Director: Tom Alderman
Writers: Tom Alderman and Darrel Presnell from a story by Larry Alexander and Marc B. Ray with additional dialogue by Kelly Estill
From: Cult Cinema
A group of friends get caught in a cave-in. After weeks of waiting, they cut off their friend’s arm for food only to be rescued at that moment. Years later, the one-armed man is seeking revenge, cutting off his companion’s arms and killing them.
Open on a figure cutting the arm off a body in a morgue and sending it to our main character, Jeff, through the mail! There is a promise of gleeful excess made in this moment that the film utterly fails to follow through on. He starts calling people to let them know what happened, but he doesn’t go to the police.
Cut to five years earlier. Jeff and five friends go spelunking, including the nebbishy wise-cracking Herman who serves as the comic relief that is never funny. He, almost immediately, causes a cave-in trapping the group with no food and very little water. After seven days, they start discussing cannibalism. After two weeks, Jeff suggests they draw lots to see who gets his arm cut off and used as food.
Ted loses. He begs them to wait one more night before cutting off his arm, but that night he tries to kill Herman since he's the weakest and this is all his fault. The group then holds Ted down and cuts off his right arm. Ironically, that’s the moment they hear rescuers coming to save them. Rather than face the consequences of their actions, they quickly concoct a story that Ted’s arm was crushed in the cave-in and they amputated it. They tell the rescuers that Ted’s gone mad and invented this story about them trying to eat him.
This should really be the movie: their sense of guilt over what happened and the constant fear of the truth getting out poisoning their lives potentially with moments of blackmail cropping up here and there. Instead, Ted is institutionalized because his insistence upon the truth makes him crazy so his life is ruined beyond just being made into food.
In the present, the five get back together: Jeff, the man who planned the trip; Herman, a radio host; Ray, a doctor; Bill, an architect; and Mark, a cop. They float the idea of telling the truth, but now have so much more to lose. So instead they plot to capture and, if necessary, kill Ted. Mark’s a cop, he can get it done, but he can’t report it to his superiors because they’d all be accused of withholding evidence. After meeting, the killer breaks into Ray’s house and cuts off his arm, but leaves him alive.
The story moves from there as you’d expect with each member getting picked off: Herman on-air, Bill in an elevator. Jeff and Mark recruit Ted’s daughter to help them, but it doesn’t work. Eventually, Jeff is the last one left alive. The daughter takes him to her family’s cabin hidden deep in the woods where he gets knocked out and wakes up in a small, locked room. Turns out the killer wasn’t Ted but Ted’s son and daughter working together to get revenge for their father. They leave Jeff locked in the room with just a knife saying they’ll let him out once he’s desperate enough to cut off his own arm to eat it. While his screams echo in the background, they go upstairs to tell the catatonic Ted that they’d set things right. THE END.
A fairly grim ending to a relatively joyless movie. One of the problems is we never get a sense of the characters outside of these two traumatic moments. They’re trapped in a cave considering cannibalism and then they’re plotting the murder of a person they think is trying to murder them. And that description also hits another problem with these characters: they’re never sympathetic. They never seem to feel particularly guilty about what happened or even regretful. Their attitude is largely a shrugging disdain. In fact, they act pretty put out about Ted’s anger and vengeance. “Hey man, I know we cut off your arm and then told everyone you were crazy for saying exactly what happened thereby further ruining your life, but your insisting upon the point is kind of inconvenient.” Rather than worry about them getting killed, most of the time was spent being bored waiting for these pricks to get offed.
There’s no real joy in the movie and then it closes with an especially grim conclusion of a man being locked in a cell to starve until he goes mad. It’s a little proto-Saw, and I’m not a fan of those films even in concept, so I’d say this movie’s a hard pass for me. Not fun, not even ironically. Just leave it alone to fade into obscurity.
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