Head Trauma

George is a troubled homeless man, returning home after 20 years. And to an empty house trashed by squatters and host to terrifying visions of violence. On a seemingly Sisyphean quest to clean up the house and earn it a reprieve from municipal demolition, George is more effective at uncluttering an old mystery.

Head Trauma is a great indie with plenty of moodiness. The alcoholic loner, George Walker could have been rendered with repellent creepiness; yet Vince Mola is superb at playing him as a sympathetic victim of horrific circumstance. The rest of the performances range with varying success.

Unfortunately - as is true of so many low-budget movies - sound design replaces any music, and it's mixed to push the visual scares. At the same time, one strains to hear the dialogue, which could have been recorded through a box of Kleenex.

The bleak cinematography is well-shot, though the visions are over-tweaked with After Effects. But no matter how much effort was put into the visual editing, we are still missing considerable back-story. And that's a serious omission given the ending.

All in all, it's worth a watch.

After a twenty year absence, drifter George Walker (Vince Mola) returns home to settle his grandmother's estate. As if awakening from a long dream, he finds his childhood home condemned and littered with the remnants of squatters.

Rue Morgue named this the best indie feature of 2006, and it received generally positive reviews. "This effective, atmospheric chiller seeps into your fear center like damp rot," says Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Oddly, the critics are contrasted by viewers, who largely called the film "boring".

Despite being a short film, I can understand why some see it as boring. This is the classic "slow burn", and it is admittedly very light on the horror. Aside from a few visions, the most traumatic thing that happens is a man returning to his home town and realizing how much everyone annoys him.

While not a bad film, it probably falls more into the drama category than the horror category, so I would not recommend it for anyone who wants the blood and guts.

Really enjoyed this film. I know it's a low budget horror film but it's one of the best I've seen in a while. Good acting, music, editing, photography and directing. There are a few scenes that the acting wasn't as strong as the rest of the film but they are short and the rest of the film makes up for it. The story is engaging for the 84 minutes. I found some of the scenes very creepy and well crafted. The ending was a surprise and I didn't see it coming but it was a nice twist. I wonder when we are going to see the director , directing bigger budget films? Hopefully soon. Gets me excited to make another film.

Director Lance Weiler and his co-writer, Brian Majeska, obviously love ghost stories. And it shows in their movie HEAD TRAUMA, because you can spot all the scenes from other popular creepy ghost stories like THE CHANGELING, THE GRUDGE, THE RING and even...GHOST STORY. But the difference between TRAUMA and any other shoestring-budgeted effort that would simply rip off those other films, is that Weiler has a strong visual sense, and a clear vision of how to tell the story in a way that makes perfect sense. He also fortunately has a pretty darn good cast to get the audience involved.

Homeless drifter George Walker (Vince Mola) finally returns to his late grandmother's house, once he learns that it has been condemned and will soon succumb to the wrecking ball. A not-too-friendly meeting takes place between George and Julian (Jamil A.C. Mangan), resulting in a bad fall for George in which he sustains the titular injury. Julian is then volunteered to help with cleaning the house by his grandmother, Ms. Thompson, (Meryl Lynn Brown), the former next-door neighbor to George's grandmother.

But what is already a difficult task is about to get a lot harder, as George, who is now staying in the house, begins to experience some pretty vivid nightmares. Haunted by visions of a sinister hooded figure, the hanging body of a dead girl and a fiery car crash, George is beginning to question his own sanity. Has something terrible happened in the house since his grandmother's death? Is someone trying to send him a message from beyond the grave? Is it the work of an antagonistic neighbor who wants to see the house destroyed? Or is George really losing his mind? HEAD TRAUMA draws you in and challenges you to answer these questions as George tries to, leading up to an ending that may either satisfy your curiosity, or present more questions to be answered, depending on your point of view.

In any case, it's a very strong effort from Weiler, and one I would definitely recommend for lovers of good, ghostly mysteries with a twist.

Head Trauma is about a man who suffers a head trauma while cleaning out his grandmother's condemned house, which results in bizarre nightmares that begin to bleed over into the waking world.

Very well-written, well-directed, and ties things up perfectly at the end. It has some thematic elements similar to the recent invasion of Japanese horror movies (in particular, a mysterious girl with black hair whose back is always to the protagonist/camera), but whereas those have all been disappointing and seem to have just latched onto a scary image without making any effort to justify it, in Head Trauma every strange and scary image actually fits into the story, and it all makes sense in the end.