Un silencio de tumba

Jess Franco directs a rather lacking giallo, or at least thriller. It's a whodunnit set in a large Mediteranean villa - a setting as gialloesque as they come.

An all spanish cast and a rather simple intrigue fail to deliver anything beyond pure mediocrity however. While the plot tries to deliver some suspense, it's just not that adept of a film to succeed. There's also no classic killing setpieces, which is something this subgenre lives and thrives on. There's no sleaze either.

Instead it's a fairly slow burning thriller where people just turn up dead. In the end we get a revelation. There's nothing more to it. The Dorado Bluray, which I watched, contains a written but dismissed alternate ending. Apparently it was supposed to feature a much darker ending and I have to say the film would have been better with it.

While not exactly the consensus of popular opinion, but I actually consider, 'Un Silencio de Tumba' to be a rather magnificent, consistently enjoyable and surprisingly chaste, Jesús Franco thriller. The low-key, Agatha Christie-style pot-boiler concerns the delightfully fervid and soon to be murderous goings-on during a not-so swinging soiree held on a isolated island retreat. Maestro, Franco really delivers on the escalating tension and creepy atmospherics here; while many erroneously regard, Jess Franco as merely a hyper-psychedelic, hyperbolically-zooming, furiously febrile T & A man (and, to be fair, he might well be the best of the beast!) but he was also a highly skilled, visually savvy filmmaker, and I still genuinely feel that 'Un Silencio De Tumba' is ample proof of his refined artistic sensibilities. 'Un Silencio de Tumba' is a cracking yarn, and would most certainly be of interest to all obsessive Euro-cultists and uber-biased Franco assessors alike! Top (glory) Hole!!!! And like many other laudable, Franco efforts, this sterling mystery also boasts a tremendously effective, sweetly sexy score by, Jesús Franco and Fernando García Morcillo!

Hoping to forget a box-office disaster, an actress and her friends decide to spend the weekend hanging out, but when one of them notices a child has been kidnapped and held for ransom it causes a rash of murders to sweep the group forcing them to uncover the killer's intentions to leave the island alive.

This was a pretty solid if flawed slasher-style thriller. Among the more enjoyable elements here is the simple-enough setup that permeates plenty of intrigue for its later dispatching. Gathering everyone together at the island and trying to live out the decadence of their normal lives which infuriates the more level-headed sister enough that she secretly wishes them dead, this offers a simple scenario that offers a reasonable excuse to showcase their pettiness and social standings. By the time we get the abduction and their reaction spurring on the continuation of her psychological issues, this early setup starts the film off rather well. That becomes the main selling point for the film in the final half where it turns from the kidnapping thriller to the body-count slasher. Despite most of the scenes taking place off-screen and the group stumbling upon the body afterward, there's a fun atmosphere here as the gruesome nature of the incidents builds rather well towards the shocking finale. It comes off pretty interestingly where the revelation of the killer and their motivation is quite surprising as the back-and-forth nature of revelations against the discoveries of the other bodies is all handled quite well. These all have a lot to like with this one while there are some factors holding this one down. The main issue with this one is the general lack of action that carries on for the first half that makes for a tough time for some. All the work this does with the psychological issues about the groups' relationship with each other and the sisters' burgeoning hysteria comes at the expense of action that would pump up the excitement factor. Consisting of an endless series of melodramatic outbursts and conversations, it really highlights the dearth of activity here until the bodies start dropping around the hour-mark with very little happening before then. The other factor that holds this down is this tacked-on ending that goes on for longer than it really needs to. The emphasis on psychological explanations for the various murders and happenings is somewhat overbearing and doesn't land the way it should with that attempt at explaining everything followed by the feel-good finish. As well, there's also the rather problematic issue here with the lack of gore, sleaze or anything exploitative here since the storyline cries out for that stuff but is conspicuously absent, while all the murders being off-screen doesn't allow for bloodshed either. These aspects are what bring this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence, Language, and children-in-jeopardy.

Un silencio de tumba (1972)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Famous movie actress Annette Lamark (Glenda Allen) buys a private island and one weekend she decides to have some friends out for a party. She also invites her sister Valerie (Montserrat Prous) who has just been released from a mental hospital. Pretty soon Annette's young son is taken with a ransom note left behind demanding money. Before long people begin to turn up murdered.

UN SILENCIO DE TUMBA isn't the greatest film from director Jess Franco but for the most part it's an interesting thriller that has the filmmaker getting away from some of the trashier films that he was making around this era. The film, also known as SILENCE OF THE TOMB, doesn't feature any graphic violence, gore, sex or even any nudity so it's not your typical Franco film. The film does manage to be mildly entertaining throughout thanks in large part to Franco's direction.

At just 84-minutes the film is certainly short enough but its biggest problem is the fact that there's really not too much that happens. There's certainly a "story" being told here but unfortunately there's just not enough of it to really hold your interest throughout the running time. The first fifty-minutes are pretty much just at a stand still as the sister constantly begins to suspect countless people before we finally get to the murders. I really wish the screenplay had been a tad bit better or at least did a bit more with some of the supporting characters.

There were some impressive things here including the direction by Franco. As I said, the film certainly gets away from some of the trashier elements that were in most of his films from this era so that's refreshing. I'd also argue that the music score is one of the better from any of the director's films. I also thought Prous was quite good in her role but then again the entire cast was good and helped keep the film moving.

UN SILENCIO DE TUMBA isn't a masterpiece or even a good movie. It's certainly well-made and is worth watching if you're a fan of the director.

Franco was mostly known and (in)famous for his ultra-sleazy and semi-pornographic exploitation movies, which span over a period of five decades. What fewer people know, or even downright refuse to admit, is that he also made approximately a dozen of truly great, atmospheric, suspenseful, and well-scripted horror movies. That may not be a lot out of more than 200 films directed, but still... "The Awful Dr. Orlof", "The Diabolical Dr. Z", and "Faceless" are fantastic movies. "Faceless", "Night of the Skull", "Bloody Moon", "Sadist Baron Von Klaus", and "The Bloody Judge" are really good movies.

"Un Silencio de Tumba" is NOT a good movie, unfortunately, but at least it's entertaining, and - moreover - an effort that entirely depends on story and atmosphere/suspense rather than on nudity and sex. It's a sleaze-free Franco from the 1970s, and that alone is quite remarkable!

The film can best be labelled as a (Spanish) giallo! There's the isolated setting, a group of obnoxious & extravagant people who deserve to die, guests behaving exaggeratedly suspicious (and clearly are not the killer), and a culprit with melancholic motivations. My biggest complaint is that the kills are sadly bloodless and not nearly as imaginative as in other contemporary Gialli - mostly from Italy - and that the characters are deliberately insufferable. All of them!

And to close off; - a bit of fun! It's always good to learn a few things that you didn't know before via watching a film! Jess Franco's "Un Silencio de Tumba" even taught me three things! #1: apparently the more people get who killed in your surroundings, the less worried you become. It's weird. After the initial kidnapping and first murder, everyone at the house is in a panic, but when there are only two or three people left near the end, they seem to deal quite calmy and relaxed with the discoveries of new bodies. #2: a kidnapped 9-year-old is something you forget easily when there is also a killer at large. The story begins with the abduction of a child, and only later a killer shows up and eliminates the adults one by one. The missing child is hardly even mentioned anymore, until the lead actress suddenly remembers him again after the climax. "Oh, right... Christian!". #3: giving in to lesbian desires gets you killed accidentally. One of the female victims wasn't targeted by the killer, but since she requested to sleep together with another woman in her room, she gets mistakenly killed. What a bad timing to come out of the closet.