Trauma (1993)
Today's screening marked the first time I've ever
seen the "American Argento" movie, and I learned something from it.
I had always assumed that the poor acting in Argento's movies was
directly related to the absence of live sound during the recording
process. I was wrong. Trauma, his only full-length American film,
was recorded with live sound as per the standard American procedure,
but the acting is just as bad as ever. Chris Rydell did a reasonably
good job in the lead, and Brad Dourif provided a couple of good
moments in an extended cameo, but the rest of the cast was either
completely amateurish (Dario's young daughter, Asia), or gave
performances inspired by the Shatner school of acting (Piper Laurie
and Frederic Forrest). I suppose the sad fact of the matter is that
Dario simply has no idea how to get realistic performances from his
actors, either during filming or in post-production. I wonder if he
has ever re-shot a scene because an actor misread a line or
delivered the wrong interpretation. I would tend to doubt it. I
don't think he would notice. Dario seems to be so absorbed with his
camera movement that he considers the actors either part of the
background or a necessary evil.
I do have to give Asia Argento some props for this
film. She had almost no grasp of English at the time, and she couldn't act
worth beans, but nobody can say her heart
wasn't in it. She worked her ass off to get the part right.
Literally! She pulled a Christian Bale. Playing the part of an anorexic, she starved herself
for months to get the right look, according to a Dario Argento
interview on the DVD. Her legs, in particular, make her look like a
stick drawing. Have no fear, flesh lovers. Even when starved, she
still had an impressive chest!
The script isn't a lot better than the acting. It
is a classic Halloween-type slasher movie in which we follow some
sympathetic character or characters through danger while a lunatic
commits a series of murders around them, and the murders seem to be
related to them somehow. It all leads up to the final revelation
of the murderer and the motive. Unfortunately, once those
announcements have been made, several story elements no longer fit.
If the murders were committed because of the reason stipulated, then
there is no reason why the crime spree began with the random murder
of an amiable chiropractor who had absolutely nothing to do with the
plot or the killer's alleged motive in any way. Even sillier is the fact
that the investigators conclude that the murders only occur when it
is raining - which seems like an accurate hypothesis until one of
the intended victim's roommates is killed on a quiet night, and
nobody seems to notice or to question the rain theory! Of course,
those are just niggling points when you realize that the important
question is this: why does Chris Rydell decide to get involved in
investigating a serial homicide. He is an artist, a former junkie,
and is completely without any skills at self-defense. (He gets beat
up by a pharmacist. Imagine how he'd fare if he met the killer
face-to-face.)
The logic of the film gets a lot stranger than that! In fact, it
gets downright surreal. After one of the serial decapitations,
Rydell is the first person to arrive on the murder scene. He sees
the body. He sees the head. He then does what I think any of us
would do in that situation - he gets down on the floor and starts to
question the decapitated head. But that isn't even the weirdest
part. The truly odd thing is that the head answers him!
Oh, yeah, and then there is the inept editing. The
scene transitions are absolutely random. Some examples:
- Chris Rydell comes up to Brad Dourif in the
street, on a sunny day. Dourif rejects him, so Rydell walks
away. Rydell spots a cop car, which makes sense because the
cops have been just a half-step behind Rydell in the
investigation. What does not make sense is that the scene cuts
from the approaching cop car back to Dourif, and this time
he's walking at night, in the rain! The whole angle with the
cop car is dropped.
- Here is my favorite scene transition.
Rydell has just been punched by the pharmacist. He's obviously
on a busy city street and many people pass him while he lies
on the sidewalk with blurry vision. In his hazy attempts to
regain his sight, he spots a bracelet which is important to
the plot. He gets up, still in a daze, and walks in the same
direction as the woman wearing the bracelet. CUT. Next scene,
Rydell seems to be wandering aimlessly through a tree-lined
suburban neighborhood, obviously far from the busy urban
street where he collapsed. He sees a little kid. He asks the
kid if he has seen a woman wearing a black dress and a
bracelet. The kid says "no." Rydell says "are you sure?" The
kid then points to the spooky house next door - the murderer's
house! So I guess we are to assume that (1) the murderess just
happened to walk by Rydell while he was lying on the sidewalk,
and (2) she walked a great distance from there to her spooky
mansion, with Rydell somehow following, but not closely enough
to see where she was actually going (since he had to ask the
kid).
When you get right down to it, the so-called plot
and character motivations are basically as irrelevant to Argento as
the actors. He doesn't really care if it all makes sense. His "gialli"1
movies basically consist of a vaguely connected but nearly random
series of grisly murders, which eventually end at some random time.
In the process of getting to that random time, Argento presents the
murders in a highly stylized fashion, using wild camera movement,
creative visuals, graphic splatter, strange atmospheric touches
(like close ups of animals or their body parts), and odd points of view.
Argento frequently uses
various tricks to disguise the identity of the criminal while
actually showing the crimes explicitly. In this case the tricks
include:
- Showing the victims from the killer's point
of view. "Oh, hi! I thought that was you. What do you have in
that bag? No! No! Please don't!"
- Showing the killer from the point of view
of the boy next door, who peeps through the windows from house
to house, and whose angle of observation always prevents him
from seeing much above the criminal's waist.
- Showing the criminal's hands in black
gloves. (Of course, this also serves as a handy red herring in
which we viewers suspect anyone wearing black gloves until we
see the grand revelation.)
The film doesn't show much of Argento's usual
sense for music. Neither Goblin nor Ennio Morricone did the score,
and the final product sounds like folk songs rejected from an Enya
album. The only real cool thing about the film is the
murder method. The killer saws off the victims' heads with a
custom-designed band saw that draws a sharp wire tighter and tighter
around the neck until it produces the desired effect. These crimes
are committed while the victim is still alive. (And, as noted in an
example above, at least two of the heads continue consciousness even
after being removed.) Even this has its problems, because I wasn't
very impressed by Tom Savini's special gore effects. The close-ups
on the severed necks clearly reveal that we are seeing something
other than human flesh.
The good news is that the DVD restores some of the
footage which has been deleted in previous
R-rated releases. Some scenes are in English, but others are in
Italian with English sub-titles - I suppose the original English footage has
been lost. The deleted scenes do not include every one
listed
in this IMDb article.
Of the eight scenes listed in the article, numbers 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7
are still missing. According to the IMDb article, the regular
foreign print (106 minutes) plus every deleted scene (7 minutes)
would add back to 113 minutes. The DVD runs 106 minutes and the
deleted scenes run 4:33. There is about thirty to sixty seconds of
overlap between the two, so all the available DVD footage runs about
110 minutes, indicating that the total running length of the five
missing scenes must be about three minutes.
Although this film is neither very good horror not
good giallo, there is one scene in this film which is absolutely
beautiful. Rydell comes home late at night to find a note from Asia
Argento which says that she has gone to be with her mother. Since
Asia has already tried to commit suicide by drowning, and since
Rydell thinks the mother is dead, he assumes that Asia has tried to
drown herself in the pond behind his house. He then dives into the
pond and searches for her frantically, while the camera shoots in
the exact direction of the full moon, catching Rydell floundering in
the shadow of the moonlight. While Rydell continues his increasingly
desperate search, the Enya impersonator (Laura Evans) sings a
haunting song called Ruby Rain. That heartbreaking scene alone, although suited
more to a tragedy than a giallo, makes the film worth renting ...
... Well, that, and seeing Asia Argento before she started to look like she'd
been rid hard and put away wet. Despite the weight loss, she looks fresh-faced
in this film, and no tats are visible.
1 Footnote for newcomers:
I suppose I shouldn't toss around unfamiliar foreign terms like "gialli"
without an explanation. Sorry. "Giallo" is basically the Italian
equivalent of the American term "pulp fiction." "Gialli" is the
plural, roughly translatable as "pulp murder stories." The
sensationalist male-oriented pulp stories which were so popular in
the pre-TV era, filled with as much sex and violence as the law
would allow, appeared in the United States in a familiar paperback
format with lurid covers painted by Frank Frazetta and others. The
equivalent Italian stories, most typically murder mysteries, looked
similar to their American counterparts, but the covers typically had
a yellow background. Literally translated, "giallo" is just the
Italian word for yellow. When referring to films, "giallo" means the
genre of stylized, ultra-violent Italian movies inspired by the
stories in those paperbacks. Here's the
Wikipedia entry, which shows some sample covers
from the publications and references many films inspired by the
stories.
Laura Johnson
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