Beast in the woods: Trhauma (1980)

Trhauma (Il mistero della casa maledetta) (Italy, 1980)
Rating: **
Starring:  Gaetano Russo, Domitilla Cavazza and Roberto Posse

An awfully rare Italian 80s exploitation flick, Trhauma is an overlooked mish-mash of giallo subtexts and slasher film bodycounting. 

It opens with a boy born with a blind eye getting coaxed by his friend to climb a tree, only for the poor lad to fall on his back and left for dead by the other boy after uttering a cold remark.

Years later, we now join a group of friends and frenemies staying in a remote vacation villa for that oh-so-typical Summer fun, with one of the ladies wandering out to the nearby woods no soon after arriving to go au natural for the fun of it. Unknown to her, a disfigured loon happens to be prowling the place with murder and post-mortem rape in mind and she becomes the first of many victims to fall dead and violated by this maniac. When her friends notice she hadn't come back out of the woods since, it may be too late for them all as the crazed killer brandishes his billhook and makes his way through them in a savage killing spree. 

A killing spree, that is, apparently orchestrated by someone who hates the group enough to convince the killer to slay everyone with the payment of, I kid you not, toy building blocks...

Plot-wise, Trhauma played its giallo card with the usual suspects of suspicious character, rounds of red herrings and manic twists, only with an added stab on 80s slasher panache. Majority of the running time has us wondering who could it be bargaining the killer to murder as each characters has their own personal issues with the group, ranging from affairs to blackmail, which makes pretty much anybody in this film a suspect or an accomplice to the psycho hacking up people with a billhook. This would have been a workable pattern for a backwoods hack-a-thon and in its own cheesy way, it is, but Trhauma still has its misfires in this run by slugging down the pace of this film's 70 minute running time, made worse with its lack of interesting characters, overly misogynistic overtones and mediocre shock value.

Gore is light, like blood splashes light, and the multitudes of sleaze just overcooked the movie's exploitative nature to the point it lost its impact further down the plot. I will say, however, that the last act of the film makes up for a tad bit as we are treated with a classic cat-and-mouse chase between the killer and the last victim. Only a tad as it all abruptly ends with a pre-final credit moral telling us that God decides the fate of each man for their deeds. Which is awfully preachy for me, even as a lapsed Catholic.

"Eye" see you!

Still, I do appreciate an effort and while Trhauma is an uneven mish-mashing of American and European influences, its has this so-bad-it's-good vibe that I'm sure bad movie lovers and hardcore slasher fanatics can easily get fond of. If you have the chance to track it down and your cat is willing to be killed off with a sickle- I mean, your curiosity, expect little from this cheese pile and you might do just fine enough to love it or hate it.

Bodycount
1 cat decapitated with a sickle
1 female seen killed
1 dog strangled to death
1 female strangled to death
1 male had his neck hacked with a machete
1 male hacked to death with a billhook
1 female strangled to death
1 male found gutted
1 female hacked with a billhook offscreen
Total: 9