Category: Name That Trauma!

I'll always remember this because this is my first ever experience with HBO and these images have been forever associated with HBO in my mind. The scene I remember most in this movie is where a woman in a huge ‘80s-style, multi-colored mohawk is walking towards some people in a zombie-like trance and someone shoots her. Green blood squirts out in a huge arc as she flies through a window.

Later on in the movie there's a car chase scene where they're being chased around by a glowing ball of light (I think it's on a desert highway) and people are shooting futuristic laser-guns at it. That's all I remember.

Any ideas what it might be?

AUNT JOHN SEZ: If anyone out there has any ideas, please share them via email or in the comments.

 

 

Dear Kindertrauma:

Please help me. I found your site by accident; it reawakened horrors deep in my mind. One that still puzzles me- a T.V. show or made-for-T.V. movie (I guess). It involves a dress mannequin (without a head, armless torso, and conical bottom skirt portion) that moves. The only sound is that of a loud heartbeat. I believe there is some kid trapped in the house with this thing as it slowly moves around.

What was this?

I have spent most of my life wondering what it was.

Must have seen it in the mid-to-late seventies.

Please, please help me.

Sincerely,

Freaked

Dear Freaked:

I have no freaking idea.

Respectfully yours,

Aunt John

PS: I am confident though that one our readers will know the answer and either leave it in the comments, or email it to us.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA solved. It's the 1974 made-for-T.V. movie THE STRANGE AND DEADLY OCCURRENCES starring ROBERT STACK and VERA MILES. Special thanks to reader Propagatrix for solving this one!

Hi!  Long time lurker with a request that has plagued me my whole life:

I'm looking for a movie that I saw the tail end of back when I was a little girl, probably in the late 1970s, on network television.

I walked over to my childhood friends' house and found their older teenage brother Ritchie sitting on the couch watching a movie that he said was about to go over any minute.

I remember a scene of devastation, a never-ending field of treeless wilderness and a woman — perhaps with long dark hair and ragged peasant clothes, carrying a baby in a bundle close to her chest as she trudges across the scorched Earth. There may be bunkers… maybe even bodies littered along the countryside; something that indicated an incredible tragedy. Her silent walking while dramatic music swelled in the background made me ask Ritchie what was the movie about.

His explanation to this day is barely recalled. Although I do faintly remember something about a natural disaster, and him telling me that, "The world became very sick," and everyone died except for a very few people.

The next scene has the woman finally kneeling on the ground as if she can trudge no more, cradling her baby closer and weeping. A man approaches her — he perhaps with shoulder-length dark hair and a beard — and asks her if she is okay.

The woman looks sadly up at the man and, with a vague accent, states, "My baby… is dead."

Next scene we see is the man and the woman standing next to a grave that they had dug for the baby. Or perhaps it was a pyre to burn the infected little body. Either way I remember them standing side by side, both now silently grieving for the lost little life. And it broke my child-like heart.

I've been searching for this movie for years, but have never run across it in all my movie-watching habits. Googling movies about "plague" and the film METEOR came up that sounds as if it might have been a similar premise. But METEOR came out in 1979, which would have probably made it too late to air on television for me to see it as a child. Doing a plot search on several other disaster films from the ‘70s also came up unhelpful.

Then again it might not have been a natural disaster that caused the plague, although a part of me wants to remember that it was. I was really terrified of the whole out-of-control concept of natural disasters as a kid, and it had to have been something like that to have frightened and saddened me so much at the time.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: If anyone knows the title, please leave a comment or shoot us an email.

UPDATE: It sounds to me like reader Tychoanomaly may have hit the nail right on the head with Arch Oboler's FIVE (1951)….

I have a vague recollection of having seen a movie on T.V. many (many) years ago (early to middle 1960s) about a cruel prison warden who kept these fierce hounds as guard dogs. I recall that the prisoners were mistreated, perhaps they were political prisoners, and, at times tortured, and, perhaps, fed to the dogs. I also recall that their blood was sometimes drained, and, perhaps consumed by the warden (none of this is very clear to me and given the time, none of this would have been explicitly shown). I recall the film had a Mexican or Spanish setting, but this may be my own childish interpretation of the uniforms of the guards (I was a child, and may have misread the setting).

However, the conclusion was something that has frightened me for years, even though it was an off-screen event: the warden, fleeing from some disruption in the prison (perhaps a revolt, I cannot recall), is torn to death by his own dogs. His shrieks and the dogs' howls were quite vivid and terrifying, "blood-curdling" as goes the cliché.

Perhaps this is why I am, to this day, so wary around dogs.

UPDATE: It seems Joe D. (with assistance from Leonard Maltin) has answered his own question with 1958's BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE…

One of my co-workers has a Traumatic memory he can't place, and has promised me tee-shirts if I can figure out what it is. Help me, you Traumatized legions!

Here are his clues:

Scene 1: An Asian-looking guy is stuck in a closet or something and he can look into the room and there is a woman laying on a cot and her skin looks like she has leprosy or something. He's locked in there and there are two people trying to dig through the wall to get him out. The leper woman wakes up and comes to the door and knows he's in there, so the guy flips out and starts beating his way through the wall with his mag light. He gets through and they cover the hole.

Scene 2: The same girl with the leper skin is reaching into a glowing mirror or doorway and is pulling some kind of demon or monster into our world, dimension, or whatever. There is another girl in the room and she heroically charges the leper chick and knocks her into the portal and falls in with her. At the same instant some dude throws something on the portal and it closes. I remember the chick reaching out to get saved and that always creeped me out. The dimension where the demon/monster was like water…if that makes any sense…like the chick was floating down into water reaching out.

Not much to go on, I know, but if it were easy everyone would do it. That first clue had me thinking THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, but nothing else in it fits and my co-worker knows T.P.U.S. and swears that's not it. Hope you guys can solve this mystery, or else I'll have to do laundry.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Since the holidays are the times that we should be doing things for others, let's put on our helper hats and see if we can spare the VICAR OF VHS the indignity of doing laundry and into a free t-shirt. If anyone knows what this one is, please sound off in the comments or shoot us an e-mail.

UPDATE: It took reader EegahInc all of two minutes to recognize this one as JOHN CARPENTER's classic PRINCE OF DARKNESS!!

Hey, I got a good Name That Trauma question for you.

I remember seeing ages ago something on television in the early ‘90s that might've been a movie, a made-for-T.V. movie or an episode of some T.V. show.

I'm guessing whatever it was, it was from the early '90s as well.

Anyway all I remember is a man and woman, presumably a couple enter some sort of room that's an African Savannah (I'm guessing it was probably a virtual reality room or something) and a lion starts heading towards them to eat them, but then they find that they can't open the door to escape!

That's it, I remember it being cheesy, but for some reason the idea of both a man and a woman being eaten by a lion was quite disturbing to me.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: I'm not lion lying when I say I have no clue. Does anyone out there know this one? Feel free to leave your guesses in the comments or email them to us at kindertrauma@gmail.com.

STATUS: This one has yet to be confirmed but one thing that folks agree on is that RAY BRADBURY is most likely responsible for Griffin's trauma! (see comments section for more.)

So I have this memory of a really creepy kids series in the '80s. I don't remember much other than it creeped me out. I want to say that it aired in a block of shows with one of the other shows about kids being lost in a labyrinth through time. Maybe it was on a very early version of Nickelodeon. The series I'm thinking about centered on a couple of kids who lived near an ocean or large lake. There were strange sea creatures in the lake. For some reason I picture a lair the monsters lived in that the kids infiltrated. To escape capture I want to say they slid through a slide-like tunnel that the monsters used to get around the town. I don't think that the series was made in America. It was either Canadian, English, Australian or New Zealand. It's been driving me crazy to remember what this series was and if it is available anywhere. Sound familiar?

UNK SEZ: Chad, you're not thinking of SIGMUND AND THE SEA MONSTERS are you? Well, if that's not it then I don't know what it could be. Does this show sound familiar to anybody else out there? Let us (and Chad) know!

UPDATE: It looks like commenter seedymckenzie has found the movie! It's called UNDER THE MOUNTAIN (1982) and its from New Zealand. Good going speedy! (Please see the comments for Chad's confirmation). To be honest, it looks much, much, more traumatizing than SIGMUND!!

First off just wanted to compliment you on a fantastic site. For someone like myself who grew up during the 80's slasher heyday this site has been invaluable in sourcing out those titles from memories that are 20+ years old.

However, I have a few here that I am still having trouble with.

1) This is from the mid to late '70s I believe, possibly a TV movie. Maybe not so much a horror film, but something that has stuck in my psyche for years. A boy and a girl are on a beach with a small turtle and carve something onto it's back. Years later, the boy lives under the water or something and we see the turtle (now huge, I think) swimming by with the carved initials??? On it's shell!

2) This one was possibly part of a trilogy type story from the '80s or maybe from a TV show like RAY BRADBURY THEATRE, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, etc. but not sure. It involves groups of people who come out to the scenes of auto accidents. Don't remember much other than these groups of people all showing up when there is an accident…turns out they are all accident victims and are already dead????

3) And finally this one WAS part of a trilogy or quartet of horror stories popular back in the '80s VHS days. All I remember of this one was a guy who was performing a "Punch and Judy" type show on a beach or waterfront somewhere. I don't remember if the Punch and Judy theme was the connecting story or one of the stories itself.

Sorry to be so vague but it's all I have. Hopefully it will spark someone's memory and I can finally re-watch these and "put them to bed."

UNK SEZ: O.K. Sonny I know at least two of these three. The first one is certainly THE BERMUDA DEPTHS, a made-for-television movie from 1978. There may be more than one giant turtle movie, but only one has the initial carving scene you mentioned. The third one I'm pretty sure, is a British anthology film from 1983 called SCREAMTIME, which indeed sports a segment involving Punch and Judy puppets. The second one sounds a lot like CARNIVAL OF SOULS from 1962, but since you didn't mention it being in black and white I have my doubts. Anybody out there think they've got a clearer handle on the second one? If so leave a comment or contact us at Kindertrauma@gmail.com!! In any case Sonny, in the words of MEAT LOAF two out of three ain't bad!

NOTE: Currently you can watch THE BERMUDA DEPTHS on Youtube! The first part is below, double click the screen to get to the rest. Best to do so now, it could disappear at any time!

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.