Grito silencioso

For a film as cliche ridden as Silent Scream, it's a minor miracle that it came out as enjoyable and fun as it did. The story is well-worn and only slightly remixed for the late 70's/early 80's slasher craze. A young college student finds herself without housing, so she finds a room for rent at a spooky beachside home operated by a repressed young man and his nearly mute mother. Pretty soon, the bodies are piling up and family secrets are flying out of closets left and right.

Only a useless cop subplot (featuring Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schrieber) kills the pacing here and there and feels extraneous. The cast happens to be a likable, agreeable bunch with the charming and spunky Rebecca Balding leading. Veterans Yvonne DeCarlo and Barbara Steele show up to add some class to the seedy proceedings and it works. Silent Scream feels like a cut above most of the early slasher glut due to an emphasis on suspense, mood, and interesting characters.

Four college-bound students arrive too late for on-campus housing and are then forced to rent rooms in the creepy old hilltop mansion inhabited by a weird family hiding a dark and disturbing secret. Yvonne De Carlo is the mysterious matriarch who always stays upstairs and always seems to be guarding the attic, and Brad Rearden is her strange son. Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schreiber are detectives called in to investigate when a brutal murder occurs at the eerie place. There's also a nice role for sixties scream queen Barbara Steele. I"ll admit, before I actually saw the film I thought, considering the release date and R rating, that this was just going to be another one of those bloody teen slasher flicks. I couldn't have been more wrong! There actually is a plot, a surprisingly low body count, and even the few characters that do get knocked off are appealing in their own strange way, so you can't help but care what happens to these people. And above all, there is some terrific suspense sequences. It usually takes alot to get my adrenaline running, but at some points in the film, I literally jumped out of my seat! Any horror movie that can do this for me is truly something special. It appears to have been made on a small budget, but the cast handles it all so professionally that it hardly matters. Indeed, there are some real professionals involved, including horror mavens Barbara Steele and Yvonne DeCarlo. Unfortunately, it's a tough movie to find and not likely to be sitting on the shelf of your local retail/rental store, but it's well worth the extra effort.

A cloying atmosphere. A large, wooden mansion close to the beach. A camera prowling the hallways. An arm grabbed in a crawlspace. Barbara Steele. The strange, bespecled son who puts on an old army uniform and stays in his room. The mother we rarely see. The grim tone.

I recall these fleeting aspects of "Silent Scream" and I recall the trailer featuring the arm grabbed.

The film is not very bloody and not a lot happens, but director Denny Harris chooses to focus on the dysfunctional family who rent rooms to college students. One of them, Rebecca Balding, a strong, no-nonsense actress, cottons on to what's happening and starts to investigate.

Although the film was inspired by Halloween, it plays more like "Psycho" or "Terror House" and benefits from its downbeat look and score.

This really wasn't a bad film at all. For me personally, what really kills a lot of these types of movies or at least brings them down quite a bit is the poor acting.

I mean, this is 1979, in my lowly and wretched opinion Not the very best time for films and especially for realistic or believable acting. But, the director/writers did a good job here with the story and dialog.

And, seriously... Take about 80% of all the Slashers of the 1980's and how many of them have anything even Close to good acting. Normally, they are full of paper thin stereotypes, usually completely unrelatable and not realistic whatsoever.

So, that alone to me sets this film above most later Slashers. I was quite surprised that these characters did indeed come across as real people and their interactions and dialog weren't just some superficial, 'Hip' nonsense, but interchanges that the audience could actually buy into. Overall, I feel this is quite rare in these types of low budget Horror movies, especially Slasher films.

Apart from the above average acting (and remember, most of these people other than a couple of known supporting actors like Cameron Mitchell and the rather odd choice of Avery Schreiber, were relatively unknown) the story sets a pretty good tone and mystery about what is going on.

The plot isn't terribly deep or complicated, but with the good cinematography, nice locals, and decent writing and directing, I thought it was a good, slightly above average Slasher, especially for such an early one.

If you enjoy watching commentaries, it is a fun listen with both writers and the lead actress.

So, nothing that's going to rock your world or change your viewpoint on life, but a relatively fun and engaging early Slasher that you might enjoy if you like films like this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ My Particular Way of Rating:

5 - Flawed, but perhaps with a little entertainment value here and there for some.

6. A decently passable story maybe worth a watch.

7. A solid film, well made, effective, and entertaining.

And, obviously, you can probably figure out what above and below these would mean... : )

Let it begin. Post-Halloween slashers are in force. But this just made it in before the major onslaught, and admirably it's a above par entry. Actually it probably has more common with "Psycho" , and touch of "Black Christmas", than most brain-dead slashers. The one-note story is quite typical and fairly bare on building much in the way of sub-plots, but it's the dreary, underlining atmosphere that smothers the gloomy seaside mansion and invokes a real unsteadiness of slow-burn tension. Even the performances lend well, and the central outlook on a dysfunctional family (who rent out spare rooms in their mansion to students) grows incredibly eerie. A silently steely Barbara Steele is memorably striking in her support role, while Rebecca Balding is competently fine as the main heroine. Cameron Mitchell and Yvonne De Carlo also show up. There's a subtle stylishness to Denny Harris' direction in many effective sequences, where obviously his less concerned about a body count and ghastly shocks. The feel is more like an old-fashioned Gothic-tale, with psychotic-drama currents. A problem though, would that there happened to be many flat (or dead-air) moments. Dead silence, and believable actions aplenty. It's low-budget shows, and minimal scope gives the film a tight, dank and creaky vibe that works. Even the vast, forlorn coastal location choices, and shadowy, cob-web house-bound settings are nailed down to perfection. Roger Kellaway's hysterically sombre music score had that familiar sound to it, but Michael D. Murphy & David Shore's murkily prying cinematography really sneaks up onto the viewer. Even within the empty passages, it still emit's a spine-tingling ambiance and workably solid performances by the cast.