Trauma

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.

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.

***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.

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.

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"!