Silent Rage (1982)

MARCH 10, 2020

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST, SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (FRIEND'S COLLECTION)

Almost a full ten years ago, I watched Hellbound, the Chuck Norris vs Satanists movie that stands out from his usual stuff on account of being horror adjacent. It wasn't very good, but the commenters told me I should give Silent Rage a try and, well, a decade later I have finally done that - hope those readers are still around to see what I thought! It's probably the only Norris movie I've seen since (not counting his cameo in Expendables 2), so I can't say how well it stacks against Invasion USA or Missing in Action or whatever, but I can say it's certainly better than Hellbound, not to mention a must-see for Halloween fans since the influence is more than readily apparent throughout.

And, painful as it might be to admit, it actually trumps Halloween in one tiny area: its opening tracking shot, while not overall as complicated, is actually done in one continuous take, or if there are cuts, they're hidden better (Halloween's has three cuts, one of which is pretty easy to see). The camera stays inside, but it moves in and around through various rooms and tracks multiple characters (it's not a POV like Halloween's, so we see everyone it involves) as our villain wakes up, calls his doctor, goes outside, grabs an axe, comes back, and starts attacking the people he lives with. With all the dialogue and movement, it's pretty impressive - even more so when you consider the director, Michael Miller, gave us the lifeless Class Reunion the same year. Guess he put more effort into making an actual slasher movie than he could muster for spoofing them?

That said, Miller has denied that there's any slasher influence here, claiming the film is more of his take on something like Frankenstein. He's not crazy - there are a couple of mad scientist types who use the body of the killer to try out their regeneration formula - but it's absurd to think that Halloween and its imitators weren't on his mind. The score is sting-filled (and electronic, so it's got a real Halloween II flair that's enhanced by the number of hospital-set scenes) and the tracking shots make it hard not to think about Carpenter's classic, even if you ignore that the film's villain is an murderous madman who seemingly can't be killed. Whether he likes it or not, some producer definitely envisioned "Chuck Norris fights Michael Myers" (Jason wasn't around yet) and that's how the movie came to life.

As for Norris, he's... well, he's Norris. He's never been a particularly interesting or charismatic performer, and this doesn't pose any challenge to that view. In fact you could practically remove him from the movie and it'd barely make any difference; he fights the killer early on, but it's the other cops who bring the villain down (which kicks off the plot, as he survives the shooting and is brought to the misguided doctors), and he is unaware of the resurrection until its final reel. He even disappears for a stretch as the film focuses on the trio of doctors: the two who are gung-ho for the experiment (one played by William Finley!), and the other who has more of a conscience and doesn't want any part of the experiment. Funnily enough, that "good" doctor is played by professional bad guy actor Ron Silver, as if to tell us "this is how wrong it is - even Ron Silver won't go along with it!"

Instead, Norris just kinda hangs out in the margins of the movie, waiting until the big finale where he will go toe to toe with the killer. For no other reason other than to give him something to do, we see a motorcycle punk harass him at a diner early on, prompting Norris to tell him to get out of town (why the guy opted to pick a fight with a sheriff in the first place is beyond me), so you know they'll fight later. Sure enough, a half hour later Norris and his partner (Stephen Furst) are driving along when Norris sees the guy's motorcycle parked outside a bar, and being that this is the 1980s he has no choice but to drop whatever he was doing, enter the bar, and proceed to beat the crap out of every dude inside. It's a pretty good fight scene, extraneous as it may be, but a better script would at least have him get hurt so he had a reason to go to the hospital and maybe stumble upon the experiment plot.

But no, he continues to be oblivious to it all; it's only really a coincidence that he manages to get involved in the third act. Silver's sister is Norris' girlfriend, so when Norris comes to get her for their weekend getaway she is in hysterics because the killer has just attacked Silver and his wife. From that point on he's a bit more proactive, but still - over an hour until the hero serves a plot function? It's not a surprise the screenwriter has no other produced credits. I swear it's like they added Norris into the movie the day before shooting, as you can easily see how his girlfriend might have been the protagonist in a tighter draft of the script. I suppose it's not even worth mentioning that it stretches beyond the expected 90 minute runtime for such fare, with that extra 10-12 minutes being pretty much exactly the amount of time they spend on Norris' bike gang "subplot".

Still, it's an amusing enough B-movie. Furst has some choice moments (an anecdote about how he accidentally froze his dog as a kid is pretty great), Frank Darabont regular Brian Libby as the killer is certainly imposing, and Finley is still a hoot in what counts as one of his more normal roles. And I like that the regeneration stuff is actually the point, so you can't exactly roll your eyes when the killer turns out to not be dead - of course he isn't! That's literally his thing! I also enjoyed the Texas backdrop (apparently, this was the first time Norris played a Texas lawman), which you didn't see all that much in this sort of thing. Also (spoiler for 38 year old movie ahead) Silver's body is hung on a door and I was incredibly impressed at his corpse acting, as he's not only on-screen for a while without moving (some of the other corpses in the movie blink/twitch) but the door he is hung on is opened/closed and he still manages to keep it straight! Goddamn he was good.

What say you?

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