Doctor Movie: Episode 301: Trauma

Show Notes

Doctor Movie is back with a forgotten Dario Argento movie that deserves a little more love than it has been given. The get into the 1993 giallo Trauma. Some heads are gonna roll!

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We are back on the road, and we're talking about an Argento movie where Brad Dourif is a doctor.

That's scary enough.

Wait a minute.

I hear something.

What's happening, everybody?

Welcome back to Doctor Movie, your favorite show on the road.

You know, we just recently celebrated 300 episodes.

I can't believe I've done 300 of anything in my life.

Oh, by the way, if you're a regular listener of the show, if things sound a little different, it's because I've got a different vehicle.

So yes, you know, we had the Blunicorn for a long time, and it has been retired and replaced.

And I've got a new travel vehicle for back and forth to work.

And so if something sounds a little different, hopefully that's all it is.

It has been, oh, I don't know, maybe a month or so since I've released any shows, and I apologize for that.

One reason was I was really sick for a couple of weeks where, you know, the weather change and all that stuff kind of affected me, and you had the sinuses and all that mess.

And so that lasted for a couple of weeks.

But then I have to admit, you know, it's always good to face our demons.

But yes, I have an addiction.

And that addiction is to a TV show called Ted Lasso.

Man, even to the point to where I've considered even doing a podcast just about that show.

So much to unpack in that show.

I put lots of posts on Facebook about my love for this show.

It is, I don't know, it's the best TV show I've ever seen.

And I'm on my, so there's only three seasons, and about 12 episodes a piece.

And as the seasons go on, the episodes get longer.

They start off in 30 minute segments, then they turn into hour segments.

And the last season, you got some of them, they're an hour and a half, pretty long episodes.

But I am on my fourth round of going through that series in a month, and I can't say enough about it.

But anyways, yes, I do have an addiction, and it's Ted Lasso.

So if you value anything that I ever talk about here, I don't know, you can't go wrong with that show.

It's just top notch.

Everybody's like, eh, you know, the first thing everybody always says is, isn't that about soccer?

Well, soccer is the background, but that's not what this show is about.

It's about, you know, fighting your demons, having support, what being a coach really is.

It's one thing to coach a team, to be disciplined on the field, but how do you make these people become better people in life?

And that's really what this show is about.

And it's just absolutely brilliant.

Anywho, that's not why we're here.

I just wanted to come out and admit my addiction, and that's what it is.

Another thing I've always been addicted to is Dario Argento films.

Pretty much my favorite director.

And we're looking at one of the less popular, but I think very criminally overlooked movies of his, because you've kind of broke that 80s barrier, you've gotten into the 90s.

People think at this point his heyday has already passed.

Everybody kind of looks at opera as being his last hurrah, which I haven't done on this show yet, by the way.

This one just happened to pop up on my list.

And I remember when I first saw this one, I was just kind of like, meh, it's okay.

But I'm telling you, after waiting all these years and checking it out again, this movie really plays as like an Argento's greatest hits.

It's got everything we like of all the different Argento movies kind of sprinkled into one movie.

And I don't know, let's talk about trauma.

Like I said, from 1993, considered a horror mystery movie.

What do we got here?

Our synopsis says, a daughter of a murdered psychic joins forces with a TV employee to find a grisly serial decapitator.

I mean, come on, does that not scream Argento?

Like if you just cherry picked words from other movies and put them together in one sentence, very much so, right?

Directed by, obviously, Dario Argento, you know, the maestro.

I mean, just if you don't know any Argento movies, I don't know why you're even checking out this show.

He's made just some of my favorite movies Deep Red is probably my favorite Argento movie.

Suspiria, obviously, you know, the classic.

And, you know, it's Argento.

I don't want us to tell you.

If you've never seen any Argento movies, you got to.

I mean, if you consider yourself a horror slash murder mystery fan, Giallo, we call them, or we don't call them.

That's what the Italians call them.

And then we use the same word.

So there you go.

Why to watch?

You know, I love the why to watch.

Here we go.

We got creepy, suspenseful, and terrifying.

Yeah, possibly.

It says, Trauma is a good movie despite its lack of success.

And the very best thing is Derif's cameo.

Is it really a cameo?

He's in there quite a bit.

The cool thing about this movie is, like I said, you've got all these elements, but you also have all the special effects done by Tom Savini.

And, I mean, come on.

You know, you're coming out of the 80s, the heyday of Savini, and he finally gets the chance to work with Argento, and here you go, right?

And it holds up very well.

Let's talk about our cast.

Well, obviously, we're in that weird phase where Dario just decides that he's going to use Aja, his daughter, in pretty much every movie.

And so, yeah, movie star Aja Argento, and she plays, was it Ara, I believe, yep.

And she's a troubled girl.

She comes from a pretty messed up family.

She's kind of escaped her family, right?

Family's a little on the nutsy side.

And she's going to commit suicide.

And jump off a bridge, but she happens to be stopped by David, which is Christopher Rydell, who plays our other main character, who ends up saving her life.

And trying to take care of her, right?

And why is her family so messed up?

Well, her mom in this movie is played by Piper Laurie.

Come on.

We all love Piper Laurie, right?

The mom from Carrie.

I mean, what else you need?

And she's about as crazy in this one.

I mean, to a certain extent.

So she's a kind of a fraud psychic, I think, right?

She does these seances and I don't know.

It's just, can you imagine having a family life where, you know, all these people gather around in your living room, and you have these seances, and that's just kind of what they do for fun.

So yeah, Aja's character, Aura, is pretty messed up, right?

We've got the great Brad Durif, like we said in this as well.

And that's pretty much all the main cast really talk about.

So as far as this movie goes, like I said, I really feel like after watching it again, I didn't give it a fair shake the first time around.

I guess because your expectations are on such a level, because when you're new into Argento and all this material is out there, and you're starting with the early stuff, you're seeing other stuff get released.

You know how they do a retrograde of everything, and you're going to get the big heavy hitters first, and it just kind of trickles down from there?

So there you go.

That's the story here where you just sit through Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebrae, Phenomena, and then you start getting these movies, right?

You start getting Stendhal Syndrome and all this.

I didn't even talk about the first three.

Bird of the Crystal Plumage, Cat of Nine Tales.

What's the other one?

I just went blank on the third animal.

Four Flies and Grey Velvet.

There you go.

So I mean, you know, which are all classics.

I mean, they kind of set the Giallo world on fire, right?

But like I said, this one, you kind of get the greatest hits here.

So the cool thing about this movie is you've got this killer that's running around and wiping out people, and they've built this device, which is kind of a, you know, black and decker, motorized, battery-powered, handheld device that has a wire that opens up.

It's almost like a noose.

And the killer will put it around your head and hit this button, and this thing will just automatically start cutting your head off.

In a lot of cases, they will inject you with something to keep you still and proceed on, you know?

And a lot of times, they don't use anything.

They just do it, right?

So the story is really built around the idea of these people are getting knocked off, and you really have no clue of why these people are being selected.

And then you have a night where a lot of the local people that are around that have dealt with losing people close to them get together over at Aura's house with her folks doing the seance, and they're wanting to find out from somebody that was killed who the killer is.

Big storms happening, all of a sudden, you know, things just kind of implode, and people scatter out of the house, and they end up, Aura runs outside and sees the body of her dad laying there, and his head's missing, and she looks up and there's a figure standing there and it's holding two heads.

It's holding the head of her mom and her dad, and it's holding them up to where you can't see the killer's face, right?

It's pretty cool.

And it gives you that kind of deep red thing where you kind of see the killer, but you don't see the killer, right?

After you go back and they show you at the end how it was done, you're like, oh, okay, got it, got it.

Just like Deep Red, right?

If you haven't seen Deep Red, I highly recommend Deep Red.

I've got an episode about that one if you want to check it out.

Back in, I don't know, the early hundreds of the show, I think.

So yeah, so now we're on this track with the guy that works at a TV station trying to figure out what's happened, right?

And I'm missing a lot of details here because again, I'm just trying to give an overview of this.

I want you to check this out for yourself.

But it really leads down to something that happened in a person's life.

And they're going after a crew of...

what's the word here?

And not give it away.

There's a specific group of people that the killer is going after for a specific reason, which all comes to light at the end, right?

And you get several red herrings here, which is set up very well, but very reminiscent again of deep red.

And you know, these kills are pretty brutal.

You do have Brad Durif in this, which you can never go wrong with.

And yeah, I'm kind of stuck because I can't say anything else without giving it away.

This is a much better Argento movie than I remember it being.

It does kind of plod along a little bit.

You feel like maybe we could pick up the pace a little bit, but other than that, this is a really solid flick.

And again, if you're an Argento fan, and you've seen this one, you kind of went, I tell you what, watch it again.

And instead of looking at it as a rehash, or just saying, oh, he's just kind of doing what he's already done before, look at it with fresh eyes again.

Because it's got some really good stuff in it.

And it's just different enough.

There's a whole lot of deep red in this.

Even the ending to me is very deep reddish.

So again, maybe that's why I like it so much now, because I love that movie so much.

But I say you give it another shot.

Or if you haven't seen it, this is actually probably a good one for you to start with with Argento, because it's a bit Americanized.

It's even supposed to be in America.

So I think it actually is in Georgia, I think.

So this is a great starting point if you've never watched any Argento movies and you hear that word Giallo thrown around and you're just not quite sure, well, this is really a good one to start with, right?

So I say give it a shot.

Oh, I didn't mention that it got a 5.6, I think, on IMDB.

I think it's a little better than that.

For me, we're doing a 1 to 5 rating like I always do.

I give it a solid 4.

It really surprised me on revisit how much I actually went, huh, okay, all right.

Because, I mean, I remember the nuts and bolts of the movie from before, but it really solidified this time around and made me go, okay, I see what he was doing here, but it's actually quite good.

And again, you got some heavy hitters here.

I mean, you know, again, the downside is when he starts putting Aja and everything, which don't get me wrong, I'm an Aja fan, but, you know, she's not on the acting level as what you normally get with Argento and stuff.

But at the same time, you got Piper Laurie and Brad Durif, and again, you got Savini doing the effects.

I mean, that sounds like a home run when you hear it.

And this is a much better movie than I remember it being.

So do yourself a favor, go to Tubi, because that's where it's at, and check out Trauma.

All right, folks, that's it for this episode.

It's good to be back.

Maybe I won't take so long to put out episodes.

All right, folks, we will check you later.