Invasion Of The Podcast!: Year Of the Knockoff! Evil Clutch (1988)

In honor of Ash vs Evil Dead season 3 kicking off, I figured I would take a look at a knockoff of the original Evil Dead film, 1988's Evil Clutch.

The film starts off with a three minute long credit sequence smash up that swings from lighthearted music with a series of polaroid photos showing a happy couple on vacation in Italy to ominus music that just lists the cast and crew. It is trying to set a tone of fun and dread but doesn't really land either.

Then there is the title card itself.

Rawr! claw claw claw!

This font/color scheme reminded me of another infamous knockoff.

Who would have thought people would be upset at a professional
sports team treating mental illness lightly?

After the credits, the film shows a man, I believe his name was Fango (which is either the greatest or worst name ever, I can't make up my mind), being inexplicably drawn to a run down structure to see a woman, Arva. There, Arva seduces him and suddenly, mid passion, she turns demonic/gothy and a 3 talon claw emerges from between her legs and rips Fango's crotch off. He staggers away, now fangoless, and dies.

And then we get this.

Just in case you didn't know that movies often tell their stories in sequence.

The film picks up with the happy couple we heard in the opening credit sequence. Cindy is an American and Tony is an Italian and I appreciate that the film let them keep their accents even with the Italian overdubbing process. They are driving into the mountains to spend some romantic time alone. Arva, with her clawgina put away and ungothed, appears alongside the road, distraught. The couple stops and picks her up and she tells them that she was being chased by someone and they agree to take her to the nearby town. They become weirdly fast friends.

In town, they exit the vehicle to have Arva freak out at the sight of a goggled man on a motorcycle. She runs away and the man, whose name is Algernoon, asks the couple if they know her. Algernoon has to use a electrolarynx (one of those boxes people that put on their throat to speak if they lost their voice box) to speak. It doesn't add anything to the plot, but it does add a little weirdness to the proceedings.

Algernoon tells the couple that he is a writer and goes on to tell them a story. He says his story is about them, but only that he uses Cindy and Tony as characters in it. As the film moves forward, I thought Algernoon was going to be telling them different stories, anthology style, but no. It is just this one story about a man killing his girlfriend only for her to come back from the dead and stalk him in his home. This story has nothing to do with the actual plot of Evil Clutch at all. It is just a 5-10 minute aside that is fully acted with gorey special effects that feel like it overall belongs in a different film (and who knows, probably did). The couple, obviously weirded out, leave Algernoon, and head onto the woods for their romantic getaway.

Somehow they cross paths again with Arva and she convinces them to spend the night in a nearby location in the woods. Cindy is creeped out by the building (it was the same location seen by us at the start of the film) and goes to get some air. Arva offers Tony some cocaine which he promptly drops into a bucket of black goop that happens to be right beside them. The goop explodes in his face and Arva tries to seduce Tony. Turns out Arva is a witch and does weird witch things from that point forward.

The rest of the film is Tony being possessed or not, Arva being gothy witchy or not, Algernoon showing up to immediately get killed and then turned into a zombie, and Fango returning from the dead (evidently mad his junk got ripped off). Cindy spends the rest of the film screaming and running away from things, aside from the time she finds a chainsaw and rekills Algernoon.

...this film doesn't make much sense, to put it simply.

But that's not why we are here. The question is: how much does it attempt to knockoff 1981's Evil Dead? The answer is: A LOT.

Before we get into that, I just want point out that Evil Clutch came out in 1988, while Evil Dead 2 came out in 1987. Evil Clutch stayed within the lane of the first film released 7 years previously. This film does not attempt to ape the sequel though, which I would think would have been the bigger target if your goal is to attract people that wanted to see something like that. It is a curious choice. I did also see that this film was distributed by Troma, but something tells me that this was after the film was completed, so any input at chasing the sequel of Evil Dead was probably not discussed.

Evil Clutch used the fast moving, low camera angle that Sam Raimi used very effectively in Evil Dead. Here is the very end of the first film to give you a refresher.

The story of how that technique came to be is really fun and interesting and well worth the minute to read about.

Evil Clutch used the 'shaky cam' so much through the runtime that it is clear that they liked it and wanted to showcase it as much as possible. At first I really appreciated it, but as the film carried on, it was obvious they had no other way to pad out the run time of the film. This ruined any attempt at suspense as you would know that the shot/scene would long outlast its welcome. The ending of Evil Clutch is a 2-3 minute running shot of Cindy from behind as she is screaming through the woods that should be redone in a better film. Had there been any emotional connection to what she went through, it could have been painful and haunting, but moments before she rekilled Fango(less) with just the reflection of sunlight cast form a pocket mirror, so I wasn't really relating to her situation.

Other 'nods' to Evil Dead included a shot of a wall clock with it hands spinning wildly and direct close ups of Cindy's eyes as they dart back and forth. It felt like Evil Clutch had to tick off those boxes as well and did it. If the shaky cam use wasn't so blatant, I might not have noticed those moments, but it was hard to ignore when Evil Clutch was trying so hard to look and feel like Evil Dead.

Evil Clutch tried using the random possession idea that was shown more as a trap in Evil Deah. Ash couldn't trust his girlfriend or his sister as they turned into monstrous Deadites but he wasn't 100% sure they were gone because they would revert to their 'regular' selves and try to convince him they were the victims and they were okay now. In Evil Clutch, Tony was possessed, tried to rape Cindy, and then he himself was almost tree root raped (another rip from Evil Dead) and Arva tried to use her clawgina on him. Algernoon saves him (and then dies quickly after) and Tony is no longer possessed. None of it makes sense. Cindy just accepts him again. I am glad that got wrapped up so quickly.

The gore in Evil Clutch was over the top but just as directionless as the rest of the film. I would argue that the gore in Evil Dead doesn't always make the most sense either, but it (in my opinion) has a certain low budget charm to it. There is a moment in Evil Clutch when a severed head on a hook has the top of the head explode off as it was packed full of bottle rockets and them blood just pumps out (of a severed head... think about that) in garden hose streams. It felt like the makers of Evil Clutch understood that Evil Dead was gonzo with it's effects but not how to dole them out effectively. Even when a chainsaw is used, it is brief and lacking impact.

I will give Evil Clutch small points for three gore effects that Evil Dead did not have:

Tony getting his hands smashed off by Fango dropping a rock on them. The set up was easy to see coming, but it still looked wrong in the right way.
Cindy getting a fishhook in her cheek. Fango used a fishing pole to snag her at distance. It doesn't make sense but it looked like it hurt.
Fango shoving Tony's head into the spokes of an old wooden wheel and then turning the wheel to decapitate Tony.

Evil Clutch is not a good film but you can see they loved Evil Dead, or at least liked it enough to think they could make money by knocking it off. They identified elements that make the original film what it was but didn't have a compelling story or characters to make it stand on its own.

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give it a 8 as it did ape the camera work and shot choices of Evil Dead. It really caught me off guard at how much this film adhered to what Evil Dead looked like. Also, the score for the film isn't really like Evil Dead but is way better than it has any right being. Not amazing, but pretty damn good for an Italian Evil Dead rip off.

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?

Cinematography wise, it was better than Ator. Entertainment wise, it's not even a film I would show to my friends on a lark.

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?

No, unless you can appreciate the time they took to mimic the style of Evil Dead.

Bonus:

The whole film is available to watch for free on YouTube if you want to watch it. I would not recommend it. But the terrible forbidden fruit is just a click away.