bunch (though still sub-par); the Saxon film fares the worst. In the future I might get 'round to reviewing these other films for EC... but then again, maybe not. (NOTE: EC's DVD rating of "3" is for the entire 3-disc set.). 9/20/04

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