Relatively cheaply-made and not-so-hotly directed by one hit "wonder" Denny Harris, The Silent Scream came out at the beginning of the slasher flicks boom following John Carpenter's Halloween in 1978. This film and Friday the Thirteenth came out in 1980. The Silent Scream seems to have been somewhat lost though it really is way better than the other and its entire franchise. We get a very creepy old house by the sea and a group of college students in need of rooms to rent. Mason Engles, the young nerdy boy of the family handles the business as his mother stays cooped in her room in the attic. Soon young people start getting butchered. First one man by the surf, another in the laundry room - no need for a laundry list here. The murders are not particularly grizzly - certainly not by today's standards, but the acting believe it or not is miles ahead of much of the dreck in films of this ilk since. No wonder as we have Yvonne De Carlo as Mrs. Engles, Barbara Steele in a truly bizarre role of a mentally frustrated psychopath who dresses as an adolescent but is in her forties(and still beautiful I might add), Cameron Mitchell doing a workmanlike job in a small role as a cop along with Doritos pitchman and comedian Avery Scrieber playing it straight as a detective. Rebecca Balding is our heroine and she is refreshing and lovely. The house is very eerie and we get back corridors and all that plus a basement and attic to die for(okay, to die in). The story is trite, hackneyed, predictable, or any word you would like to use that means something we have all seen a hundred times, but the acting and the atmosphere are pretty good. that is quite a complement, because I didn't think much of the direction especially that stupid slow-motion beginning of Mitchell and Scriber coming in the house and seeing the murders. You wonder first if the house has some history of murder, but then just wonder why the director went that route at all. An intriguing film especially in the context of when it was made.
Review of The Silent Scream
