kindertrauma

Month: September 2010

Name That Trauma :: Reader Brie on Infidelity in Ireland

Posted on By aunt john

It wasn't super traumatizing…but I'm trying to figure out what the crap this show was called.

Family with daughter move to Ireland?

Possibly something about trolls and they put out milk and it turns to blood?

Dad has a dream of the mother screwing someone else and the guy says, "Somebody likes to watch."

Helllllllp!

—Brie

UNK SEZ:: Brie, I think I've got this one! Sure, I've been known to miss a "Name That Trauma!" or two concerning classic movies directed by my heroes, but I'll be damned if I don't recognize a direct-to-video GREG EVIGAN movie! I'll bet you a bowl of blood that the movie you seek is 1996's SPECTRE (aka HOUSE OF THE DAMNED)!

Most dismiss this one as a stinky clunker but your Unke Lancifer actually owns a VHS copy of it! Don't judge me folks, how can I resist B.J. from B.J. AND THE BEAR and BAYWATCH's ALEXANDRA PAUL (who also starred in JOHN CARPENTER's CHRISTINE) hanging out in a haunted house in Ireland? Plus, as you can see from the trailer below this movie offers both an exploding car and a blood squirting turkey! I'm only human ya know!

Traumafessions :: Reader Toonhead on The Day After

Posted on By aunt john

Dear Uncle L. and Aunt J.,

First of all, you have created a fabulous website. I would like to nominate this site for the "Most Addictive Webpage Ever Award," and if such an award does not exist, it ought to! It is easy to tell that the folks that write in with contributions are dyed-in-the-wool film lovers. (Or possibly DIED-in-the-wool, considering the movies discussed…)

Anyway, my Kindertrauma is the one glaring omission to your movie list. I am referring to the T.V. movie, THE DAY AFTER. The movie features JASON ROBARDS, JOBETH WILLIAMS, JOHN LITHGOW, and totally eighties heartthrob STEVE GUTTENBERG.

When this was broadcast on ABC, I was in junior high school. The Powers That Be decided that all of the students at my school should watch this film so that we could hold a discussion on it in Social Studies the next day. Hey…watching a movie as homework, sounds great!

Well, not so great, after all.

Between shots of people being vaporized by the nuclear blast, a little boy being blinded, and the survivors slowly dying of radiation sickness, this was not a movie for a pre-teen with delicate sensibilities. Other scary films I had seen up to that point had caused oh, maybe a single sleepless night, but this one freaked me out for DAYS! I kept thinking about someone, somewhere, without warning, pushing a few buttons, and plunging the whole world into nuclear Armageddon. Mind you, I think if I would watch the whole movie again as an adult, it would have some Moments of Cheese. But I did pull up the clip of the nuclear strike in Kansas a short time ago, and it still gives me the shivers.

Eaten Alive (1977)

Posted on By unkle lancifer

The HOOPER posts, they just keep on a' coming! I can't blame some folks for not cuddling up to EATEN ALIVE. It's scattershot, brutally blunt and sometimes feels like it's held together with spit and crossed fingers. Like the run down hotel it takes place in, the overall structure comes off as flimsy and second hand and the walls literally wobble. Yet it's also strangely eerie and I don't know what your nightmares look like but mine don't look too far off from the random, nausea-toned whirlwind found here.

There's not much as far as plot goes, sad sacks line up to be scythed and fed to a crocodile, but genuine sense-defying horror hovers about like an impenetrable wall of humidity. Bottom of the barrel country tunes bleed together with manic music box chimes (and a chorus of wails) and even as the whole package plays with pointlessness, it's so darn expressive that you have to take a step back and gawk. EATEN ALIVE's commitment to chaos makes it a slippery fish and hard to get a handle on but as a surreal horrific mood piece, it works big time for me.

There's really no identifiable reality to cling to here for comfort. EATEN ALIVE, with its makeshift, puke-toned, sets comes off as a hellish high school stage production or a cancelled Satanic soap opera. HOOPER, having just exited the bleached bone dust bowl dimension of THE CHAINSAW MASSACRE, flipped a switch in his head and got down to experimenting with garish unnatural color and lighting, a proclivity that will come to full fruition with THE FUNHOUSE.

The film texture itself is collage-like sometimes stark and brazen, sometimes shrouded and hazy. Maybe it's just grindhouse sloppy but it jars regardless. I can't help comparing it to the mash-up, psychedelic roulette wheel visuals that ROB ZOMBIE puts to use in his films. HOOPER may have been paying a bit of an homage to horror comics with his color palette but I'm also reminded of the plethora of neon-soaked eighties music videos that EATEN ALIVE predates as well (or stranger still, ROBERT ALTMAN's FOOL FOR LOVE). The clash of "real" weathering and grit and "unreal" otherworldly color may throw some off but maybe that's the point. So much of what is going on here comes off as a slap attack on the viewer.

Speaking of the ROB-ZOB, EATEN ALIVE definitely digs dumping its ladle in hillbilly sleaze and stirring the white trash gumbo. It's not only the local yokels like the TARANTINO-quoted Buck (a young ROBERT ENGLUND whose, "I'm Buck and I like to fuck" resurfaced in KILL BILL) who come off as less than noble characters. Even TCM survivor MARILYN BURNS is difficult to relate to or rely upon completely. First of all, she's not a very good mother and second of all, I still can't for the life of me figure out why she wears a "new Jan Brady" wig at the start of the film and then discards it without ado. Her husband is bat-shit crazy for what purpose to the story I don't know and her daughter (a pre-HALLOWEEN KYLE RICHARDS) does little more than scream at the top of her lungs (not that that didn't work for BURNS in TCM).

If you want to know how much EATEN cares about your sensibilities just check out how it milks poor RICHARD's peril. I won't reveal her outcome but her safety is not the usual assumed "given" based on her child status. That's really one of EATEN ALIVE's biggest strengths, the fact that you can't trust the film or anybody in it at any time. Everybody we meet is crazy, duplicitous or falling apart in some way and weirder still, the victims all but take numbers and volunteer for their savage fates.

The crocodile is paper mache phony and the sets are about as convincing as a SID AND MARTY KROFFT production. Nobody, not MEL FERRER (who is presented as little more than an animated portrait painting) or THE ADDAMS FAMILY's CAROLYN JONES (made up for the most part like a hunch backed cartoon witch) or main loon Judd (a wild-eyed and mumbling NEVILLE BRAND) is identifiable as an authentic human. I guess these are all reasons enough for some viewers to put up their hands and decline. When presented with wild arbitrary violence such as this maybe it's instinctual for some to automatically comb for any evidence of falsehood to keep their footing and/or distance.

Perhaps it's a cop out on my part but I don't think a film like this needs to be bound by rational laws. In fact, I think its main agenda is to stick its tongue out at rationality in general. The truth is, when real horror does find its way into your life that old pal rationality is the first to yell, "Check please!" Real horror really can render everything senseless and the familiar world a false cardboard stage.

There's an intense (though relatively short-lived) chase scene within EATEN ALIVE that almost takes place on a fairy tale page with prop trees bending to impossible winds amidst swirling, machine made mists. It's a raging, Southern gothic storm and it's cheap and lovely like a plastic champagne flute. Whether you buy into the situation or not HOOPER does orchestrate a multi-layer cake of suspense with several floors of his Starlight Hotel reaching fever pitches of the grotesque simultaneously. If EATEN were a dream this is the moment of crescendo right before the sleeper wakes. No, it's not very believable at all but every dreamer knows it's quite real enough.

I love character driven psychological horror; I love expertly timed set pieces too but there is a special place in my heart for films like EATEN ALIVE that rattle and run on simple unleaded insanity. The adult me protests and throws down barriers but the primal me rolls over like a sniveling dog. I suggest watching EATEN ALIVE alone without the distracting voices of sense and reason, preferably late at night when the walls between "awake" and "asleep" grow soft and blur. I've come to see it as a blood-stained music box with a headless, spinning hillbilly ballerina inside. Sure, this is some frayed, imperfect jacked-up business and it's no TCM but when baby Leatherface has a bad dream, it just might look like EATEN ALIVE.

Traumafession/Name That Trauma :: Reader Carol McM. on Electra Woman and Dyna Girl & a Banshee Behind Bars

Posted on By aunt john

I just looked this one up recently cause it was shaken loose from my kinder memory bank by this fabulous site.

There was one episode of ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL (a 1976-‘77 SYD & MARTY KROFFT mini show that was shown in parts along with DR. SHRINKER and some other little weirdo kid shows I can't remember) where they were battling the Empress of Evil.

The part that scared me as a kid was this banshee that wandered the cavernous hideout of the Empress and lured the electrically charged ladies to a trap.

This clip shows the last third of the episode with two short scenes with the banshee. In my memory the banshee scenes took up way, way, way more of the show. In fact – in my memory – the banshee was the main bad guy and was featured throughout the whole freaking thing. In reality the banshee is shown for like 5 seconds. I didn't like that banshee.

I had another banshee related experience a year or so later. I was watching T.V. at night and some show had a guy lying on a bed in prison and a banshee slowly comes down these stairs. The guy knows it's there and starts to freak out and when it gets to the bars of the cell, I think, it just walks right through. That's all I remember of that one – and it's kinda vague. I have no idea if it was a T.V. show or movie.

Thanks again! You guys rock!

Name That Trauma :: Reader Kylee H.'s Pal on a Malevolent Mirror

Posted on By aunt john

I was discussing horror films with a friend and he remembered a movie, but no title. He said:

"I remember the main character (a woman) having flash-forward dreams of her walking out of a church pissed off with overlapping talking, a mirror that was painted over and the devil or a demon was inside, and she removes the paint and lets him out of the mirror. A guy is talking to some people on the second floor of the building – but it's not him, it's the devil/demon animating him because his head falls off and he's filled with cockroaches, and to try and kill the devil she jumps into the mirror at the end, and she's suspended in mid-air and then the flash-forward scene is the end, and it's a reporter talking."

Being a loyal fan, I told him the wonderful guys at Kindertrauma might be able to help!

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Thanks to reader Tim Tylor for realizing that this trauma comes from JOHN CARPENTER's PRINCE OF DARKNESS!

Ask Millie:: Flop Frets 9/11

Posted on By millie the typewriting psychic cat

Dear Millie,

I was born on 9/11 and now my birthday is ruined. Nobody wants to celebrate how hot I am today and it makes me want to strangle a Raggedy Ann Doll. What should I do? How am I supposed to honor the dead when I feel so crappy myself?

Signed,

Feeling lousy over priorities

Dear Flop,

Get over yourself already and change your birthday. Everybody knows you are hot and they are sick of hearing about it. We all have our personal traumas but some traumas we share together. A great way to honor the dead is to tell somebody alive how much they matter to you. Today is a perfect day to do that. Do so and don't be a chicken shit.

By the way, that "lost" contact lense that you've been ripping the house apart looking for is lodged in your belly button.

With tempered malice,

Millie

Kindertrauma Back-to-School Funhouse :: With Kindertrauma Academy Headmistress Aunt John

Posted on By aunt john

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Summer's over all y'alls, so let me be the first to personally welcome you back to another school year at the hallowed halls of Kindertrauma Academy! I trust you brought your hot air balloon emblazoned Trapper Keepers and sharpened number two pencils for what promises to be an academically challenging and rewarding experience.

Below you will find a copy of your roster, however your dear old Auntie seems to have forgotten the names of the movies from whence your schedule comes. Name the flicks in the comments and you might find yourself the randomly selected winner of a highly coveted piece of back-to-school swag!

1st Period :: Remedial Algebra

2nd Period :: Music Appreciation

3rd Period :: Gym

4th Period :: Lunch

5th Period :: Advanced Placement English

6th Period :: Art

7th Period :: College-Prep Biology

8th Period :: Geography

9th Period :: Free Period: Library Study Hall

10th Period :: After-School Yearbook Club

Lifeforce

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I caught LIFEFORCE back when it first appeared on VHS and was none too impressed with it. I've always avoided it as a positive example of TOBE HOOPER's work due to my unfavorable memory of it. Then the other night it slunk into my living room via the MGM HD channel*. It happened to be the longer cut of the movie with its original HENRY MANCINI score fully intact boasting a new transfer overseen by HOOPER himself. LIFEFORCE is loony and it careens and wobbles around like a runaway bumper car. I don't blame myself for loosing my grip and falling off of it way back when. It asks you to accept some serious absurdity particularly in the acting department but if you're game, it's astounding or, at the very least, refreshingly bizarre. Color me a convert; I see it now as an epic genre smorgasbord so damn nice I had to watch it twice. Oh boy, I dig the opening & closing theme…

*As an aside allow me a moment to gush over the MGM HD channel. Because I love it so much, it is sure to betray me soon so let me rave and ramble before the curtain falls and I'm hit with a sandbag. Recently on MGM HD I have witnessed bile like SUPERBEAST and MONSTER DOG transformed into strangely watchable train wrecks, the piss poor TENTACLES resurrected as a camp classic with a killer soundtrack and borderline faves like SQUIRM and THE BELIEVERS vividly revitalized. They showed the still stunning (to me) STILL OF THE NIGHT which has never made it to DVD and even the elusive PREDATOR pre-dater WITHOUT WARNING which never even crawled onto VHS!

Can you imagine a high-definition KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE? I admit that MGM-HD was incapable of changing my tune about CLIVE BARKER'S LORD OF ILLUSIONS, but I did end up with an appreciation for the scary DIAMANDA GALAS song that plays over its closing credits. If you don't have HD just ignore me but if you do, I need to tell you to make sure you check out this channel especially considering the VINCENT PRICE-heavy schedule they're threatening for October! Holy crap SHADOWS AND FOG is on as we speak! Try to tell me that's not a beautiful looking movie. Gush done.

Where was I? Oh yeah, LIFEFORCE is crazy! You really have to make sure you walk into this movie using the right door. If you go by the trailer's assertion that an ALIEN-like serpentine sci-fi horror flick is about to commence, you are sure to require a handkerchief for your multiple tears. LIFEFORCE I think is better off approached like a sweeping epic fantasy adventure that opens in heaven and closes in hell and along the way high fives a half dozen beloved sci-fi and horror devices and ends giving a big wet smooch to QUARTERMASS AND THE PIT.

It's not a simple movie, it does not walk a simple line and yes, it can't help coming off as semi-dopey thanks to the exaggerated earnestness of its major players. It's a weird mix and much like riding on the back of a cartoon unicorn, you simply have to lean into the turns or you'll be a miserable wreck. It's all very silly but get over it and you'll get a giant basket of candy.

Maybe if they had gone with the original title provided by the source material, COLIN WILSON's novel "SPACE VAMPIRES," folks could more easily accept this odd film's extravagantly pulpy disposition. Not that we're talking FLASH GORDON here, the learned WILSON's metaphysical take on vampirism is a deep well masquerading as a puddle.

Forget pointy fangs and blood loss, the LIFEFORCE parasites perform in such a manner as to remind me of my first ill fated marriage to the dead and buried Latino heart throb Aunt Hector. These vamps use your soul as a sippy cup and suck out your will to live. The peaceful release of merciful death is even wickedly withheld. It turns out your dehydrated corpse must then rise to perform the same atrocity to whoever is unlucky enough to get near you and then they are compelled to go do the same. Soon the world is 28 DAYS OF THE LOCUST LATER, all screaming zombie chaos. In other words, if you ever meet somebody who seems too good to be true it's probably because they are a giant bat demon spewed out of the tail of Haley's Comet… but you knew that already didn't you?

If you've ever entertained the notion that POLTERGEIST doesn't quite feel like a HOOPER movie, you've gotta check LIFEFORCE out. If I didn't know who was driving, I'm not sure who I'd accredit this divine madness to. Really, when people say a movie doesn't feel like HOOPER, don't they really mean that it doesn't resemble THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? I've said it before that TCM is a perfect storm. If it only took talent to make such a thing there'd be masterpieces growing on trees. I think it's commendable that HOOPER doesn't drag around a stagnant voice, with this jaunt he howls at the moon.

I mentioned QUARTERMASS AND THE PIT (AKA FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH) earlier. LIFEFORCE's climactic vision of the destruction of London due to alien sabotage strikes strongly as taken from the same mold. As I found myself succumbing to LIFEFORCE's fantastical grab bag of supernatural sci-fi salad I thought of the vast and necessary leap required to adore (or tolerate) HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH.

Both QUARTERMASS and HALLOWEEN 3 have a creative name in common, NIGEL KNEALE. KNEALE might rightfully tell me to blow it out of my ear but LIFEFORCE intentionally or not, bows towards him. I'd also like to out CARPENTER's semi-unofficial (the script was authored by CARPENTER pseudonym "Martin Quartermass") KNEALE tribute THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS as at least a spiritual sibling of LIFEFORCE with its metaphysical spine and its desire to peak behind the veil of the everyday and stare into a larger universal horror.

I'm rearing off topic I know. Let's talk about LIFEFORCE's cast. I would be remiss not to mention what grabbed many a viewer by the bullhorn and pulled them through this avalanche of outlandishness when it haunted eighties cable, one MATHILDA MAY. I can't say MAY is not well cast as a cold figment capable of inspiring slobbery servitude. Carrying the duel weapons of (cough!) scant dialogue and scant attire, MAY glides straight through the sometimes overstuffed laser show like a hot knife through margarine. Haters gonna hate but it's no easy feet to upstage an apocalypse. STEVE RAILSBACK needs less ham in his diet but has an overall convincing worminess that makes him ideal space babe fodder. PETER FIRTH is cotton candy clueless but the scenes of him running through London with gun drawn as zombies swarm are among my favorites in the film. You even get PATRICK STEWART speaking in tongues and forcing guys to make out with him. Do you need to know more than that? My favorite though may be FRANK FINLAY who I've never met before. Where have you been all my life FRANK? There's a scene near the end where he dismantles in front of a blood stained skyline and it's semi-jaw-droppy.

So's anyway suffice to say I now dig the LIFEFORCE. Any vague shame I might feel makes me desire this everlasting gobstopper of a film even more. B-movie invasion, vampire romance, zombie contamination, mind reading, possession, insane asylums, space ships, EGON SCHEILE paintings brought to life, near constant breaking glass and lasers blasts , all natural boobs for some, unsolicited PATRICK STEWART make out sessions for others. It's "out there" and "out there" movies are easy to rip to shreds. Personally I'm much happier getting high off of the secondary smoke that comes off the screen. Anyway, I'm chalking another one up for the HOOPER, movies don't have to be good to be great and this one (and particularly this HD edition) is infinity times better than I recall.

Name That Trauma :: Reader Trent on a Trio of Traumas

Posted on By aunt john

Hey,

I'm pretty savvy when locating little oddities from the past but here's three that I'm afraid I may never see again.

Somewhere between '83-'86 I had my first glimpse of MTV while spending the night at my grandparents house. I remember seeing this video of a neon pinkish man with a wheel in place of legs wheeling around and singing in what appeared to be the innards of of a VCR. I was transfixed by this until my deeply religious Grandmother abruptly flipped the channel.

Next, a few years later I watched a teen summer camp type movie which I could have swore stared a young MICHAEL J. FOX (IMDb says no) but there was some subplot about a disappearing kid and a weirdo/killer in the woods named Wally. I think the kid finally turned up but Wally may have actually just been a little slow but not a maniac.

Finally, in the early '90s I was ill and my mother had taken my little brother to the video store and he picked out some bargain bin-type kids fantasy flick. The film involved a kid and a likable vagrant drifter who happened to be from, or at least aware of, some fantasy realm that looked like GYMKATA meets the 'It's a Small World' ride. Extremely bizarre.

Anyhow, if any of these happen to strike a bell that would be amazing, otherwise I may have imagined them.

Thanks much,

Trent