The Retreat

I got this from Netflix last night and it's easily the WORST movie I've seen in quite sometime-if not ever. It was so bad it irritated me and I turned it off. I couldn't get it back in the mail quick enough. It blows ass. It was so convoluted. The continuity made no sense. The acting is atrocious. The dialogue is banal. The direction is horrible. The characters are idiots. It's embarrassing. I suppose if I'd watched to the end there would have been a explanation and a pay-off (doubt it) but I was decided I'd rather paint my bathroom and watch the paint dry for more entertainment. Lionsgate usually distributes some pretty good films but this one is just terrible.

The above line of dialogue pretty much sums up this low budget slasher film. Although the acting is bad and the plot twist is inane, I did find a few positive things in this dreck. First off, we get a twist from the typical summer camp slasher, as this is a winter camp slasher. A group of students has been helping their professor with a semester long research project. To thank them, the prof sends them to a weekend retreat at his remote Michigan cabin. Which leads to the second positive: a LOT of people get killed, and it starts pretty quickly. There's even some decent gore, considering the micro budget. But on the bad side, almost all of the murders are shown twice. What the heck?? This film is twenty minutes too long anyway, so it's all just padding. In a nod to the classic 80s slashers, we do get boobs and sex, so combined with the gore and high body count, this wasn't a terrible way to spend an evening. Still, it's mostly inane and recommended for fans of slashers and overdone Michigan accents.

Although most here, would rather it be: can't see you. But we saw it (don't know about you dear reader, maybe you wanna check on in, and decide if you want to watch it). Let me tell you though that this tries very hard to be clever. You would guess so, with the characters studying Psychology and all.

And the fact that they just behave like your average teenager (from a horror film), just goes to show you how bad ... our school system in general is! Seriously though: Of course there is more happening than usual (remember: it tries so hard!), but this only makes the whole thing more ridiculous.

If you sit through the end, you have watched a few good scenes. But you will also see something that is completely wrong ...

Despite being a low-budget film, Silent Scream is a promising slasher done the old-fashioned way. It's the same story of young people being targeted by a killer, but this time taken to the frozen area of Michigan. The winter setting serves a lot to give this film a better update so that it is not such a generic slasher. The death scenes are well developed despite the budget and it has a simple script offering a quite entertaining slasher in the style of the 80s or 90s. Everything is going well in this movie until the ending makes you say "what the heck just happened ?", leaving a lot of questions. Silent Scream is a B-movie that manages to be an acceptable, decent and entertaining slasher. My final rating for this movie is a 7/10.

This movie is so bad I don't even want to joke about it. The only Raison d'être of this review is warn people to stay far away from "Silent Scream". For a friend of mine it's already too late, as he blind-bought this rubbish on DVD, but you can still be saved if you just manage resist the promising-looking cover image and the pictures of ravishing girls on the back of the box. "Silent Scream" is as bad as low-budget teen horror gets, with a plot that gets more retarded with each minute that passes, the dumbest characters in history (even though they're supposed to be psychology students) and dialogs so painful they make your ears cringe. One could state that the body count is remarkably higher than usually the case in slasher films, but even then, the murder sequences are totally uninspired and the complete lack of continuity and/or a plausible plot is simply intolerable. In order to thank the entire class for helping with his dreams-manipulation research, a weak-acting psychology professor rewards them with the keys of his vacation resort on a snowy Michigan island. The first part of the group arrives and have some mindless sex and too much tequila before getting slaughtered the exact same night by an individual wearing a hooded winter jacket. The second group arrives the day after and teams up with the last two survivors of group one. Unfortunately they offer a little more resistance to the killer and even come close to escaping the island. Then comes the hopelessly predictable and imbecile twist-in-the-end. The script is just a non-stop series of stupidities, dire clichés and insufferable stereotypes. The empty-headed characters say the dumbest things at the most inappropriate moments and, as if that wasn't bad enough already, they constantly repeat themselves as well. Especially the male lead Mark is a pitiable character, as he keeps nagging to his ex-girlfriend that he still loves her even though they're being chased by a maniac holding an axe. All the girls are great eye-candy (except for Melissa Schuman who tries to act too much like Sarah Michelle Gellar) and some of them even show their ravishing flesh, but they're just too stupid and obnoxious to be likable characters. "Silent Scream" is boring, irritating as hell, ugly to look at, poorly directed and completely unoriginal. Next time you pick it up in a shop or videostore, just put it back.