kindertrauma

Year: 2011

Flashback (2000)

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Do you remember about a decade ago when I was working at a video store and I was in charge of the buying and I was ordering every post-SCREAM slasher revival flick that came down the pike even though most of them were beyond terrible? Neither do I, but the journal that I wrote whilst wearing a monocle says that it happened. The other night while rummaging through the furthest reaches of Netflix streaming I spotted a film from that sour time period that I actually liked. It's called FLASHBACK and it's from Germany and I recommend it with only a half dozen or so caveats. I feel it's my duty because the cover art is abominable and is sure to repel any potential advocates.

First of all, this endorsement is for slasher fans only. If you're not a slasher fan you might as well keep walking; nothing to see here. Clichés abound so your enjoyment level probably depends on how much you embrace certain tropes. Secondly, the Netflix streaming version (unlike the DVD) only presents the film dubbed and oh, what a dub it is. Personally I can get into bad dubbing. I find it sort of amusing and strange and think it can add a weird surreal cartoon tone to things. Yeah, it makes the film harder to take seriously but it adds a goofy fun element too. The dubbed version of FLASHBACK is particularly ridiculous and clumsy and may be the absolute corniest found this side of THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, but I say lean into the turns and get down with the sickness.

Let's get to some of the good stuff. I like the slick but not too slick way this film was shot and it's setting in the Austrian Alps is postcard glorious; as routine as some of the action is, the location and the novel atmosphere are worth the trip. Another big bonus is the multitude of kills which are deliciously bloody and darkly humorous in an almost HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME type of way. A sickle ala CURTAINS is deftly put to use for most of them, but an assortment of more unusual tools and devices are utilized too. The bloodshed is fierce but funny, leaning on slapstick rather than mean-spiritedness. You will also find ELKE (BARON BLOOD, LISA AND THE DEVIL) SOMMER lurking around the premises and that can only be a good thing. Dubbed or not, ELKE is ELKE.

I'm unashamed of digging the plot, which is as rickety and boiler plate as they come. A psychopath in ladies garb is murdering people. As a child, Jeanette watches her parents murdered by the killer during an URBAN LEGEND-influenced home invasion. She spends ten years in a mental hospital under close scrutiny of a psychiatrist smelling of red herring and is released to tutor French to a trio of tech savvy spoiled siblings. People get slaughtered left and right and the list of suspects is tenfold. Has the killer returned or is Jeanette bonkers? As mundane as this all may sound FLASHBACK does offer a few semi-unpredictable twists and turns. Nobody needed the bungling cops accompanied by flip musical cues in HALLOWEEN 5 and they certainly don't need them here, but they are a small price to pay to see a sickle wedged in a head and body parts flying out of a snow blower.

Perhaps some of the reason FLASHBACK is better than you'd expect is because it stemmed from an original idea from HAMMER mainstay JIMMY SANGSTER (THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE NANNY, WHO SLEW AUTIE ROO?) although it's obviously been filtered through and influenced by the aforementioned SCREAM-machine as well. Like I stated though, I enjoy this jaunt scads more than most of the other wannabes littering video shelves early last decade. It's got yummy gore, a devil may care disposition, jaw dropping scenery and ELKE SOMMER after all. I suggest slasher fans check it out and why not give it a bit of a leg up with some inebriation to boot. It won't change your world but it might change your night and as awkward as the dubbing is, like many wretched and unnecessary annoyances in life, you do get used to it. You might even end up like me and learn to love it.

Traumafessions :: Reader Count Otto Black on the Daleks

Posted on By aunt john

It all started with the Daleks. You know what a Dalek is, don't you? The amazingly long-lived British T.V. show DOCTOR WHO never quite conquered America, but I think even Americans will be familiar with the Daleks, because they're without doubt one of the scariest monsters ever invented. Hell, they're scarier than quite a few of the real ones.

According to legend, their creator, the late TERRY NATION, was in his local library when he happened to glance at the volume of The Encyclopedia Britannica labeled "DAL – LEK" and the proverbial cartoon light bulb appeared over his head. His next problem was figuring out what something as alien-sounding as a "Dalek" could possibly look like. But when he saw the pepperpots in the BBC canteen, cartoon light bulb #2 clicked on, and the rest is history and staggeringly lucrative toy-sales.

I was a nervous child. Pretty much anything concerning ghosts, monsters, or Very Bad Things generally would disturb my sleep-patterns for weeks. I even had recurring nightmares which nowadays would be identified by those excitable types with the tinfoil beanies as alien abductions, but fortunately this was back in those innocent days before Whitley Streiber explained to us that made-up space-aliens are real after all, so at least I didn't have that to worry about as well. But of course I was scared of Daleks. Every child in Britain was scared of Daleks. Well, we are talking about Nazi dustbins with voices that could grate cheese going around killing people for no particular reason, despite being armed only with an egg-whisk and a toilet-plunger, and anyone aware of this website knows that kids take that sort of stuff very seriously indeed.

And, being an imaginative sort of child, it got me thinking. So: you're four years old, and you know that a completely non-human, inorganic thing about five feet tall that looks like an everyday household object can suddenly come to life and kill you for no reason at all. Having established that your immediate environment is mercifully Dalek-free, what else do you need to worry about?

Well, for starters, there are those horrific charity-collecting boxes that you hardly ever see any more (I can't imagine why.) You know, the ones consisting of a life-size fiberglass replica of a disabled child with a disturbingly blank stare that your average zombie could take a master-class from. Of course, being made entirely from fiberglass, they're obviously rigidly immobile.

But the trouble is, they've got that cylindrical base just like a Dalek.

And we've all seen how well Daleks cope with extreme disability. Wait a minute – those boxes are thrusting a box in your face on behalf of the disabled… Do you see a connection forming here? When you're four years old and political correctness hasn't been invented yet, by God you see a connection forming…

I had nightmares about those things! I really did! They only came out at night (of course), but when they did, they invaded my house (of course.) Shiny, rigid, melancholy polio boys gliding around in absolute silence, holding out their collecting boxes for – who knew what? At that age my grasp of economics was at best vague, but even I knew that a horror of this magnitude was unlikely to be kept at bay by a four-year-old's pocket money. Luckily they had one screamingly obvious design-fault – a total inability to climb stairs. If my bedroom had been moved downstairs, or if the BBC had decided 20 years sooner that Daleks could fly, I think I might have been in a certain amount of psychiatric peril. But it wasn't and they didn't, so I had that magic staircase to protect me from those glossy lads.

Name That Trauma :: Reader Amy K. on a Bad Bear

Posted on By aunt john

kim richards

I remember seeing a movie when I was a kid, possibly from the early-to-mid '80s, and there's only one scene I remember. In it, a man finds his childhood teddy bear. He decides to do what any normal person would do, and takes a nap with said bear. While he is sleeping, the bear grows either claws or fangs (it's been a long time so I'm not sure which) and kills him.

It had quite the effect on me, even to this day. I've been trying for quite some time now to figure out what this movie is and I'm not having any luck.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!!

— Amy

kim richards

The Philadelphia Experiment

Posted on By aunt john

Once in a very great while a movie comes along that seamlessly combines top drawer acting and mind-boggling special effects while exposing a shameful military cover-up. 1984's THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT is not such a film; however it does have one card up its sleeve that trumps its inherent mediocrity and her name, my friends, is NANCY ALLEN!

Okay, NANCY naysayers, hear me out. During the tumultuous weather patterns that crippled the Eastern Seaboard last month, I found myself with plenty of sofa time and a desire to watch DePALMA's BLOW OUT. Enter the ALLEN on her one-trick hooker pony and I really thought she stunk up the joint. UNK strongly disagreed and requested that I at least watch DRESSED TO KILL before I threw NANCY out once and for all with the married-to-the-director bathwater. UNK, I gotta say, really knows best! As the working gal with the heart of gold who, with the help of a plucky teen shutterbug, turns the tables on a straight-razor wielding transvestite therapist, ALLEN secured my undying admiration and sent me on a quest to explore her full body of work.

In short, THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT is loosely based on the conspiracy theory surrounding battleship invisibility testing that allegedly took place at the tail end of World War II in the Philly Naval Shipyard. As the story goes, a naval destroyer temporarily disappeared during a top-secret, hush-hush experiment gone awry and when it reappeared, some of the crew members were stuck in the walls and the decks and, in the end, they were all driven insane by the residual effects of time travel and the government covered it up. Or something like that (if you care to go down that rabbit hole, by all means, be my guest and please go HERE.)

Perhaps realizing that a whole film devoted to time traveling seamen would not be of interest to a mainstream audience (I mean, sure that could play in the art houses, but not Middle America); the screenwriters threw in an unrequited love story between one of the time-displaced sailors (brooding slab of beef MICHAEL PARE) and an ambitious ingénue headed from Cincinnati to Los Angeles who gets carjacked when she stops to use a payphone in one of those creepy, two-mule desert towns in Nevada.

So, of course, our hopeful actress looking for her big break is played by NANCY, who gets even more props in my book for playing against type by neither being a lady of the night nor a complete monster (ala her bitchy, star-making turn in CARRIE.) You see, ALLEN, as I have finally comes to realize, has somewhat of a considerable range and THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT showcases her previously unseen empathetic and maternal sides. Whereas anyone in her right mind would probably press charges against the sailors for kidnapping and car jacking and then not show up for the hearing because she had a really big audition, ALLEN's character sees something in PARE's troubled puppy eyes. She packs a hell of a lot into the little line, "I believe that you believe it."

And since she believes in him, we the audience must too, even as he grows increasingly insufferable and more violent as the film progresses. He trashes the motel room she rents for them, never manages a simple thank you for the packs of smokes she buys for him, and nearly kills her when he subjects them to one of the hokiest high-speed car chases through an orchard ever caught on film. But that's NANCY, she cares damn it, and for that I cannot fault her for this hot mess of a movie.

Blame could be placed on director JOSEPH RAFFILL, but how can I, in good conscience, hate on the genius responsible for the Kindertraumatic Klassic MAC & ME (not to mention THE ICE PIRATES and MANNEQUIN: ON THE MOVE )? I could try to fault the special effects department for making every last time travel sequence look like it was ripped from the then cutting-edge "HBO Feature Presentation" teaser trailer, but as a kid of the late ‘70s/ early ‘80s I was raised on that and am quite the soft touch when it comes to rudimentary lighting effects. Haters hate, but back then, that sort of stuff was cool on the first go round.

Seriously though, I think the Stockholm syndrome so elegantly exhibited by ALLEN rubbed off on me. I should not recommend this film to anyone, and I won't, but I am kind of looking forward to watching its 1993 sequel THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT II. What's that you say? NANCY ain't in it… well then, never mind.

Name That Trauma :: Reader Heidi on Popped Out Peepers

Posted on By aunt john

Dear Kindertrauma,

This is a movie that keeps coming to my mind from time to time and I hope someone will recognize it. I saw it on T.V. sometime in the early-mid '90s, but I really can't remember if it was old or new movie at the time.

There's only one scene I can remember and I think it was the ending of the movie: A man is lying in bed scooping his own eyes out with a spoon. I think there was a dead woman lying next to him and he had killed her before. I don't know if I remember correctly but I think it was his eyes that somehow made him kill her. I keep running into a movie called THE HEADLESS EYES (1971) but judging by the scenes I've seen, I don't think it's the one I'm thinking of.

Maybe someone could name another movie with some eye scooping in it?

Thanks!

— Heidi

Devil (2010)

Posted on By unkle lancifer

It takes a village. My friend Fetsko may have ruined the ending of DEVIL for me, but I had it on good authority (The Mickster) that it was worth a spin anyway. Fortuitously, my generous neighbors Raj and Amanda had rented the film from my buddy Carol and allowed me to kidnap the disc overnight. I think it's ironically fitting that so many people had a hand in my finally getting to see this film on account of DEVIL gets some serious play out of urban suspicion and the fear of strangers. Oh, and it takes place in my hometown of Philadelphia too. Whoever's idea it was to show "The City of Brotherly Shoves" upside down during the opening credits is a genius. It's disorienting and sinisterly effective, not to mention splendidly thrifty.

Actually DEVIL is as economical as a coupon-clipping auntie. You got your limited setting, minimal special effects and nada on the marquee names (unless Claire's Republican boyfriend from the last season of SIX FEET UNDER and that weird lady who got canned from the first season of FACTS OF LIFE are marquee names.) We often wax nostalgic here about television movies from the seventies and there's a reason for that, with limited budgets, emphasis was placed on storytelling and characters. DEVIL behaves like a television movie and that's a compliment. It's not always entirely credible but I've got the back of any movie that moves at its own pace and doesn't desperately resort to banging on a pot with a ladle to get my attention. Kudos to this humble dumpling for making back its production budget on its first weekend in theaters, but I'm glad I caught it at home, late at night, on the couch where it belongs.

Who's afraid of M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN? I'd say, anyone who has witnessed the hilarity of THE HAPPENING. As you may know, DEVIL is the first part of a proposed trilogy from the guy. It's based on a tale from his head, though it's written by BRIAN NELSON (HARD CANDY) and directed by QUARANTINE's JOHN ERICK DOWDLE. Don't worry, it's not as silly as NIGHT's last couple tablecloth tricks but it does bare his fingerprints as it focuses on generic morality, beeline redemption and that stinky emotional residue that often results when one is a shitty driver. Claustrophobics should find it especially tense as the action involves a group of people trapped in a small space being mysteriously slaughtered one by one. As for me, I'm just happy it stars my favorite villain of all time. I mentioned DEVIL's T.V. movie nature, it's really just SATAN'S TRIANGLE on an elevator and that suits me just fine.

It's important that I don't pull a Fetsko and reveal too much more of the plot (Mickster's right, the ending really is a hoot whether you anticipate it or not.) It's enough to say that DEVIL has a lean, breath of fresh air approach when compared to much of its competition. It stirs a pot of paranoia and makes you question what you have witnessed rather than chucking rubber spiders at your head at regular intervals. I doubt it will make me cautious of elevator travel in the future but it does nice work exasperating the worry that everybody is not quite what they appear to be. There's some good performances here too, so don't be surprised if Claire's boyfriend (CHRIS MESSINA) does become a marquee name in the future. (I'm also rewarding DEVIL with an extra gold star for employing shish kabob recipient MATT CRAVEN of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME who was also in JACOB'S LADDER. I'm always glad to see that guy. ) Here's hoping the future additions to this imagined trilogy are patient enough to reach the same floor.

Kinder-Art :: Owen Allard

Posted on By unkle lancifer

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UNK SEZ: KINDERTRAUMA is proud to present the incredible artwork of OWEN ALLARD! At the age of five OWEN is making some amazing stuff and his choice of subject matter is super cool. Talent runs in the family as OWEN's pop operates the always great DINNER WITH MAX JENKE. Thanks for sharing your creations with us OWEN and keep up the good work!

Traumafessions :: Reader Grimpressions on Honeymoon Horror

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Freddy Krueger didn't really scare me the first time I watched A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET when I was about 8 years old. I saw Freddy as more of a cartoon character than anything else. Maybe it was because he could change shape and had a wicked sense of humor. Don't get me wrong, I love ROBERT ENGLUND's acting, but I found him funnier than I did scary. There was another horribly-burned mangler that traumatized me, even though I wouldn't get to see him in action for over another decade, the killer from 1982's HONEYMOON HORROR.

My parents got their first video rental membership in the late '80s from a discount drug store called Phar-Mor. They were always trying to find a bargain so we ended up shopping there a lot. Their rental section was tiny, consisting of maybe a few hundred videos, but I remember it was usually swarming with people mainly trying to snatch the new releases. I spotted an empty video sleeve which had an illustration of a couple, in their underwear, sitting on a bed, surrounded by flames, and a guy with a hatchet looming over them. I picked it up and flipped to the back to be startled by a picture of a bald man that looked like the skin on his face was burned away.

I remember it looked like he was in pain, maybe because he resembled a normal person rather than a one-liner spitting maniac like Freddy. I couldn't really tell from the taglines on the box if this guy was supposed to be bad or good, but I gathered that he was the character with the hatchet on the front. The thought of being disfigured by fire scared me more than anything. Since the couple on the cover were in their underwear, there was no way my parents would let me rent it because that insinuated a possible sex scene or nudity which was off limits. Now if the couple who was about to be slaugtered were fully-clothed, that would've been a different story. I was too afraid to watch the movie anyway. I think we ended up renting GHOST DAD that day.

Everytime we went back to Phar-Mor, I 'd scan the entire section to find HONEYMOON HORROR. I would dare myself to pick up the box and check out the back. Half the time I'd chicken out. So when I found the VHS 12 years later in a bargain bin at a video store that was switching over to only renting DVDs, I was finally ready to face the terror. The movie was a sorry excuse for a slasher and wasn't interesting at all for the first hour. I fast-forwarded to the last ten minutes to when the scarred killer busts through and shatters a kitchen door to hack some girl up with and ax. Even though the gore effects were laughable, it was worth the 7 bucks I payed for this scene and to have the video box. He then gets his guts blown out with a shot gun by, who I assume was, the girl's lover. He had also killed a couple of other people before this scene, but his face isn't revealed until the last ten minutes. The best part is, he sits up and throws a knife into a guy's back from across the room for one final kill.

I read on IMDB that Sony Home Video bought the movie from its filmmakers' for $50,000, distributed it, and it made $22,000,000 on rentals world-wide. With the images on the sleeve I can believe it. I'd be surprised if anyone who actually watched it wasn't disappointed. HONEYMOON HORROR was a nice addition to my little video nasty collection. It's since been packed away in my Mom's basement and I haven't watched it for years. It's such a terrible film that I'm not sure it's worth digging up anytime soon.

—Grimpressions