Trauma



Trauma (1993) was Dario Argento's first and last American film. I suspect that some American producer decided to give him some money hoping that they would get the next Psycho or Silence of the Lambs. Instead they got the same old Dario Argento film, with a slightly better cast and less visual flair.


She's the head nurse. Get it? Get it?

The first rule of any Dario Argento script is that it can't make a lick of sense, so Trauma leads off with an unexplained seance scene that doesn't have much to do with anything. Things go wrong, and the medium (Piper Laurie) and her husband end up decapitated outside. Their daughter (played by Asia Argento) is put in a clinic for anorexia, but escapes. She meets a graphic artist for a TV news show and together they try to find the decapitating killer, who has continued his (or her) killing spree on every rainy night since.

Actually, I can't really be sure that any American producer was involved, because the script has that same "translated from the Italian via Latin and Aramaic" feel that all of Argento's English language films do. Lines of dialogue rarely follow one another in a logical manner. Surely an American producer would have brought someone in to help get it right.

There is one moment in this movie I treasure. The daughter has been committed to a hospital (the Faraday Clinic), and the artist shows up late one rainy night to get her out. Slipping past security he finds the doors of the mental ward open and the patients wandering about. He looks in one door and sees a body lying on the floor with a large bloody wound. He approaches the next doorway and sees a huge pool of blood. As the patients get more upset he grabs the daughter and leaves. The very next scene our main characters are watching TV. They see a news report about a decapitation at the hospital, and the artist exclaims, "Someone from the Faraday Clinic was killed! I knew it!" Thank you Captain Obvious, did you figure that out yourself, or did you get help from a CSI team?


If you look closely you may spot some subtle clues that a murder has been committed here.

This movie also features one of the worst violations I've ever seen of Joe Bob Brigg's first rule of drive-in movies: When the monster's dead, the movie's over. The killer is apparently caught, complete with all the decapitated heads in his car... but the movie keeps going... and going... and going... for minute after minute, so we know he's a red herring. But why the hell was he carrying around the head in his car?

Posted: Mon - October 17, 2005 at      

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