kindertrauma

Basket Case

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I first became aware of FRANK HENENLOTTER's BASKET CASE through gore photos spied in FANGORIA magazine in the early eighties. As gruesome as those images were, they still could not prepare me for the reality of finally watching BASKET on VHS. It wasn't that the film was all that tense or scary, to my young mind it was just so dang…weird. Its shoe-string budget, sleazy locations, campy dialogue and generous doses of nudity and splatter left me more perplexed than anything else. What a strange world must lie outside of suburbia!

As I grew older my tastes did not so much mature as exponentially mutate. It wasn't long before this once perceived eccentric oddity was so up my alley that it was parked in my garage. BASKET CASE is now my type of movie. It flirts around with enough body and identity issues to be read along the lines of early CRONENBERG, but there is a playful mocking attitude toward dialogue and a reverence toward life's outsiders that reminds me of early JOHN WATERS. FRANK, if you are reading this, I just compared you two of my favorite people on earth.

To those unfamiliar, BASKET CASE introduces us to Duane Bradley (KEVIN VAN HENTENRYCK) a young man with a basket filled with some serious family baggage in the form of his sibling Belial. The two were born conjoined but where Duane is "normal" in appearance to the outside world, Belial is a globby mound of flesh so off putting that professional doctors questioned his humanity. As teenagers it was decided that the two should be separated so that Duane could lead a "normal" life and Belial could….well, die in a trash can for all anybody cared. Now the two brothers are on a mission to track down those who separated them and make them pay for being insensitive jerks by ripping off their faces.

It all may be kooky and cartoony on the surface, but there is a spine of genuine tragedy holding it all together. As Duane becomes more comfortable in the world at large, discovering allies and potential romance, Belial becomes increasingly threatened and adds a few new names to the kill list. As committed as the two are to each other, Duane rightfully is tempted by his potential normalcy and Belial is rightfully loathe to lose, not only his free hamburger ticket, but also his only means of transportation. It's a co-dependent standoff of epic proportions regardless of the fact that one of its players is for the most part, a glorified hand puppet.

In a genre rife with repetitive recycling BASKET CASE is a true original. It delivers scares, it delivers chuckles and it delivers a sad little tale of a relationship jinxed by the fact that only one of the two concerned has the luxury of dreaming to break free.

Traumafessions :: Reader Smidget on Mr. Sardonicus & Co.

Posted on By aunt john

I just stumbled on this site this morning – it is SO GREAT.

I just saw DEAD OF NIGHT last evening, and that movie lead me to Kindertrauma via IMDb…so hooray!

What scared me most? A few things:

And the big one – MR. SARDONICUS. That movie scared me so much I couldn't even think about seeing it again, even now. I was about 11. We were not allowed to watch horror films, but the ones above are the ones that I somehow saw, probably at Grammie's house. MR. S. was at a friend's house the one time I was allowed to sleep over!

Thanks for having a site like this,

Smidget

Traumafessions :: Reader Jenn S. on Required Readings

Posted on By aunt john

I LOVE this site! I have already found a couple of things I forgot about, and a couple others I never knew the name of.

I have to admit though; some of the things that traumatized me most as a kid were books. Not even "scary" books. These were books that we were supposed to read for book reports and such with those little silver seals on them indicating they were depressing enough to scar us for life or something. Mind you, this was grade school.

I think the most depressing ones I read for school were:

  • MY BROTHER SAM IS DEAD
  • THE ONE-EYED CAT
  • CHILDREN OF THE DUST
  • WATERSHIP DOWN
  • And some book about an autistic kid who gets killed by a swan (I'm still afraid of swans and geese to this day)

(AUNT JOHN SEZ: Was that SUMMER OF THE SWANS?)

Seriously, why these were all on the required reading list for 3rd graders? I mean, granted, my dad was slightly sadistic, so I was reading some Kafka as a kid, but not until 5th grade.

Madonna's New Orphan!

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Yowza! Who's that borderline material girl with the preachy poppa who's causing a commotion with all her sidewalk talk? Why it's that into the groove lucky star SHANGHAI SURPRISE's Madge "This used to be my playground" Ciccone! (She of the international smash "American Life")! Don't tell me she's trying to justify her love by adopting yet another orphan! Heads up Esther, you don't know Esther! This beautiful stranger is NO angel. She may act like she's crazy for you, but don't be a gambler, this Russian dolly is a bad girl who'll open your heart with a knife and then stab you deeper and deeper and over and over! If you cherish your life, if you'd like to live to tell and die another day, we say keep it together and dump this pseudo-tyke before it's bye bye baby and the coroner is dressing YOU up in a body bag!

Traumafessions :: Reader Lex K. on Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Posted on By aunt john

Not much scares me, and for the most part horror movies have always made me feel normal. My mother didn't much like me watching them when I was young (elementary age) so I would go over to my friends' places and get my fill of stuff like THE SHINING, IT, Freddy Krueger, whatever. When I was about 7 or 8 I was bragging to my mother (who was a child psychologist) how "fun" horror movies were. She turned on the TV (we had an old console T.V. and no VCR- this was in the early ‘90s) and said something like "We'll see how brave you are." (Something like that). The movie she was about to show me was the 1978 masterpiece INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

She knew I believed in aliens and I started out brave, but as the film continued and I kept seeing people "changing" into blank automatons and chasing, screaming, after the "real" people my little kid bravado turned sour and I began to seriously clam up. By the end of the movie I was breathing heavy, a combination of the movie and what my mother was doing- as I watched she became more and more emotionless until at the end, she turned to me, my sister and my friend and said in a blank, dead tone (to me). "You look frightened. Are you frightened?"

Still being at an age where reality and fantasy overlapped, I was frightened, but as she progressed with her little "experiment" the message of the movie (that anyone you know can "change" overnight, but still "look" like the person you love) began to take root. When I finally admitted I was "a bit" frightened she turned on me, shot her finger at me and screamed like a body snatcher!

I freaked out.

My sister and friend were hardly phased, but I ran upstairs and began looking for any plant in my room I could toss. When my friend's mom came to pick her up, my mother convinced the other mom to pull the same body snatcher scream on me (except the other mom had the good sense to stop after I began hyperventilating). My mother kept this up for days, and at school I became more and more emotionless, polite and robotic until they finally dragged me to the counselor's office (I was convinced she was "one of them" too).

For months I lived honestly believing that the body snatchers were taking over and that it would only be a matter of time before everyone was taken over, so for months I acted robotic, but at night I had night terrors (the beginning of a lifelong sleep disorder). The movie alone, at that age, would have terrified me, but Mommy made the movie real.

I can watch all of the BODY SNATCHERS movies now (I haven't seen the ‘50s version but the ‘78, ‘93 and '07 versions) and I do okay, but I still get the urge, to this day, to act robotic and stiff upon viewing these films… just in case.

UNK SEZ: Wow Lex, this has got to be one of my favorite traumafessions of all time (about one of my favorite movies too!). Thank you so much for sending it in. I'm not sure that I would recommend your mother's services as a child psychologist, but I feel a certain affinity with her sick sense of humor. More than anything though, I'm impressed with your vivid imagination.

Speaking of which, I really dig the painting that you sent in to accompany your traumafession…

Folks, can you believe how awesomely kindertraumatic Lex's artwork is? We're going to try to get Lex to share some more of her paintings with us in the future, but in the meantime if any of you are interested in contacting Lex about her work, she can be reached at insatiablexphile@yahoo.ca. If you are looking for somebody to illustrate something horror related, I think this is your gal! Thanks for sharing your talent with us Lex, very impressive!!!

Unk & Mickster's Top 13 Reasons To Love Friday The 13th: The Series

Posted on By unkle lancifer

What has been my favorite part of hosting Kindertrauma? Meeting folks like Mickster. If you follow these pages at all you are probably familiar with her contributions in the field of traumafessions, her frequent comments and her undeniable prowess with horror trivia. Along with her hubby Professor Von Whiskersen, she has become a true friend.

One of the first things that I learned about our Mickster is that she is a die-hard fan of FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES. I remember seeing episodes back in the day and I remember liking them but I never followed it faithfully. Upon her advice, I decided to catch up with it on DVD because a T.V. show that is my friend's friend is my friend too.

Mickster and I now present you with our thirteen personal favorite things about the series, which will simultaneously give you the viewpoint of both a devoted fan and a wet behind the ears newbie. Our ultimate point being, you should be catching up with this classic too. Mickster, take it away…

MICKSTER's TOP SIX:


(Actor) DENIS FOREST
Frequent guest star, DENIS FOREST is one of many reasons I love FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES. He appeared in four episodes during the show's three seasons. From the moment I laid eyes on him, he made my skin crawl. In "Cupid's Quiver," he is the epitome of the sleazy stalker. In "The Brain Drain," he even makes a mentally disabled character creepy. His compulsive gambling character thinks he has found the solution to his mounting debts in "The Mephisto Ring." In "My Wife as a Dog," he portrays a divorced firefighter that wants to switch his ex-wife's life with the life of his beloved, dying dog.


JACK MARSHAK (actor CHRIS WIGGINS)
What would FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES be without Jack? Well, there wouldn't have been a show without Jack. Ryan wanted to keep the store, but Micki insisted they sell the store and its contents. After the big sale, Jack arrives and discovers the manifest. Ryan and Micki were getting ready to go back to their old lives before the revelation they had unleashed cursed objects into the world. Jack's vast knowledge of the occult and magic saved Ryan and Micki on numerous occasions. I have a soft spot for older characters that kick butt. You just don't have many of those nowadays.


TIME TRAVEL
Awesome cursed objects used for time travel makes me love the Series even more. Four episodes involved objects used for time travel: season one "The Baron's Bride," season two "Eye of Death," and season three "Hate on Your Dial" and "The Charnel Pit." My favorite of the four is season one's "The Baron's Bride." This episode has a vampire traveling back in time via a diamond broach and inspiring Bram Stoker to write Dracula. The sequences of the episode taking place in the past were filmed in black-and-white, which I think was a nice touch.


(actor) ZACK WARD ( aka A CHRISTMAS STORY's Scut Farcus )
One of my favorite episodes from season one, "Vanity's Mirror," features ZACK WARD. You may be more familiar with ZACK as Scut "Yellow Eyes" Farcus from the classic holiday film A CHRISTMAS STORY. After he falls under the spell of a cursed compact, ZACK meets his doom in a trash compactor. Ralphie, Flick, and Schwartz would have cheered Helen on as she turned Scut Farcus into a bloody stain at the bottom of a dumpster. The poor guy was trying to be a gentleman by retrieving Helen's handkerchief she purposely threw in the dumpster.


RYAN DALLION (Actor JOHN D. LEMAY)
As much as I enjoyed checking out Micki's hip styles each episode, I think I enjoyed making fun of Ryan's interesting fashion choices more. For my money, Ryan's worst fashion choices were featured in the fantastic season one episode, "Scarecrow". The cardigan and cap he sported for the majority of the episode were simply atrocious. Bad fashion choices or not, I still had a crush on him. I think there was something about him that reminded me of Duckie from PRETTY IN PINK.


(Actor) R.G. ARMSTRONG
Whenever I see R.G. ARMSTRONG it is a safe bet he is going to be a bad guy. His turn as Uncle Lewis Vendredi is no exception. During the first episode called, "The Inheritance," it appears Uncle Lewis reconsidered by deciding not to sell an evil doll to a little girl. By doing this, the Devil promptly drags him to Hell. During the rest of the series, whenever Uncle Lewis appears he is up to no good. He attempts to make his way back to earth in the season one episode, "Hellowe'en" and the season two episode, "Doorway to Hell." R. G. ARMSTRONG is the quintessential bad guy.

UNK's TOP SIX:


(actress) SARAH POLLEY
The series is off to a great start by featuring one of my favorite actresses (DAWN OF THE DEAD's SARAH POLLEY) as a young child in its very first episode. The fact that this series opener also involves a very kindertraumatic haunted doll, makes it just that much more awesome.


(actress) LESLEH DONALDSON
How happy am I to see scream queen LESLEH DONALDSON in the episode "The Great Montarro"? In the early eighties LESLEH consecutively starred in FUNERAL HOME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, DEADLY EYES and the inimitable slasher classic CURTAINS!


MICKI FOSTER (actress ROBEY)
You can not underestimate the supernatural allure of ginger goddess (LOUISE) ROBEY. For my money she may be one of the most under appreciated eighties icons of all time. Everything about her emits the neon glow of the decade of excess from her fire alarm mane to her off stage new wave rocker persona (Just check out her singing cameo in THE MONEY PIT). Wherever you are ROBEY, come back we miss you!


EVIL DWARF LADY
I'm a sucker for Halloween episodes but F13:TS's "Hellowe'en" takes the pumpkin cake by resurrecting Lewis Vendredi (the uncle responsible for the cursed antiques) and giving him an evil shape shifting dwarf lady for a sidekick. I'm officially hooked now.


CANADA
X-FILES fans need to give this show some props. FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES not only has a level headed redhead as a protagonist but like THE X-FILES, is also filmed in Canada. That might not seem like a big deal except for the fact that the great white north has a very distinctive (barren, cold) feel on the small screen. (The above image is from that outstanding WILLIAM FRUET (KILLER PARTY, FUNERAL HOME) directed first season episode "Scarecrow.") Damn, Canada's greatest export DAVID CRONENBERG even directed an episode (Between THE FLY and DEAD RINGERS no less)!


KOSHER ROMANTIC SPARKS
One of the things that used to confuse me about this show when it originally aired was the sometimes romantic interplay between the two main characters who happen to be cousins (My brothers always informed me that if I had a baby with my cousin Allison it would be born with its thumb stuck to its nose). As it turns out Micki and Ryan are only cousins by marriage, which means they can pretty much knock themselves out and not have any mutant babies. (As it turns out though, they have much more pressing concerns, what with all them cursed antiques they have to wrangle.)

REASON #13: WE BOTH SAY…

THE THEME SONG
Mickster and I agree that the theme song rules in all sorts of ways, check it out below…

Name That Trauma :: Reader Minjofu on a Halloween Book

Posted on By aunt john

I know there's only a slim chance that someone can help me with this one, but it's bugged me for years. When I was a kid I absolutely loved Halloween (still do). Because we lived in an apartment my parents would take my brother and I over to my grandparents' house to trick or treat. My uncle has also always loved Halloween, and all things morbid and creepy, so one year he brought home this book from the library to read to everyone. It was full of poems and stories that scared the crap out of me. Mostly they were about monsters eating children. I think one might have been about a Cyclops; one about a troll.

I remember the impact the book had on me, but I never found out what the name of it was, and I've asked my uncle, but it's been like 20 years and he can't remember. Like I said, I know there's an absolutely slim chance of finding out what book this was, but I'm fairly certain it was published in the ‘80s (or late ‘70s).

If anyone has any faint ideas I'd appreciate them. It'd be so awesome to find a copy of it, and see it again after all these years.

Rob Zombie's Broadcast News

Posted on By unkle lancifer

ROB ZOMBIE's HALLOWEEN remake and its sequel may leave horror fans divided, but it seems most are in agreement that MR. ZOMBIE should not be handed the reigns of a proposed retelling of the 1987 JAMES L. BROOKS rom-com classic BROADCAST NEWS. Although a dream cast including the usual ZOMBIE co-horts has been locked in place for months, an early leaked script has much of the loyal BROADCAST NEWS fanbase (who refer to themselves as "Broadbanders") up in arms…

I know it's fun. I like fun. It's just not the f*cking news.

I am beginning to repel people I'm trying to f*cking lay.

Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more f*ckable?

"It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you are the smartest person in the room."

"No, it f*cking sucks."

I would give anything if you were two people so that I could f*cking call up the one who's my friend and tell her about the one I want to f*cking screw.

I like you as much as I can like anyone who thinks I'm a mother f*cking douchebag.

There was a rhythm we got into. It made me want to purge my snork.

"What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?"

"Eat shit and die."

"I can f*cking sing while I read. I am singing and f*cking reading… both!"

"Six years from now, I'll be back here with my wife and two kids. And I'll see you, and one of my kids will say "Daddy, who is that?" And I'll say, it's not nice to point at the fat whore."

NOTE: Kindertrauma apologizes for the use of blue language in the above report (personally we prefer the term "round heel" over "whore"), but we believe it was necessary in order to bring you the most accurate representation of the key instances in which MR. ZOMBIE's script differs from that of the original. In no way should it be inferred that Kindertrauma and its affiliates condone the use of such words. Due to our strong personal convictions, we wish to also point out that this post in no way endorses a belief in the occult.