Trauma
Tags: avant garde, murder, violence, horror, flashback, psychedelic, revenge

Plot synopsis:
On a dark and rainy night, a chiropractor opens a door to let an unseen patient into her office. When the chiropractor tells the unseen person that "you look familiar", the person knocks out the female chiropractor, takes out a machine-operated wire device and decapitates the woman.Several days later, David Parson is driving around Minneapolis and over a local bridge when he sees a gaunt, dark-haired teenager standing on the edge of the bridge, preparing to jump. David stops his pickup truck and helps the seemingly dazed girl back into the street where they get back into his truck and dive away. They drive to a local restaurant where the girl, speaking with a thick European accent, identifies herself as Aura Petrescu from Romania. She refuses to eat, and David suspects that she has a drug problem when he sees needle marks on her arms, and he shows her his that he too was a junkie. After eating a little bit of bread, Aura leaves for the ladies room where she vomits. After sneaking out a back window, she is grabbed by two men who take her away in a car to the home of her parents. Back inside the restaurant, David realizes that Aura has just stolen his wallet.The two men drop off Aura with her weird mother Adriana, while Aura's father, Stefan, locks her in a bedroom. That evening, many business-like people arrive at the house for a séance conducted by Adriana. While trying to summon a soul, Adriana is possessed and mentions a monster with a noose and threatens everyone with more murders to come. Adriana eventually becomes more violent and runs out of the room, followed by her husband. Aura goes after her parents, only to stumble upon a headless body and looks up to see a black-clad killer holding up the severed heads of her mother and father in the pouring rain.After making a phone call, Dr. Judd arrives where he asks Aura about what she saw. Soon, the police, led by Captain Travis, arrive to investigate the killings and question Aura about exactly what she saw. Aura gets away from the police and tracks down David, by using his ID from his stolen wallet, where she tells him about her parents murder and needs a place to stay.Meanwhile, Gabriel, a young boy, apparently lives next door to the killer when he sees an unseen person leave a decapitated head sitting by the window to stare at the boy all night.Later that same night, David awakens to find food laying all over his house and Aura vomiting in the bathroom. The following morning, David, who works as a storyboard sketch artist at a local TV station, arrives for work where he confides in his friend, Arnie, about Aura's problem. Arnie infers that Aura may have anorexia nervosa.The following night, Aura sees David and his reporter girlfriend, Grace, having sex in his bedroom. Disturbed by the sight, Aura runs out of the house, and David is forced to run after her where he's forced to tell Grace about Aura and her problems. The next day, Arnie and David watch a collection of news stories on the recent murders and realized that they all occurred when it was raining. David receives a phone call from Aura who has been taken away. He learns from an apparent covetous Grace that she told Dr. Judd of Aura's whereabouts. David angrily breaks up with Grace and tells her that Aura witnessed the murder of her parents and that the killer may come after her.Meanwhile, Dr. Judd tries to help Aura remember what she may have seen the night her parents were murdered, but he is unsuccessful at extracting any more details. As night falls, David visits the Faraday Clinic where he sneaks in and attempts to find Aura. But the unseen killer has followed him there and forces his way in as well and decapitates one of the clinics doctors. David helps Aura escape and they hide out at his house. Aura reveals that she had stolen a set of keys form the murdered doctor and a key chain as the word 'Marigold' inscribed on it.The next day, David and Aura follow the source of the keys which leads to a local storage locker where they manage to find a photograph of several doctors before the police arrive to confiscate the stuff in the locker which they add up to another murder victim of the so-called Head Hunter. Meanwhile, one of the doctors, named Linda Quick, is telling her girlfriend about the recent murders and that she and the doctors were involved several years ago in an accident involving electro convulsive therapy and something awful. David phones her to ask about the murdered doctors, and Linda immediately hangs up. David and Aura go to visit Linda, but the frightened Linda speeds away in her car. David and Aura drive around looking for her when they finally see the car parked in a motel parking lot. Linda's girlfriend, still at the house, receives a call from Linda and writes down Linda's hotel room number. But the killer arrives and kills Linda's girlfriend and sees from the notepad where Linda is.While David and Aura stake out the motel, the killer arrives, triggers the building sprinkler system (for the rain effect), breaks into Linda's room and beheads her too. David arrives too late to find Linda's decapitated body, but the killer has fled before taking Linda's head with him. The severed head of Linda manages to whisper to David the name "Lloyd" before expiring. David sees and takes a medical bag of Linda's displaying the name St. Bartholomew Hospital.David goes to the hospital, but learns that Dr. Lloyd no longer works here. David finds Dr. Lloyd living on the streets as a junkie drug dealer. Lloyd becomes frightened when David tells him about the recent murders, and refuses to talk with him. David gives Lloyd his phone number and tells him to call if he needs him. Before long, the killer finds Lloyd by tailing him back to a derelict warehouse where Lloyd resides. The killer attacks Lloyd in the same way as with the previous victims by hitting him in the back of the neck with a hammer, and attempts to decapitate Lloyd with the wire device, but the wire snaps. So, the killer is forced to drag Lloyd's still-living, but imobilized body to an elevator shaft and allows a decending elevator car to decapitate Lloyd. Lloyd's severed head falls down the elevator shaft. A little later, the police arrive to investigate the crime scene and discover David's phone number on a note.That night, Dr. Judd arrives at David's house where he tries to persuade Aura to leave with him. David wakes up and a struggle ensures, but Judd runs when the cops arrive to arrest David in connection to Lloyd's murder. Judd speeds away and the police give chase, but his car runs off the road and into a tree. The car truck pops open and inside are all the missing severed heads. Before dying from his injuries, Dr. Judd whispers to a policeman, "I loved her". David is released and runs back to his house to find Aura gone and note declaring "I've gone to join my mother." David finds her nightgown by the lake next to his house and is very distraught thinking that Aura has just drowned herself.With the death of Dr. Judd and the discovery of the severed heads, the Headhunter Murders are considered solved, but David goes into a decline over his loss of Aura. Over the next few days, David resumes his own drug use. Disheartened, he becomes addicted more to prescription drugs. He attempts to feign a prescription, but gets found out and is punched by a pharmacist when he refuses to return the pills. While sitting down on a sidewalk, David sees a person walk by who he believes is wearing Aura's bracelet. David follows the unseen person to a house which is the killer's. Gabriel, standing outside, tells David that he saw someone in a black coat go into the house.David knocks on the front door and says to the unseen person who answers: "Sorry, I thought you were someone else". Believing that he has seen Aura reflected in a rain barrel, David crawls though an open window on the side of the house. He enters a child's room with the name of "Nicholas" written everywhere where he finds a decomposed baby with its severed head in a crib. David is knocked out. He awakens in the basement chained up to a wall with Aura by his side. David soon learns that Aura's mother is still alive.Adriana arrives where she tells David that many years ago, while she was giving birth to her son, her newborn infant was accidentally decapitated by Dr. Lloyd who froze during a blackout in the delivery room during a sudden rainstorm. In an effort to make Adriana forget the horrible accident, and to cover it up, Dr. Lloyd and all the other nurses subjected Adriana to excessive electro-shock therapy. But the process only made Adriana insane and filled with her a resolve to kill all those doctors in the same way her baby was killed. David uses his chains to restrain the gated cage door, and Adriana forces it open with a fireplace poker, in which a support pillar tears open part of the ceiling. Standing above them is Gabriel, who jumps down and uses Adriana's portable wire saw to decapitate Adriana.

Review: The variations between the movies, then, come from the genre accidentals  "Profondo Rosso" is a detective thriller, "Suspiria" an occult conspiracy tale, etc.; Argento seems to come along and apply his own unique vision of the giallo onto whatever horror style is fashionable at the time.
It's his uniqueness, rather than his ability to produce great films, that has assured his place in the canon.So, then, "Trauma" turns out to be exactly what we would expect from an early nineties Dario Argento film.
Odd plot, check, arbitrary title, check, bad acting, check  Asia Argento actually manages to make Aura a likable character, but you can't deny that she garbles her lines and seems mostly amateurish throughout.
Italian horror master Dario Argento's only venture into American film-making was this tight, unique thriller.Young man tries to help a troubled anorexic girl catch the 'head-hunter' killer that murdered her parents.Trauma is a film that has been given the shaft by many critics, including some of Argento's own fans.
Also different from the other works of Argento, this film is rather light on gore, but still manages to have some shocking murder sequences thanks to some wild set-ups.
And he's hugely successful at it, too.Trauma has a lot of great set pieces, some great scenes of extreme violence and gore to spare,a cleverly plotted and written story, decent performances from Rydell and Asia and genuine old fashioned suspense.
TRAUMA Aspect ratio: 2.39:1 (Technovision)Sound format: Dolby StereoA TV newsroom artist (Mark Rydell) helps a distraught anorexic (Asia Argento) to investigate the death of Argento's mother (Piper Laurie) at the hands of a monstrous serial killer.Though often cited as the film which signalled a creative downturn in Dario Argento's career, TRAUMA is actually a much better entry than its reputation suggests.
Indeed, far from providing evidence of 'creative decline', TRAUMA is actually a fine addition to Argento's filmography, and is ripe for reappraisal.Despite its American setting, the film is defiantly European in style and execution, employing ultra-wide scope framing, inventive camera-work (including a bizarre shot from the point-of-view of a butterfly!!), ornate narrative structure and eccentric characterizations.
The cast is a typical Argentonian mixed bag: Asia portrays the same joyless harpy she's played in all her collaborations with Argento to date (including THE STENDHAL SYNDROME and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), leaving Rydell to shoulder most of the film's emotional burden as a young man who learns to accept Asia's flaws whilst simultaneously falling in love with her (few) virtues.
Laurie makes much of her limited screen time as Asia's domineering mother, while Brad Dourif (the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy) plays a former doctor whose guilty conscience comes back to haunt him in the worst possible way.
Not One Of Argento's Masterpieces - But Definitely Not Bad. Dario Argento's "Trauma" of 1993 is definitely one of this great director's lesser films, but it is nevertheless a more than decent Thriller and better than most 90s Horror films.
As far as I am considered, however, Argento is one of the greatest Horror directors of all-time, and films like "Suspiria", "Profondo Rosso" or "Phenomena" range high in my personal all-time favorite list.
Even Argento's weaker films are usually above average, and "Trauma" is a more than decent film that easily outshines the majority of 90s Horror efforts.Director Argento's daughter, then 18-year-old Asia Argento stars as Aura, a teenage Romanian girl who has escaped from a mental hospital where her parents sent her, supposedly to cure her anorexia.
Journalist David (Christopher Rydell) wants to help the girl...Generally speaking, "Trauma" has everything decent Horror films need - it is stylishly filmed, atmospheric and very suspenseful from the beginning to the end.
The supporting cast contains Frederic Forest, Brad Dourif and Piper Laurie.As mentioned above, "Trauma" is certainly not one of Argento's masterpieces.
Things only get worse for poor Aura when she returns home to her parents (her mother played by Piper Laurie is a seer) are soon killed by a serial killer by the name of 'Head Hunter'.
Aura attempts to get answers (with the help of the good Samaritan) as she fights her weakened state, the clinic personal and the serial killer.Dario Argento once again mines the familiar giallo territory in this, his first American co-production.
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.
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.
Dario Argento's first American film is very very good but not great like "Deep Red" and "Suspiria" were.
Finally, the presence of several acting vets (including James Russo, Brad Dourif, Frederic Forrest, and an excellent Piper Laurie) don't hurt at all."Trauma" is not Argento's best movie, and certainly pales in comparison to movies like "Deep Red", "Suspiria", and "Inferno." As it stands though, it's an underrated movie, and worth a look, especially if you are an Argento fan..
Despite this, Argento's skillful POV shots (the hospital sequence is especially impressive) imbue the film with an efficient mood of dread, and the story, once fully revealed, makes a bit more sense than the director's earlier, more artistic efforts.
"Trauma" is definitely not the best film he's ever done, and by no far the worst either, but it's just not up there with (Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre and A Bird With A Crystal Plummage).The set up is good and the acting is top-notch especially Asia Argento, she's a talented actress.
"Dario Argento's Trauma" is better than expected, even if it doesn't match his previous works.**SPOILERS**After failing a suicide attempt, Aura Petrescu, (Asia Argento) is captured and returned to the Farraday Clinic, where her mother Adriana, (Piper Laurie) is concerned for her behavior.
Italian's top-class horror director Dario Argento obviously impressed some people with his previous films ('Opera' in particular) as he was offered the opportunity to film a fully American backed production.
Dario Argento scraping bottom.As the director's stylistic flourishes seem to be muted by the American setting - although there are some small moments here and there that work -, you're left with one of those silly giallo plots full of cheap and exploitative psychology, random narration, amateurish performances - the only decent acting's done by Brad Dourif - and no logic at all.There's a certain fascination to be gained watching rubbish like this.
Argento's real-life daughter (and European sex symbol) Asia Argento plays a young anorexic who witnesses the decapitation murder of her parents by a serial killer known as `The Head Hunter' who only kills when it's raining.
Although it's not quite as lavish as, say, Suspiria or Opera, there are some typically inventive touches that raise this above other early-90s slasher movies of its kind (for example, the killer uses a mechanical device with a razor-sharp wire to decapitate victims, and some heads continue to move and even speak for a few seconds after they've been cut off.)  A great oddball cast (including eccentric character actor Brad Dourif, Frederic Forrest as the suspicious, unconventional doc, and Piper Laurie as Asia's batty, phony-medium mom) make it even more enjoyable -- but, honestly, this movie has one of the most unusual and seemingly out-of-place opening and closing credits sequences of any movie I've ever seen.HIGHLIGHT:  When the wire on the decapitation device snags on Dourif's necklace, the unruffled killer compensates by dragging him over to an elevator shaft and pushing his head under the descending elevator car..
It is perhaps his first foray into the Americanized 'slasher' genre as we know it, which is okay, but apparently someone forgot to tell him that the year was 1993 and that tactics used for slasher films that heavily populated the 80's was not cool anymore.The second mistake Dario Argento is guilty of is casting his daughter, Asia Argento as the main lead in "TRAUMA".
Unlike Dario's earlier films such as "PROFONDO ROSSO" and "TENEBRE" where the killer is revealed at the end and his/her motives satisfy the viewer once you look back at all the pieces that finally fit the complex puzzle, the motive for all the murders in this movie is highly preposterous and quite ridiculous.All of Dario's trademarks from his earlier films are nowhere to be found in "TRAUMA".
I'm big fan of Dario Argento movies and was hoping something great entertainment and music in this film but I was very disappointed with the story, suspense, music, atmosphere & killings which I have always found on the top in other films given by Dario Argento.
While it isn't my personal favorite Argento film(that was Suspiria), it is probably his most accessable and good place to start if you haven't seen any of his other works before.
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.
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!.
This film lacks almost everything that makes Argento great; the music is largely misplaced and fails to have the same creepy effect that it did in his previous films, the film lacks any real atmosphere, the characters aren't introduced in any memorable way so it's hard to keep track of them and the death scenes weren't nearly as creative or bloody as his earlier works.
That being said, Trauma is nowhere near as bad as some would have you believe; a mediocre Argento is still better than a lot of thrillers of the same ilk, it's just that with Argento, horror fans have come to expect more and this doesn't deliver on the same level that his other movies do.Many a talented director has made the journey overseas to America, and the results are usually not very good.
The rest of the movie is filled with an interesting cast, including Christopher Rydell, Piper Laurie, Frederic Forrest and Brad Dourif; who has a disappointing amount of screen time.Trauma does feature some nice aspects, such as the trademark Argento sequence in which the main character sees something but only notices the most important thing later on, and a very eerie séance, but it also features a lot of lackluster sequences too.
Overlong and dull Dario Argento horror film even lacks the director's trademark style of direction.
This is basically everything that you would come to expect from a late 1980's / early 1990's slasher / horror movie.However, given the predictability of the movie, then "Trauma" wasn't really much of an enjoyable experience, and there weren't any scares to be found anywhere.Director Dario Argento have some pretty nice titles to his name, "Trauma", however, is not really one of them.It was hard to get submerged into the story, because it was slow paced and rather mundane and dull.
And the mediocre acting performances throughout the movie weren't really helping the movie along in a nice way either.If you enjoy Dario Argento's work, then there are far better pieces in the collection.
TRAUMA is the fourth Dario Argento film I've seen for the first time and given that I've not yet seen the films considered to be his best just yet, this will be a review that won't compare it to films like SUSPIRA, INFERNO, DEEP RED, PHENOMENA and TENEBRE which I haven't seen but rather to OPERA, MOTHER OF TEARS and THE STENDHAL SYNDROME which are the only ones I have seen aside from TRAUMA.After I watched it I mainly thought this film was really weird, script wise the plot was really good and had an interesting twist to it, on a technical side the camera work was great, I just loved the style in which the camera was used, constantly moving and there were some strange angles at times, aside from all this the acting was rather dull and the score of the film was actually strange too, at times it played in scenes where it wasn't really needed and where it was needed it didn't really fit in with the scene.TRAUMA is also very low on gore and the violence in it which involves decapitations are very tame compared to the other three films I've seen and given that Tom Savini created some of the effects for the film, you would think it would showcase his work just like the other films he worked on did.The overall strange thing about it is is that it has its good points like the plot and the camera work and it has its bad points like the acting and the score, they almost balance each other out in some odd way.As far as recommending it goes, this might be a good place to start if you're just getting into Argento's films.
It's actually kind of hard to comment on this movie, because the fact is- like all of the rest of Argento's movies, it makes absolutely no sense, and I'm convinced the man was doing heavy drugs at the time he mad every one of his films.
This film follows an unseen murderer who is committing acts of violence in response to a past "trauma." We've seen Argento handle this same story before with much better results (see Tenebre).
Both David & Aura decide to investigate the killings themselves as headless bodies continue to pop up all over the place...This Italian American co-production was written, produced & directed by Dario Argento who is well known for this type of film, Trauma certainly isn't his best but at the same time it's far from his worst.
One more thing, I hated the talking decapitated heads & I'm pretty sure that decapitated heads can't speak.Director Argento is widely known amongst horror fans for his style & visually stunning films like Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebre (1982) & Opera (1987).
The acting wasn't anything special & for some reason Argento makes his real life daughter Asia go topless...Trauma is a decent murder mystery as long as you just go with it & not pick to many holes in it & ignore the talking decapitated heads.
I think it's definitely worth a watch especially if you like Argento or horror films in general..
That boy notices the wire-machine that the killer uses to collect his/her head-trophies and will play a specific part at the end.A decent Argento effort is better than a lot of horror directors' really good work and TRAUMA has a visual polish and style(..not to mention ghoulish, sometimes humorous, beheadings)that makes up for a rather tacky ending..an ending I just didn't really buy into.
ANOTHER SPOLIER: the way the killer is killed is pretty dumb (SPOLIER: a stupid kid saves the day), but alot of the film is very fun and those who love Argento will probably like it, but it's certainly is no Suspiria.Your best fiend in horror movie reviews: Jesse Tucker.
I feel bad for Savini that he was so hamstrung on this project.Piper Laurie also appears in this movie, as Asia Argento's nutty mom.