Category: Name That Trauma!

Hi Kindertrauma. I'm going crazy trying to remember a movie I saw in the NYC area on local tv in the late 70s. The movie itself is in color and made in the 70s as well. All I can remember is the end. Two possible escaped prisoners in a foreign land (one wounded) slowly make their way down a wooded/jungle road evading recapture from their captors. The movie cuts to friends/family en route to the rendezvous as well. Anyway, a military helicopter lands, soldiers get out and exchange fire with the military captors, but have to leave. The firepower is too much. The movie ends on the beaten faces of the prisoners helplessly watching as their escape flies away, on a freeze frame no less. This is the LAST movie in my mind I'm trying to track down. ANY help is appreciated.

Thanks, George H.

Hi there Kindertrauma,

I'm looking for a movie about a guy who is locked up in an apartment (could also be a hotel). The apartment is filled with women, and the man must run and hide from these women for some reason. I believe it's a movie from the seventies. It could also be that the movie is French.

Does anybody have any idea what movie I'm searching after?

Friendly greetings from Belgium,

SteelJaw

Greetings uncle Lancifer I have two movies I can't think of the title right now. I could do with some help.

1. This one premiered on Chiller it is about a group of people that got stuck in an open house, and can't leave it. All I can recall is one scene with a box you pressed that said hello welcome to blah blah blah take a look around. They also try to drive away from the property to always come back to it.

2. Also premiered on Chiller, it is a holiday horror film, where they are taking a shortcut to a relatives house and they die one by one, and there is a black car that keeps passing or following them.

3. Another horror film that has this trap door like thing in a basement that is shallow and one person dies by being pulled into/crushed into it. I for the life of me can't think of the name of it.

Many thanks, invader.

Hi..

You guys have helped me out twice in the past, and I'm back for my third request. Here is what I saw that scarred my brain forever.

I was probably 7 or 8 years old, so this would've been in the early 70s. And I believe I was at a drive-in with my parents. There was a coming attraction playing before the movie, and one image from that trailer burned into my mind. It was a toy robot – the old fashioned metal toy robots that every little boy owned decades ago. The toy robot was walking, when suddenly something injured it (my memory is fuzzy when it comes to what type of injury the robot sustained). Anyway, the robot fell over – dying – and from a gaping wound in its metal belly, GUTS STARTED TO SPILL OUT! Holy crap, we're talking bloody, red, gory GUTS! The robot had actual intestines!

Any ideas? Besides that one freaky image, the memory is very murky. But I'm about 98% sure that I didn't dream this. This film is out there somewhere.

Thanks!

The mid-1980s was a gangbusters era for Trauma, what with the rise of mom-n-pop video-rental shops that knew better than to enforce strict policies about horror-movie rentals. But in addition to that, such places often had third-hand cassettes that Blockbuster woulda been ashamed to shelve. I am on a quest to turn up one such bomb. Keywords: foreign, gory, hypodermic needles, coffin, surprise ending.

Okay, here's the expanded version: back about 1985, the local hole-in-the-wall video shop got a reputation for renting out "Headless Eyes" to kids under 18, and you were guaranteed some gossip at school if you were known to have watched it and thrown up…or watched it and NOT thrown up. Celebrity in high school is like that, remember? Anyway, some friends and I were determined to get in on that action, but of course the Friday we went looking for it, the tape was already out. Eh whatever, we settled on a box that looked to be of similar caliber. I really should have written down the name.

For starters, it was foreign. Italian or Spanish, and I don't think the cassette we got was dubbed into English. Big deal, we weren't watching for plot subtleties after all – this was supposed to be a test of our fortitude! And boy-howdy was it ever – it was like watching paint dry on a rainy day. Until the very end. And I mean the very, VERY end…the last second and a half of the film. See if you can guess how it ended.

From what we could piece together, the story was set in a villa/castle owned by some Dr. Jekyll-wannabe with a plan for an immortality serum or maybe just a process that would turn people into gorillas or something. That was this film's claim to gory fame: it involved close-up shots of venous injections and blood spurting from incisions, supposedly "TAKEN FROM REAL-LIFE FOOTAGE". This might have been quite traumatizing if the whole film didn't look as though it had been filmed with the proverbial 16mm potato.

Anyway, the mad doctor's plans come to naught and the film ends with him probably dead and his lovely young wife also a casualty of his attempts to meddle with Mad Biology. Her coffin is on a table and some guests/servants are mulling over how it's gonna be a pain in the butt to bury her as the camera slowly zooms in on the coffin. The conversation drags on as the camera zooms and the focus-puller just barely manages to earn his day's wage. Can you see where this is going? Off in the distance a telegraph can be heard….

BOOM! Coffin lid flies off and the bride flails about wild-eyed, revealing fangs or some such as the screen freeze-frames and the credits roll. SORRY KIDS, NO REFUNDS! BE KIND AND REWIND! Well obviously I'm not crazy about the prospect of sitting through that whole mess again, but I sure as heck would love to spring that finale on the guys again after all these years. I have little doubt they remember it – it was our own collective Ralphie-Parker-Ovaltine-Decoder-Ring moment. Not the usual kinda Trauma but more the end of innocence kind.

Again, it wasn't a super-rare tape or this little shop wouldn't have had a copy. It was definitely European and had the grainy look of a 1970s cheapie. I keep thinking it must have had a pretty good title coz I believe we just picked it on the basis of whatever was on the front of the case. Of course, it couldn't have been as good as "Headless Eyes", coz we knew we were settling for second-best at best.

Hi Unk,

Longtime reader here, I love your site. It always brightens my day to read through all of the writing here.

I have a pair of film images that have been rattling around in my skull for close to forty years, and it's now driving me crazy that I can't figure out where they come from. I need help! Both of these scenes / images are from what I believe to be 1950s/early 1960s science fiction films, which I caught on some far-flung UHF channel.

The first scene is of a group of astronauts / explorers making their way through a mist-covered swamp on some hostile planet. At one point, they spot what appears to be an oversized, basketball-sized spider which proceeds to leap onto one of the men's heads, killing him. I think they end up blasting it with a laser gun or something.

The other movie I am trying to place has a scene where a group of men (scientists?) are standing in front of some sort of alien hedgerow or wall. One of the men sticks his arm through the hedge/wall, screams, and then pulls it back out, his arm now completely frozen or turned to stone or something similarly horrible.

Can anyone tell me what movies these are from?

Thanks!

Hello,

I just stumbled across your site while researching "One Step Beyond's" "Reunion" episode and after reading your manifesto, it occurred to me that perhaps you could answer a question that's bugged me for years. I remember as a small boy of seven of eight years old in 1972, I was living with my mother in my grandparents creepy old house on Ursulines Avenue in New Orleans. I saw an old black and white film which featured two really horrifying little men. They were either dolls or undead midgets. They would do their master's bidding by stabbing their victims with long spike/needle-like daggers. I remember the little men would shrink back in horror from a crucifix, or anything that reminded them of the fact that they could never receive salvation. The master very nonchalantly informed onlookers of the little men's fear.

I've never been able to find anything remotely about this film.

Can you help,

Gil

New Orleans, La.

Greetings Kindertrauma:

Was wondering if you could help, or if anyone out there might be able to shed some light on a snippet of a film that I saw on Channel 13 (Tri-State Area, some sort of TV special I think – not positive) ? Here's my only recollection particulars:

There was this TV special on channel 13, with a guy who looked like Peter Frampton/Roger Daltrey – type who got executed at the end of the movie, on like this white and black checkered firing squad patio. It was some British type show. Any info or thoughts would be awesome….????

Thanks/Cheerio-

Chris D.

Howdy Kindertrauma!

I've solved all of my childhood mystery movie memories — save one — and it's perplexed me for years! Here is what I can recall:

The scene takes place in a bar/restaurant. Some people are sitting around a table, and there may be some sort of aquariums (?) in the background. A man or men walk up to their table and it's a little tense. What really scared me, though, is what was on the table. There was some sort of centerpiece that frightened my young eyes. I'm not sure it was meant to be scary, but it was to me and has remained the centerpiece of this movie mystery memory for over 45 years. I'm not sure if it was a movie or TV show, but I know I saw it on TV, not in a theater.

I would've see this sometime between 1969 and 1971, when I was 4-6 years old. Thank you for any help you can give me! It's been a looong, frustrating trip trying to solve this one.

Brian

P.S. There is an early 70's anthology that has vampires in a restaurant, but that's not it.

One of my early traumas comes from a snippet of a movie I don't know the name of. My cousin was watching this movie one day and I walked in and caught a scene that's stayed with me ever since (I was in my single digits I think). There was a man surrounded by a lot of tubes or pipes or something. He screamed, then the movie cut to a scene in a sterile white prison cafeteria. All of a sudden a bunch of blood and guts comes falling through the ceiling. That's when I noped out of the room, so I never caught what the movie was. Can you help me? I'd really appreciate it.