[Thanks Grokenstein!]
Author: aunt john
Traumafessions :: Reader Brayden on Trick or Treats
The one film that scared me was a film by GARY GRAVER(1982's TRICK OR TREATS). I saw my dad watching it in the family room and I wanted to watch it. He told me okay. And it was all fine until the crazy man started chasing after the babysitter. That seriously traumatized me and I had always pictured the murderer outside my window. And that is why I avoided slashers for a bit of time.
Traumafessions :: Reader David on Pepsi's "Sucked In" Ad
Just wanted to say, I adore your site. Anyway, my personal childhood trauma occurred in 1995 (I was 6-years-old then) during the Superbowl. I'm there with my family, eating some chips, enjoying the game and commercials, until I saw something that screwed me up but good—Pepsi's 1995 "Sucked In" commercial.
It's the one where the kid (wearing a sailor hat, no less) is slurping his Pepsi on the beach. He's slurping and slurping, and finally overdoes it and gets sucked into the bottle from his straw, leaving him trapped inside.
Alone.
I was scared to watch another commercial for the next two or three years, and although I'm a huge horror fan now, I refuse to give that commercial another viewing.
Name That Trauma :: Reader Bigwig on Gorilla Genetics
This one has been plaguing me, and comes from when I was older. It stays with me to this day.
The plot is something like this. A geneticist mixes human sperm (his) in the mix and impregnates a captive laboratory gorilla. The result is a gorilla-boy, who, through some long sort of process, the doctor manages to hide its origins. As he is being nursed, the Gorilla boy has this really weird whimper cry. I think the Gorilla-boy eventually loses his body hair, and the doctor has his vocal cords fixed, and pawns him off as an orphan that he's taking care of. He has all kinds of hardships trying to fit in, but is still regarded (and looks) more-or-less like a human boy.
The Mad Doctor (and I do need to point out that this wasn't a sci-fi movie as you may expect…it was much more like a melodrama) is proud of his accomplishments…however Gorilla-boy, now Gorilla-teen, senses something's not right, as he yearns for the jungle, and can climb trees with reckless abandon. He also falls in love with the Scientist's teenage daughter. In the end, he finds the Mad Scientist's notes, and overwrought, goes to confront/meet his mother, the captive gorilla….who seems to notice him for a few seconds, stroke his face….and then beats him to death!
Here's the clincher, the Mad Doctor takes in relative stride the death of Gorilla-Teen, but months later, his daughter (who was pregnant) gives birth to a baby off screen at the hospital. The Mad Doctor is satisified….until the baby does the whimper-cry! The movie ends with a freeze-frame of the Mad Doctor's eyes bugging out as he realizes the implications….
I have no idea the movie name, or anyone in it. I'm convinced it was English. The last freeze-frame of the movie, if ever shown to me, would probably induce cardiac arrest.
AUNTIE SEZ: Readers, I am not monkeying around when I say I have no idea what this movie is, and… it's driving me bananas! Please leave your tips in the comments or email them to us at kindertrauma@gmail.com.
The Stuff
 Confession time: Your Aunt John has a major thing for the genius that is director LARRY COHEN. Sure, from a technical perspective his movies aren't necessarily the prettiest to look at (IT'S ALIVE), and yeah, his special effects are typically more, ummm, "special" than effective, but sweet baby Jesus, that man is not only an astute observer of popular culture, but also a brilliant satirist to boot!
Case in point, 1985's THE STUFF.
Like most readers in my age demographic, I originally caught this gem on basic cable the same year a TCBY yogurt set up camp in a neighboring town's strip mall and became THE frozen desert palace du jour (coincidence or conspiracy?).
On the surface, THE STUFF centers on an over-marketed frozen dessert (Is it ice cream? Is it frozen yogurt? Is it, gasp, tofutti?) that becomes a must-have for mindless American consumers along the lines of Swatch Watches and Coca-Cola clothing. Enter MICHAEL MORIARTY (in one of the worst hair-pieces ever!) as David ‘Mo' Rutherford, an industrial saboteur with a silly Southern drawl hired to find out the secret ingredient of the titular "Stuff" by some rival company. He quickly recruits the brainy and beautiful marketing wunderkind behind the successful Stuff advertising campaign (ANDREA MARCOVICCI), a little boy with hypnotically blue eyes (JASON BLOOM), and a deposed cookie entrepreneur (GARRETT MORRIS as "Chocolate Chip Charlie") to ascertain the specifics of said recipe.
If you try to watch THE STUFF as a head-on horror flick, the cheesy zombie-inducing effects caused by mass "Stuff" consumption will surely disappoint you. It's straight up ridiculous, and the shoestring effects budget really doesn't help matters. However, if you focus solely on "The Stuff" advertisements sprinkled throughout the movie, you will see the aforementioned COHEN genius. He lampoons advertisers over reliance on supposedly sexy models, "urban" dance troupes, Broadway actresses, and ‘80s octogenarian ad queen CLARA PELLER.
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Did you catch kinder-heartthrob ABE VIGODA in the above ad? Like I said, COHEN is a genius! Repeat viewings of THE STUFF was enough to keep my family away from TCBY and on the Carvel path. Long live COOKIE PUSS and his (her?) non-zombifying side effects!
Name That Trauma :: Reader Maritsa on a Boarding House Franken-Mom
I have a question maybe someone can help me with. In the early eighties I remember watching a slasher film where a man lived in a boarding house with his domineering mother. She would tell him that he needed to find himself a girl just like mother. He was killing the girls that would move into the boarding house. Using their body parts, he created a woman that looked like his mom. Then he locked his mother up with the body and told her to teach it to love him just like she did. Does it ring a bell? I can't seem to remember the title of the movie.
Unk Sez: How about it kids, anybody know this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments or email us kindertrauma@gmail.com if you do!
Traumafessions :: Reader Jen on Welcome to Pooh Corner
WELCOME TO POOH CORNER. You know, the Winnie-the-Pooh live action people-in-suits show? They had this government sponsored special called "Say No to Strangers," which I would rent from our local video store time and time again, because I was horror struck…oh yes, it's on YouTube.
Born Innocent
After 14-year-old Chris Parker (LINDA BLAIR) runs away from home just one too many times, her parents decide to teach her, and in essence everyone who has ever sat through BORN INNOCENT, some valuable life lessons by making her a ward of the courts. Young Chris is processed by the justice system, and dispatched to a juvenile detention center where she is promptly cavity searched, deloused, and initiated into the hard-knock life of a girls' home where plenty of sexually unambiguous girls with feathered haired abound. Make no mistake though, THE FACTS OF LIFE this isn't.
Chris draws attention to herself in class by impressing the home's lone schoolteacher a.k.a. "Mom" (JOANNA MILES) with her geography prowess, and shortly thereafter ends up on the business end of a plunger handle while four tough girls hold her down in the shower. Since there's nothing like a little forced sodomy with a plunger handle to send a person's normally sunny disposition down the toilet, our tragic heroine spends the rest of the film in a downward spiral.
She returns home for a weekend visit, only to runaway again from her abusive dick Dad, and is carted back to juvie where she ends up in solitary confinement for inciting a food fight to protect her pregnant friend. The pregnant one happened to be involved in the shower rape, but this seems to be lost on both Chris and the script supervisor. After the pregnant one miscarries, Chris becomes even more bitter and eventually incites a full-scale riot after the school's house mother Mrs. Lasko (ALLYN ANN McLERIE) refuses to give her shampoo. There's an inquest into the riot, and Chris straight up lies about her involvement. The movie anticlimactically ends with Chris stomping off across the schoolyard, arm-in-arm with the other delinquents, just another child left behind by a failed rehabilitation system.
Released as made-for-T.V. movie of the week in 1974, BORN INNOCENT garnered high ratings and its shocking shower scene was cited for inspiring a real-life act of forced sodomy with a soda bottle by a group of underage girls. A subsequent legal battle based on this copy-cat crime led to the establishment of the Family Viewing Hour, and the shower scene was cut from all re-broadcasts.
Perhaps equally as criminal is the oversight of BLAIR's lightening rod performance by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Not only did she not receive an EMMY for her work, she wasn't even nominated. In the hands of a lesser contemporary, say HELEN HUNT (There, I said it. I never cared for her poor-man's JODIE FOSTER schtick and her big forehead), BORN INNOCENT would have just been a Primetime After-School Special. Whether she's carving her initials in her forearm with a heated bobby pin or slapping a schoolmarm upside the head, BLAIR lends a natural believability to the unfortunate proceedings. You really want her to escape this hell hole, and when she doesn't, you can't really fault her for becoming a charter member of the old-school bad girl's club.
Name That Trauma :: Reader LeeAnn on Fatal Water Tower Games
I remember being a kid and walking into the living room while my mother was watching a movie on television. I watched the remainder of the movie and found it very scary. It was about some kids (teenagers?) who were playing in/around a water tower, and I think one of them fell inside or got pushed inside. If I remember right, the kid ended up dying. I could be way off, but I was hoping someone would be able to tell me what movie I'm recalling.
UNK SEZ: Yikes, another day, another "Name That Trauma" stumper! I feel like I've seen this before. It kind of reminds me of THE OTHER but I think those kids where messing around in piles of hay. Wasn't there another movie where a kid fell into a silo of corn and suffocated in it? Falling into a water tower reminds me of something that might happen at the beginning of C.H.I.P.S. Gee, LeeAnn I'm not quite sure what this may be. If anyone has any ideas please dump them in to the comments section…but be very careful around the comment section edge, it's very slippery and several readers have been known to fall in, never to be heard from again!
Name That Trauma :: Reader Marcel on a Building-Dropping Bug
Reading the article with AMANDA BY NIGHT gave me chills since, for a long time, I have been searching for something that was VERY similar to the Prisoner's ROVER…
When I was a kid (in the 80s) I rented a VHS tape that at the beginning had these previews and one was like this:
In the middle of the desert a man in a suit, laying on the sand, desperately drags himself at a slow pace, like something was about to attack him (but there is nothing around!). Then a quick cut shows us a big city downtown and a horrible noise. Suddenly, in the best HARRYHAUSEN stop-animation fashion we see flying a HUGE giant mechanical bug (shaped like a fly) that gets on top of one of the skyscrapers and yanks the whole thing out with debris falling all over. Cut back to the guy in the desert, cut to the giant fly with the building hanging between her legs, cut the guy, horrible sound getting more intense, cut to the point of view of the bug flying over dunes, cut to the guy hearing the noise, the bug gets on top of him and drops the building…on him.
It was horrific. I remember rewinding it and watching it over and over again. To this day it haunts me to know what that was about.
AUNTIE SEZ: Marcel, you have us stumped! If any of you dear readers know the name of this freaky fly flick, please leave it in the comments or email it to us at kindertrauma@gmail.com.