Trauma, Dario Argento's first US production, is often cited as one of the director's weakest movies. This may be, in some part, due to the fact that he 'held back' slightly, for fear that his new American audience might not fully appreciate his more outrageous directorial touches. It may also be because Argento unwisely allowed nepotism get the better of him and unwisely cast his inexperienced daughter Asia in the lead role.
Whatever the reason, Trauma is certainly a far cry from the director's classics such as Deep Red or Tenebre, lacking the excellent camera-work (to me, the butterfly-cam felt like he was trying a tad TOO hard), precise editing, stunning soundtrack, and stylish death sequences of these earlier works.
The one factor that Argento does retain from his Italian films is a ludicrous plot; unfortunately, without the other outlandish elements to distract the viewer's attention from the dumb story, the film flounders in its own idiocy.
In Trauma, Christopher Rydell plays David Parsons, a young man who becomes involved in a deadly mystery after preventing Aura (Asia Argento), an anorexic girl who witnessed the murder of her parents (by a maniac with a hand-held decapitation machine), from committing suicide.
Dario Argento, who is often referred to as the 'Italian Hitchcock', has fun referencing both Rear Window (by having a young lad spy on the killer from his bedroom window) and also Psycho (with a shower scene that mimics certain shots from the 1960 horror classic), but on this occasion, however, the director is definitely not worthy of the comparison: he delivers a lacklustre and infuriatingly silly effort that took me three viewings to get through.
The pacing of the film is dreadful (for example, David's descent into drug addiction towards the end of the film happens in the blink of an eye), the acting is awful (Piper Laurie overacts; Asia Argento doesn't act) and even the gore FX by the usually reliable Tom Savini do not impress.
Moreover, the film is not in the least bit scary, and often elicits laughs rather than screams: in a couple of the film's daftest moment, the just-severed head of a murder victim manages to utter a few words to the hero, and, after a decapitation by an elevator, another head is seen screaming as it falls down the shaft!!
Perhaps the most disturbing moment of the whole film, in my mind, was the brief topless shot of buxom Asia: maybe it's just me with my uptight British sensibilities, but filming your own daughter with her norks out just doesn't seem right!
Whatever the reason, Trauma is certainly a far cry from the director's classics such as Deep Red or Tenebre, lacking the excellent camera-work (to me, the butterfly-cam felt like he was trying a tad TOO hard), precise editing, stunning soundtrack, and stylish death sequences of these earlier works.
The one factor that Argento does retain from his Italian films is a ludicrous plot; unfortunately, without the other outlandish elements to distract the viewer's attention from the dumb story, the film flounders in its own idiocy.
In Trauma, Christopher Rydell plays David Parsons, a young man who becomes involved in a deadly mystery after preventing Aura (Asia Argento), an anorexic girl who witnessed the murder of her parents (by a maniac with a hand-held decapitation machine), from committing suicide.
Dario Argento, who is often referred to as the 'Italian Hitchcock', has fun referencing both Rear Window (by having a young lad spy on the killer from his bedroom window) and also Psycho (with a shower scene that mimics certain shots from the 1960 horror classic), but on this occasion, however, the director is definitely not worthy of the comparison: he delivers a lacklustre and infuriatingly silly effort that took me three viewings to get through.
The pacing of the film is dreadful (for example, David's descent into drug addiction towards the end of the film happens in the blink of an eye), the acting is awful (Piper Laurie overacts; Asia Argento doesn't act) and even the gore FX by the usually reliable Tom Savini do not impress.
Moreover, the film is not in the least bit scary, and often elicits laughs rather than screams: in a couple of the film's daftest moment, the just-severed head of a murder victim manages to utter a few words to the hero, and, after a decapitation by an elevator, another head is seen screaming as it falls down the shaft!!
Perhaps the most disturbing moment of the whole film, in my mind, was the brief topless shot of buxom Asia: maybe it's just me with my uptight British sensibilities, but filming your own daughter with her norks out just doesn't seem right!