Trauma (1962) User Reviews

While it has a few logical flaws, it's not bad for a cheapo mystery/thriller.

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 15 August 2015]

To enjoy "Trauma", you have to turn your brain off and just watch the film. After all, so much of the plot really makes no sense. Still, given the limitations in the script and with the budget, it's not a bad little psychological thriller.

This film is unusual because the opening titles appear 15 minutes into the film! This is when Emmaline's aunt is murdered...deliberately drowned by someone whose identity is unknown through most of the film. However, and this is a dumb twist, Emmaline might know but she's got complete amnesia of this as well as her life before the murder! It's an overused and difficult to believe concept--and it's not made any easier to accept given the whole hidden mentally challenged and insane brother angle that appears later in the movie!

But the folks acting in the film do a nice job, the film has a nice, tense atmosphere and the film is a decent time-passer given that you can just look past everything. Just don't think too much...otherwise it will probably be a bit of a waste of your time.

Good Gothic! Grand Guignole strikes again!

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 31 August 2016]

The death of a wealthy aunt with a past leads to murder and mental anguish for her surviving heiress, a niece who as an impressionable teen witnessed the slaying. Now marries to an older man who may or may not have nefarious plans, she struggles to reside in the gorgeous country home where the memories are anything but peaceful.

This psychological thriller is a common theme in movies ever since "The Cat and the Canary". Lorri Richards isn't really all that memorable as the beleaguered heroine, a role any young actress with vulnerable expressiveness could have played. She's a good screamer, though. Veteran actress Lynn Bari has gone from oomph to cough as the smokey aunt who meets a grizzly end. The best performance is John Conte as the calculating older man who keeps the audience guessing whether he's killer or kisser. Not bad for its kind (especially for being so cheap), but not really scary, either.

The Enigma of Everett.

[rmax304823 · 5/10 · 2 November 2014]

I don't see any way in which this could be compared to Hitchcock's "Psycho" except that one followed the other closely. "Trauma" is really burdened by its low budget, most of which may have been spent on that brand new Corvette. The production values affect both the script and the performance.

Even in the first two or three minutes, when teen-aged Lorrie Richards as Emmaline, is talking with a caring friend, Carla, Renee Mason's acting as Carla is so poor it made me wince. I don't know who you are, reading this. Or WHY you're reading it, for that matter. But if you are some grizzled old wino in an alley, you could be dragged into a studio and give at least as good a performance as Renee Mason. I've seen better acting on the stage of a high school in Tonopah, Nevada. But she's pretty, petite, and has a saucy figure.

I don't mean to be too harsh on the poor girl. She doesn't stand out in any particulars. Nobody really delivers the goods. A middle-aged Lynn Bari does her best with the role of Emmaline's rich aunt, but she never did bring much to the party and recites her lines as if in a classroom, but she's a seasoned pro and adds an occasional odd and interesting twist to her delivery of a line. The other chief character, John Conte, has the magnetic appeal of a hard boiled egg.

But all of them get some good lines. The writing is better than any other element of the film. When we first see John Conte, he chats with the young Emmaline and mispronounces her name. Even after she corrects him, he smiles genially and mispronounces it again. There's an edgy feel to the scene and the edge is not in the performances but in the dialog.

Not to say the twisted plot is in any way original. "Psycho" built up its suspense in ambiguous ways -- Janet Leigh, filled with guilt, yet still smiling with satisfaction as she imagines how her boss will react to her treachery -- until the crashing mid-film crisis that turned the story on its head. There's no danger of anything being gradually built up here. In the first five minutes. Emmaline is put through the cliché of a woman alone in the woods, hearing a strange sound, and then someone leaping into the frame, only to have the leaper turn out to be the family handyman.

The plot has been described elsewhere. Briefly, a man marries a woman for her money and when she dies everyone suspects him, possibly because he looks and sounds like a snake. Ah -- but the REAL plot involves forbidden love, an idiot child, hidden rooms, and amnesia.

The musical score is by Buddy Colette. He was a talented musician who was part of the West Coast jazz movement, distinguished by its odd arrangements and use of instruments unfamiliar to jazz. Colette played with the Chico Jones group, for instance, that used a jazz cello. The style doesn't belong behind a movie. We hear weird instruments, a bassoon, and I think a harmonium, and, who knows?, sacbuts, virginals, rauschpfeife, and spoons.

All in all, I found it dull. The story doesn't really fit a California ranch-style house. It belongs in a ghoul-haunted mansion.

Jeez

[recluse2 · 5/10 · 27 March 2019]

It had some interest but then I got mad at the film. Hard-to-understand plot. Some unintelligible lines. Slow-moving; momentum especially lost in last 30 minutes. I quit caring about the characters. When it was over I breathed a sigh of relief.

uneventful "thriller" extremely cheaply made

[HEFILM · 4/10 · 31 March 2013]

Severely limited by lack of budget, perhaps, accounts for a story with very few thrills and a very odd kind of "hep-cat" music score that only rarely appears and then usually to be distracting. It's basically a super low budget modern day JANE ERYE. But there is just almost no sense of danger to the film and though its ending isn't what you might expect it doesn't really all work out after it's over and you look back and the few things that really happened. The film is never stupid and the performances are good--seems like the lead girl deserved to make more films after this. But saying it isn't junk doesn't make it a jewel and most of what happens feels like filler, well done filler all considered, but when it's all said and done not much has really happened. It's pretty plane that the murder victim at the start is blinking right after death, but the rest of the film is gaff free but excitement free too. The lead character is just never really in any urgent danger so the mystery doesn't demand it get solved or ever feel like it's building to something awful. Various scenes cutting away from the girl's story to the architect's office deflate things more though the mild comic relief does work and the characters are believable, but so what when you know nothing threatening is anywhere nearby. There aren't many suspense of violent set pieces and those aren't very well done and end very quickly.

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

I mean only one person dies in the whole film and scenes with "the killer" come few and far between and about the most threatening thing the killer does is knock over a painting. They usually only show the killers hand but some of these scenes are almost comical. The whole structure of the film had you sure you know what's going on to the point of saying: "Oh come on let's get one with it." It does have a surprise in store at the end but that can't redeem the too too long a time trying to set you up for the ending.

Too talky

[hollywoodshack · 3/10 · 30 March 2019]

I have no idea why the main actress is small, shy and has a big nose. In every scene it seems important to have it stick out. The doctor wants to solve the mystery of whether the son died or not, if the aunt's drowning was really a murder, he lectures on and on through martinis, olives and cherries, only to send the question back to where he started. The opening titles arrive 16 minutes into the film, a whopping $69,000 budget. And we always thought better movies were made on low budgets. Just if they cut the dialogue more it might look average with better acting. The surprise ending makes no sense. Entertaining as a root canal without pain relievers.

Quite Good

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 31 October 2013]

Teenager Emmaline (Lorrie Richards) discovered the drowned body of her aunt (Lynn Bari), and as an adult returns to the family mansion as a married woman. Eventually, she falls for the caretaker's nephew, and remembers who the real killer was.

This was Robert Young's only directing credit, as he was primarily a writer and worked on such films as "Escape to Witch Mountain" (1975). Was he an adequate director? I would say yes. This is a gem of a film.

There are aspects of this that sort of call to mind "Carnival of Souls" and even "Diabolique" to some degree. I might be overstepping the bounds by saying this is in the same league, but it definitely deserves more attention than it has received.

Small time thriller

[adriangr · 7/10 · 22 January 2019]

This is largely a forgotten movie, and it has both good and bad points, but it ends up more fun than failure. The plot concerns a young woman who witnesses a murder and then has amnesia for the next 6 years. When she returns to the place of the crime, her memory gradually starts to come back, and the mystery of what happens starts to reveal itself.

"Trauma is both filmed and titled like one of the Hammer Films "psychological thrillers" of the same era, but it looks like it had way less budget to play with. This doesn't impact the story too much because the sets, lighting and locations all work pretty well. The murder scene at the start of the movie is quite nasty, and the black and white photography looks pretty classy. But, oh my god what really skewers the movie is the terrible acting. Mostly by the actress playing the central character of Emmaline, who cannot seem to manage more than about 2-3 expressions. Most notably in the pivotal murder scene near the beginning, the movie's title suddenly blasts onto the screen over freeze-frame of her face, which holds an expression of nothing more than sleepy disinterest. I think the director could have at least shouted at her to look a bit more...well... traumatised! She maintains this lack of emotional depth throughout the rest of the movie...there's just nothing going on in there, despite the character supposedly going through the agony of trying to recall her memory, you'd think she was just wondering what flavour of ice cream to buy at the local store.

The rest of the cast do little better. Emmaline's love interest Craig is acted slightly better then her, but he's very one-dimensional, sadly he plays in a lot of scenes with a work assistant, who does an acting job equally as bad as Emmaline. Nearly all the rest of the cast are equally poor. All of this would probably sink the film, but for the fact that it has a twist ending that I did not guess. The revelations in the last few 10-15 minutes of running time were good fun, and it worked for me, even if a lot of inconsistencies that came before it are never explained.

Currently not officially available on DVD or Bluray, you'll have a hard job finding a clear print of this to watch. I had to make do with a pretty poor copy. A good clean up and polish might even make this marketable again as a curiosity. But please don't believe any review that describes it as "maybe better than Psycho"!

An exciting page in the Gothic's textbook

[Cristi_Ciopron · 9/10 · 16 March 2010]

TRAUMA (1962), a quite exquisite and scary Gothic thriller, is as good as some claim; it is one of those almost secret jewels of the genre cinema, a true lesson of craft. The main ingredients of the Gothic (insanity, sexuality, architecture, family secrets) are intelligently used in a shocker directed with good sense.

The sexual overtones will, I presume, win the audiences' hearts. And in a couple of scenes there's quite a lot of see—through, which kind of places TRAUMA not so far from the genuine _sexploitation. Scary, sharp, intelligent, ably paced, played with grit and gusto, TRAUMA shows how a shocker made on a tiny budget can successfully avoid the ridiculousness and camp.

The few resemblances with Argento's TRAUMA are that both flicks are Gothic, both have a young woman in the lead, both, as the title promises, speak about psychic damage, both use some sexuality to conquer the viewers' hearts …. All these resemblances derive naturally from the common subject—when you write about a trauma, it befits a shocker to make it a psychic trauma, hence make the traumatized a woman, young to seem both appealing and vulnerable, therefore conjure her sexuality, and all these describe pretty accurately the Gothic's gist.

On the other hand, the differences with a 18th century Gothic novel are obvious; in aesthetic terms now, the well—made Gothic flicks, like TRAUMA, like DEMENTIA 13, seem a lot more commonsensical than the regular old Gothic novel with its exaggerations and brouhaha and useless accessories.

Historically speaking, the Gothic revival in the cinema doesn't prove the imperishable nature of the original, 18th—19th centuries literary Gothic, but, on the contrary, the fact that everything unnecessary and superfluous and exaggerated was naturally discarded.

You don't find the past.. The past finds you

[sol-kay · 8/10 · 10 October 2004]

***SPOILERS*** Very well thought out murder/mystery that covers some six years from the time that Emmaline Garrison, Lorri Richards, suffered through.This due to the trauma of seeing her Aunt Hellen, Lynn Bari, murdered by having her forced down under to drown in her swimming pool at the Garrison Estate by an unknown killer. Emmaline also had to identify the body of her friend Lily earlier that evening, who was also murdered, at the Oakmont County Morgue. This caused her to lose her memory of not only what happened to her that terrible night but of her life, fifteen years, up to the time that those events happened.

Now six years later Emmaline 21 and married to her Aunt Hellen's former lover Warren Clyner, John Conte, and after extensive treatment for the trauma that she suffered because of that incident is back at the Garrison Estate to start a new life, since she forgot her old one, as young Mrs. Clyner.

Despite it's many sub-plots and red herrings "Trauma" does not let it's viewers down and the movies ending more then ties all the loose ends together to make the very complicated story plausible. You even learn a bit about architecture in the film due to one of it's characters Craig Schoonover, David Garner, who's an architect himself. Craig spots an important clue, by comparing an old blueprint of the Garrison Estate to a recent painting of it by Emmaline to what was the reason for the murders there some six years ago. There's also a sub-plot about a major financial swindle by Emmaline's husband Warren and the real reason for him marrying her that in a way runs interference to what the reason is for the murder of Lily and Aunt Hellen. Saying as much as I can without giving away significant plot-lines and clues to the suspenseful and shocking ending to the movie thats well worth the 93 minutes of your time watching this solid suspense thriller.

Made two years after the Alfred Hitchcock classic "Psycho" I really think that "Trauma" is a much better movie even though it's almost totally unknown to the movie going public today as well as back in 1962 when it was released. Unlike in "Psycho" the movie didn't have to have at the end a more or less five minute monologue explaining to the audience about the reasons of what was happening in it, "Trauma" did a very good job in the last five minutes of it's story explaining, without the help of an inserted teacher-like commentary, what were the reasons for Lily's and Aunt Hellen's murders as well as what lead up to them.