Trauma (1994)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Just what I expected

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Trauma is a particularly significant horror in that it was the first film to be made by Italian genre master Dario Argento on American soil. Following a string of eye-catching, kaleidoscopic gialli and superior supernatural tales, Argento found himself at the door of Hollywood, an industry which, at the time, was struggling to churn out much in terms of originality in the horror/thriller genre. While he had employed English-speaking actors before, such as Jennifer Connelly, David Hemmings and Karl Malden, their roles were often crudely dubbed, and Trauma offered the director a chance to reach a broader audience with his unique - if obviously Hitchcockian - blend of build-up and terror.Disappointingly, Trauma, if anything, represents the beginning of Argento's drastic career decline. The opening is full of promise, as a familiar black-gloved killer stalks a victim before killing her in a brutal and stylish fashion, here with a device which allows the victim to be garroted with relative ease. Bolstered by a POV style and traditionally great effects work by Tom Savini, it's a scene that could have easily been taken from one of Argento's native works. However, as popular as the giallo craze was, it didn't quite reach the general American audience, and so Trauma gets watered-down and peppered with horror clichés in an attempt to cast a wider audience net. While the tropes are there - an everyman (Christopher Rydell) is forced into sleuthing while dodging the police - it does little but frustrate as you realise that somewhere, deep down, there's probably a great giallo trying to get out.So while the film has it's odd moment, the result is an incoherent, and somehow quite boring, mess of ideas and clashing styles. Starting promisingly, the story goes on to place anorexia sufferer Aura (Asia Argento, the director's then 17 year-old daughter) in the hands of illustrator David (Rydell) after her parents are murdered by the masked killer, and it is during this period that the film does nothing but lay out a string of red herrings, as well as creepily leering at Argento's youthful beauty. The final third is an exhausting conveyor belt of anti-climaxes, before the ludicrous (and not in an entertaining way) reveal that feels like it was made by a sub-par Tobe Hooper or Wes Craven arrives. While it's nowhere near the level of atrociousness that Argento would vomit out in 2009 with Giallo, Trauma feels like it was made by a once-great visionary who had tiredly given in to the producers' voices in his ear.

Dario Argento's 1993 Giallo is a mixed bag, it's a film on his CV that his fans readily accept shows the best and worst of the goremeister's bent.Asia Argento plays a troubled young woman with a eating disorder who runs away from a psychiatric hospital. Teaming up with a hero in waiting, she is drawn into the hunt for a serial killer known as "The Headhunter", a hooded killer who has a penchant for decapitation.Backed by American dollars for the first time, Dario Argento is in a mischievous mood here. Pumped by Pino Donaggio's chipper musical compositions, Trauma struggles to get the audience to take it seriously as a horror film. Conversely, it's still a bunch of fun, intentionally or otherwise, with the director blending gore and suspense with his playful peccadilloes.The murder scenes are handled with the customary Argento skill, where we even get introduced to what can only be described as Garrote-O-Vision! His camera work quite often borders on the brilliant, but elsewhere the acting is poor across the board and the uneven tone destabilises the pic as a "horror" film of substance.Roll the dice and take your chance here really. It's fun not scary, bloody yet playful, classy yet amateurish, gotta love those red berries though. 6.5/10

OK, I hated Tenebrae, I thought it was junk. I absolutely loved Trauma. If you are looking for top-notch acting, nope not here. If you are looking for cheap Giallo / Thriller w/ a decent amount of splatter, YES ! The movie has the right amount of story and tension that kept me watching. It built up the pace just right and delivered schlocky campy Euro-inspired horror / thriller action right up to the end.Asia was awesome and her flawed acting was perfect because it fit the campy nature of the genre. Perfect acting in that it all was flawed just right to fit by everyone. Sit back watch it and have a pizza, some vino and enjoy w/ a loved one on a dark stormy night. The ending was perfect for the film. Trash cinema at it's best.

Trauma, Dario Argento's first US production, is often cited as one of the director's weakest movies. This may be, in some part, due to the fact that he 'held back' slightly, for fear that his new American audience might not fully appreciate his more outrageous directorial touches. It may also be because Argento unwisely allowed nepotism get the better of him and unwisely cast his inexperienced daughter Asia in the lead role.Whatever the reason, Trauma is certainly a far cry from the director's classics such as Deep Red or Tenebre, lacking the excellent camera-work (to me, the butterfly-cam felt like he was trying a tad TOO hard), precise editing, stunning soundtrack, and stylish death sequences of these earlier works.The one factor that Argento does retain from his Italian films is a ludicrous plot; unfortunately, without the other outlandish elements to distract the viewer's attention from the dumb story, the film flounders in its own idiocy.In Trauma, Christopher Rydell plays David Parsons, a young man who becomes involved in a deadly mystery after preventing Aura (Asia Argento), an anorexic girl who witnessed the murder of her parents (by a maniac with a hand-held decapitation machine), from committing suicide.Dario Argento, who is often referred to as the 'Italian Hitchcock', has fun referencing both Rear Window (by having a young lad spy on the killer from his bedroom window) and also Psycho (with a shower scene that mimics certain shots from the 1960 horror classic), but on this occasion, however, the director is definitely not worthy of the comparison: he delivers a lacklustre and infuriatingly silly effort that took me three viewings to get through.The pacing of the film is dreadful (for example, David's descent into drug addiction towards the end of the film happens in the blink of an eye), the acting is awful (Piper Laurie overacts; Asia Argento doesn't act) and even the gore FX by the usually reliable Tom Savini do not impress.Moreover, the film is not in the least bit scary, and often elicits laughs rather than screams: in a couple of the film's daftest moment, the just-severed head of a murder victim manages to utter a few words to the hero, and, after a decapitation by an elevator, another head is seen screaming as it falls down the shaft!!Perhaps the most disturbing moment of the whole film, in my mind, was the brief topless shot of buxom Asia: maybe it's just me with my uptight British sensibilities, but filming your own daughter with her norks out just doesn't seem right!