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Released by a company called Artsploitation, Chilean shocker Trauma is hard to label as art (a couple of time-lapse shots of a bird decomposing doesn't quite cut it), but it definitely ticks the exploitation box, delivering extreme violence and sex from start to finish.
The film opens in 1978, during the Pinochet regime, with a pre-credits scene that sets out to match A Serbian Film in terms of sheer deviancy: a teenage boy is forced by at gunpoint to have sex with his own mother, the humping continuing even after the woman has been shot in the head.
After this eye-opener, the action moves to 2011, where friends Andrea (Catalina Martin), Magdalena (Dominga Bofill), Camila (Macarena Carrere), and Julia (Ximena del Solar) - that's one straight, one bi-curious with a bad hair-do, and two lesbians with big noses - drive to a remote house for the weekend, stopping at a dodgy looking tavern for directions, where they attract the attention of the drooling locals (a textbook exploitation set-up).
Once at the house, the girls relax with a few bottles of wine and crank up the music, but their partying is interrupted by two men: Juan, the kid from the opening scene, now all grown up and more than a little disturbed (now played by Daniel Antivilo), and his equally loopy son. The demented pair submit the girls to a harrowing ordeal involving rape and brutal violence, before shooting Magdalena in the head (the exit wound making a right mess of her face). Having had their fun, the men leave and the girls call the police, who vow to arrest the reprobates.
However, when the law come to slap the cuffs on Juan and his boy, who have since kidnapped little girl Yoya (Florencia Heredia), they find themselves outsmarted, and are slaughtered in an orgy of violence (the blood really flows in this scene). As Juan and son return to their factory lair with their young captive, Andrea, Camila, Julia and wounded cop Pedro (Eduardo Paxeco) arm themselves and head off to rescue the girl and even the score.
What follows is somewhat silly - the women's willingness to risk their lives to rescue a girl they barely know, when police back-up is on the way, is rather far-fetched - but it's also gloriously over the top, the gory mayhem handled brilliantly by writer/director Lucio A. Rojas, whose film is not just sick but also technically slick, with impressive camera moves, smart editing and effective special effects (my favourite being a jaw-dropping gag in which one of the women has her mandible torn off).
As far as the sex is concerned, there's the mother and son opener, a fairly graphic lesbian scene featuring the ladies with the large beaks, and, of course, the repugnant rapes. If all that doesn't tickle your exploitation bone, then you're watching the wrong genre.
7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.
score 8/10
BA_Harrison 29 January 2019
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4614968/ |
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26-3-2021 12:05:03