A Whisper to a Scream

My review was written in July 1989 after watching the movie on Virgin Vision video cassette.

This Canadian horror film is more pretentious than most, but suspensefully tells the tale of an obsessed soundman who kills strippers.

Nadia Capone, also toplining for director Robert Bergman in the current video release "Skull: A Night of Terror", plays a dancer having trouble with her boyfriend (Silvio Oliviero), an artist who can't find work. She takes a job as a phone-sex girl, working at Michael Lebovic's nightclub.

Early on, Bergman reveasl the identity of the killer who's preying on the dancers at the club, but story gimmick has Capone increasingly suspecting (with good reason) that her nutty boyfriend is the monster. This leads to an ironic climax in which she rushes to the real killer for help against innocent Oliviero.

Bergman emphasizes topless footage of the dancers in providing exploitation content, but they are cast as performance artists rather than strippers (Gotham starlet in this field, Phoebe Legere, originally was announced as pic's co-star but does not appear).

when I saw this movie I watched it because it was by the editor of a great horror movie 'graveyard shift'(not the Stephen King one)and I was looking for a stylish erotic thriller...instead,I got this-a cheap,dull and silly movie about a guy with an obsession for a phone-up prostitute girl. The soundtrack sounds like it was done on audio cassete and the murders are crap. It features strippers,silly songs and is similar to the later (and much better)Call Me. Don't waste 96 minutes of your life by renting this.

There's a number of movies and songs that use "a whisper to a scream," why is that? Is it a quote from something?

Gabrielle we first see dressed in wings as a muse, performing for Delta, who is some sort of video artist. Owen is an announcer and soundman for a strange strip club called Sybil's Cave, and while he has one of the strippers in his loft home, he observes her and takes her for an angel. He has the stripper first making sex sounds, then making strangled noises - it's while he's strangling her because she wasn't doing it well enough that he sees Gabrielle. He lets the stripper go with an apology; this is one of the plot holes, since why this stripper doesn't later suggest the guy as a suspect when two of her co-workers are murdered is a mystery.

Gabrielle's boyfriend is a very temperamental artist named Frank, who's not meeting with much success. She takes a job at a room off the changing room of Sybil's Cave where the women do side work as phone sex operators for a service they call Whispers. The club also has a night where it is a "postmodern cabaret" (!), but we don't see that. We do see the weird strip acts, one woman dressed as a tribal African doing an African-like dance, another as a football player, another as Aprodite splashing water in a bucket.

Owen sees Gabrielle at the club, and makes a call to the sex line. For some reason she decides to imitate the voice of the Southern belle stripper on the stage at that time. He then invites the belle to his loft to record her, and kills her. He uses the recordings to add to something he calls "Canticles" which he plays in the background during his calls to Gabrielle. Again, the first stripper heard that tape, so that was another clue she had that was ignored. The video box asks "does he know that all the voices belong to Gabrielle?" Well, yes, he does from the very start.

Gabrielle doesn't make the connection between her imitating a stripper's voice and those strippers being killed right after until practically the end. She also suspects her boyfriend Frank of being the killer, but doesn't say this to the police, because she's afraid they'd shoot him on sight (?).

With Delta's help, Gabrielle realizes the killer's odd poetry on the phone is from the Song of Solomon. Quite a lot of it is quoted in the movie, by Delta, by Gabrielle, and by Owen.

None too good. People into peculiar dance scenes or mediocre thrillers might like it.