Exposé aka Trauma (1976)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) I was intrigued by Exposé’s plot summary, as it announced a writer going to a rural retreat to find inspiration and meet two beautiful women—now that’s my kind of film. Alas, what I had missed is that Exposé is a low-budget exploitation film from the mid-1970s, and as such is truly unpleasant even when it’s not spilling blood and gut on the screen: the dark cinematography creates an atmosphere of foreboding malice, and that’s before the sexual assaults, feverish paranoia and concluding murders. There’s a lot of nudity (considerably more than expected, even for porno-chic-era exploitation), but the film will make you pay dearly for it in a shower of violence and nastiness. Exposé was part of the Video Nasties list of films prosecuted for obscenity in the UK, and while I’m not a fan of censorship, reviewing the list of Exposé’s contemporaries doesn’t reveal a lot of films that I’d rescue for the trash can. (The Evil Dead, Foxy Brown, The Thing, Phantasm, Dawn of the Dead, Suspiria, yes—but the rest is an avalanche of trash.)  But anyway, back to Exposé—the buildup to the final barrage of violence is more gradual and duller than you’d expect: While the film remains an exploitation thriller, it has some pretension at being a psychological thriller. That doesn’t make it better, though—but it does give Udo Kier (in one of his earliest roles) something to do while the special effects technicians prepare the spurting blood. Still, it’s not enough: the characters aren’t likable, the settings are limited to a claustrophobic house and a nearby field where even more terrible things happen, and the point of it all is nowhere to be seen. I’m sure there’s a fun movie to be made about a writer going mad in a secluded house also occupied by two beautiful women. But this isn’t it.