Dang, I completely forgot about this one. From the moment I saw the Fangoria Films credit at the beginning, a core memory began to unravel. By the time the main character was ripping the tail off a mutant lizard (in the opening scene, no less), I was sure of it: I had seen this movie when I was a kid and I liked it very much. Then again, I liked literally anything with decent creature effects and Severed Ties has the decentest.
Harrison Harrison (Billy Morrissette) is a gene scientist who toils away in the basement laboratory beneath his mother’s mansion. Even though he’s an adult, he was never allowed to go to school or make friends, but that doesn’t seem to bother him much as he’s dedicated himself to continuing his late father’s work: trying to crack a serum that will regenerate lost limbs. His mother (Elke Sommer) and the corporate scientist crushing on her (Oliver Reed) have already made arrangements to sell the serum to an unethical corporation against Harrison’s wishes. Upon creating a successful batch, Harrison and his mother’s beau get into an altercation which results in Harrison losing an arm and hiding amongst the homeless community.
Fortunately, Harrison made off with the serum and injects it into his bloody stump. Unfortunately, because it was partially synthesized with reptile genes, the new arm has the instincts of a cold blooded killer. While getting used to the newly grown arm, Harrison meets a bum by the name of Stripes, played by SNL’s Garrett Morris. Morris frequently turned up in genre movies playing exactly this kind of character, but complaining about that would be like complaining that Groucho Marx never did Shakespeare. Morris’s involvement, as well as the involvement of veteran actors Sommer and Reed, is part of the reason the film works as well as it does.
Stripes says he was a combat veteran, though his claims are dubious at best. He’s also an amputee, missing one of his legs. (You can see where this is going, yes?) He introduces Harrison to a band of homeless misfits who live in the tunnels beneath an abandoned prison. The leader of the commune is a crazed preacher, played by rockabilly singer Johnny Legend, whose moonshine distillery will serve as the basis for Harrison’s second lab. Meanwhile, Harrison’s mother and the evil corporation are hard at work trying to replicate Harrison’s success while Harrison races to perfect it. Eventually the two camps will go to war.
This a movie heavily influenced by The Re-Animator and the severed hand sequence in Evil Dead II. It has all the trappings of a cult classic, only falling a little short in the execution. It’s by no means a bad gore movie, just a lite one, and the death scenes have the annoying habit of starting a couple seconds too late or ending too soon. The creature effects are quite good, as one would expect from KNB EFX Group, and there’s some creative solutions for filming Harrison’s hybrid arm, which likes to detach from his body and wrap its tail (yes, it has a reptilian tail) around his neck for relaxation.
The strongest aspect of all is the writing. The story concludes with a deliciously nasty ending that would’ve made the film a lot more memorable if only it had been shot with the same verve of the guys who wrote it. I’ll give it a strong recommendation to those of you who love this kind of a stuff and a shrug to those of you who don’t. I’m certainly glad I discovered it again. You know what? I had pretty damn good taste as a kid, if I may say so myself.
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