The death of a wealthy aunt with a past leads to murder and mental anguish for her surviving heiress, a niece who as an impressionable teen witnessed the slaying. Now marries to an older man who may or may not have nefarious plans, she struggles to reside in the gorgeous country home where the memories are anything but peaceful. This psychological thriller is a common theme in movies ever since "The Cat and the Canary". Lorri Richards isn't really all that memorable as the beleaguered heroine, a role any young actress with vulnerable expressiveness could have played. She's a good screamer, though. Veteran actress Lynn Bari has gone from oomph to cough as the smokey aunt who meets a grizzly end. The best performance is John Conte as the calculating older man who keeps the audience guessing whether he's killer or kisser. Not bad for its kind (especially for being so cheap), but not really scary, either.

To enjoy "Trauma", you have to turn your brain off and just watch the film. After all, so much of the plot really makes no sense. Still, given the limitations in the script and with the budget, it's not a bad little psychological thriller.This film is unusual because the opening titles appear 15 minutes into the film! This is when Emmaline's aunt is murdered...deliberately drowned by someone whose identity is unknown through most of the film. However, and this is a dumb twist, Emmaline might know but she's got complete amnesia of this as well as her life before the murder! It's an overused and difficult to believe concept--and it's not made any easier to accept given the whole hidden mentally challenged and insane brother angle that appears later in the movie!But the folks acting in the film do a nice job, the film has a nice, tense atmosphere and the film is a decent time-passer given that you can just look past everything. Just don't think too much...otherwise it will probably be a bit of a waste of your time.

Severely limited by lack of budget, perhaps, accounts for a story with very few thrills and a very odd kind of "hep-cat" music score that only rarely appears and then usually to be distracting. It's basically a super low budget modern day JANE ERYE. But there is just almost no sense of danger to the film and though its ending isn't what you might expect it doesn't really all work out after it's over and you look back and the few things that really happened. The film is never stupid and the performances are good--seems like the lead girl deserved to make more films after this. But saying it isn't junk doesn't make it a jewel and most of what happens feels like filler, well done filler all considered, but when it's all said and done not much has really happened. It's pretty plane that the murder victim at the start is blinking right after death, but the rest of the film is gaff free but excitement free too. The lead character is just never really in any urgent danger so the mystery doesn't demand it get solved or ever feel like it's building to something awful. Various scenes cutting away from the girl's story to the architect's office deflate things more though the mild comic relief does work and the characters are believable, but so what when you know nothing threatening is anywhere nearby. There aren't many suspense of violent set pieces and those aren't very well done and end very quickly.MILD SPOILERS BELOW I mean only one person dies in the whole film and scenes with "the killer" come few and far between and about the most threatening thing the killer does is knock over a painting. They usually only show the killers hand but some of these scenes are almost comical. The whole structure of the film had you sure you know what's going on to the point of saying: "Oh come on let's get one with it." It does have a surprise in store at the end but that can't redeem the too too long a time trying to set you up for the ending.

TRAUMA (1962), a quite exquisite and scary Gothic thriller, is as good as some claim; it is one of those almost secret jewels of the genre cinema, a true lesson of craft. The main ingredients of the Gothic (insanity, sexuality, architecture, family secrets) are intelligently used in a shocker directed with good sense.The sexual overtones will, I presume, win the audiences' hearts. And in a couple of scenes there's quite a lot of see—through, which kind of places TRAUMA not so far from the genuine _sexploitation. Scary, sharp, intelligent, ably paced, played with grit and gusto, TRAUMA shows how a shocker made on a tiny budget can successfully avoid the ridiculousness and camp.The few resemblances with Argento's TRAUMA are that both flicks are Gothic, both have a young woman in the lead, both, as the title promises, speak about psychic damage, both use some sexuality to conquer the viewers' hearts …. All these resemblances derive naturally from the common subject—when you write about a trauma, it befits a shocker to make it a psychic trauma, hence make the traumatized a woman, young to seem both appealing and vulnerable, therefore conjure her sexuality, and all these describe pretty accurately the Gothic's gist.On the other hand, the differences with a 18th century Gothic novel are obvious; in aesthetic terms now, the well—made Gothic flicks, like TRAUMA, like DEMENTIA 13, seem a lot more commonsensical than the regular old Gothic novel with its exaggerations and brouhaha and useless accessories.Historically speaking, the Gothic revival in the cinema doesn't prove the imperishable nature of the original, 18th—19th centuries literary Gothic, but, on the contrary, the fact that everything unnecessary and superfluous and exaggerated was naturally discarded.