Good start, but then it gets ruined

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The Silent Scream is a dated relic of the "Unusual '80's" horror movie phenomenon. The 1980's produced a glut of highly conventional, large-draw slasher flicks such as Friday The 13th and the Halloween sequels. The decade also produced a couple of dozen unusual and distinctive efforts such as Fade To Black, My Bloody Valentine, Grandma's House, and Motel Hell. Odd films like these dwell on a darker, more rarefied level, one that hasn't been visited much in the intervening years. Newly released on DVD after 29 years, The Silent Scream is a noteworthy entry in this later category of period horror. Until last year it had been lost in the mysterious, silvery mists of screen-scream antiquity.Barbara Steele stars as the villain in this dated '80's American-made shocker. Good character development, strong performances, and relatively little gore distinguish this effort from the usual slasher fare.Here's the setup: Cute and saucy Scotty Parker (Balding) transferred to her university a couple of weeks late and missed out on the fun of bunking with a bunch of freaks she doesn't know in the dorms. Challenged to find accommodations. she gravitates toward the old Engels house, a foreboding, sea-side edifice.The creepy Engels place is run on behalf of his very reclusive MOTHER! (De Carlo). by a wrapped-awfully-tight, real-life Milhouse Van Houten character named Brad (Reardon). Brad is harboring a wide variety of deeply seated personal issues. (Hey, who's that looking through my air vent?) Three more hormonally bloated students sign rental agreements and the school year is off to a beer and bodily fluid saturated start. For most of them that is. The fratboy-playboy ass-wipe barely gets out of the starting gate before he is found filleted rather than fellated on the beach, A psycho is roaming the dunes. Worse yet, there is something sinister going on in the Engels House, something really F ' D-UP in the attic. SOMETHING TERRIBLE!!!!! Creepy 50's music is mysteriously wafting down through the air vents, and who's burning that light bulb up there and thumping around at night? The cops show up and an erstwhile detective (Mitchell) starts keeping an eye out the desolate beach. But with more secret passages, hollow walls, trap doors and concealed rooms than H.H. Holmes' Chicago Murder Castle the real danger, don'tcha know, may be creeping through the crumbling walls of the old mansion itself.The Silent Scream is variously reminiscent of The Unnameable (1988), The Shuttered Room AKA Blood Island (1967), Black Christmas, (1974), American Gothic ( 1987), Psycho (1960), and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, (1987). With plot elements of all of these movies, The Silent Scream could be an unremarkable horror yarn, but instead it manages to add a fresh twist to the genre, and establishes itself as one of the more memorable 'old scary house at the top of the lonely hill' type movies.While not the bloodiest '80's slasher piece, The Silent Scream offers genuine tension with a distinctive and offbeat feel. There's plenty of atmosphere for a small budget (but well-produced) '80's horror flick and a few stylishly shot, memorable scenes that will stick with you. (And yes it is a "flick" in very since of the word. No, not a film, a flick. Write that down.) Not so much a horror story as a thriller about a seriously dysfunctional family, The Silent Scream's plot falls a bit short in that it misses out on some chances to include more twists and turns, but it's still a good ride for nostalgic '80's horror fans.PRODUCTION NOTES: Barbara Steele is noted for her Giallo and Euro-thriller characters among other types of roles. Despite Yvonne De Carlo's tremendous body of dramatic work, viewers may remember her best for her role as Lily Munster in The Munsters television series. Cameron Mitchell appeared in numerous horror and thriller films in the 1980's and Rebecca Balding may be familiar to audiences from her part as "Trish" in The Boogens (1981) as well as for a gigantic volume of television work. Jim and Ken wheat are the writer/producers behind films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Pitch Black, The Fly II and The Birds II.The Silent Scream was first filmed in 1977 by Denny Harris. The original project was scrapped, then picked up and reproduced by Jim and Ken Wheat who constructed new sets around fifteen minutes of salvageable footage filmed at the original location house. A more appropriate house in Highland Park was used for the exterior shots in the re-shoot.As an aside, The Silent Scream is one of the first horror movies to use CGI editing techniques. According to old timers (those antiquated souls who were coming of age in the 1980's) "everyone wondered how they did that." Apparently general audiences weren't that computer savvy in the nearly pre-silicon, medieval 1980's.Utilized in establishing shots under the opening credits, the CGI created the illusion that the action in each frame was halted abruptly for a moment and frozen in time. This same result was achieved with freezes during the opening credits in the 1979 Chuck Pierce film, The Evictors. In that instance good old fashioned film lab printing techniques were applied to frames in the opening sequence to give a sense of antiquity to the past events they portrayed, and to emphasize the significance of those shots to the plot's subsequent events. Today, CGI editing is overused and abused so much that we take it for granted.Thanks to the newly established company, Scorpion Releasing, The Silent Scream has been re-released on DVD in high definition after 30 years of obscurity (as "Silent Scream, not "THE Silent Scream"). The soundtrack has been remixed in true 5.1 and 2.0 stereo, with bonus featurettes, audio commentary and interviews.

Unable to find accommodation on campus, pretty college student Scotty (Rebecca Balding) rents a room at an isolated seaside mansion, unaware that the owner Mrs. Engels (Yvonne De Carlo) keeps her lobotomised homicidal daughter Victoria (Barbara Steele) hidden in the house in a secret room. You can't keep a good psycho locked up for long though, and it's not long before Vicky is out and about getting stabby with the tenants...The Silent Scream doesn't score many points for originality, its 'murderous insane relative' and 'old dark house' schtick hardly breaking new ground. But despite the over-familiarity of the material, and a disappointing lack of gore, The Silent Scream still manages to be an reasonably effective little horror/thriller thanks to solid direction from Denny Harris, who makes good use of his creepy location, and decent casting: Balding (The Boogens) makes for a very likable protagonist (of course, it doesn't hurt that she's very easy on the eye); De Carlo (Lily from The Munsters) is suitably creepy as the maniac's mother; Brad Rearden is convincingly freaky as Mrs. Engel's weirdo son Mason; and both Juli Andelman and John Widelock are more than irritating enough to make very deserving victims.It is horror legend Steele, however, who 'steeles' the show; she might not have any lines of dialogue, but she still manages to make her character completely menacing.

Spunky college student Scotty Parker (winningly played with disarming sweetness and vitality by cute and appealing brunette Rebecca Balding) rents a room at an old house located down by the shore. Scotty and her three fellow boarders discover that the ramshackle abode harbors a very dark and deadly secret deep within its grimy cobweb-strewn walls. Director Denny Harris, working from a smart and absorbing script by Jim Wheat, Ken Wheat, and Wallace C. Bennet, relates the simple and involving story at a gradual, yet steady pace, does an expert job of creating and sustaining a mysteriously creepy atmosphere, and pulls out all the stops for the picture's rousing and hair-raising conclusion. The able cast of genre veterans helps a lot: Yvonne De Carlo does well as the stern and remote Mrs. Engels, Cameron Mitchell as the weary Lt. Sandy McGiver and Avery Schreiber as his jolly partner Sgt. Manny Ruggin are likewise excellent, and 60's Gothic fright feature goddess Barbara Steele delivers a remarkably intense and frightening tour-de-force mute pantomime performance as the deranged and dangerous Victoria Engels. Better still, the youthful protagonists are well-drawn and genuinely engaging: Balding shines in the perky lead, with fine support from Steve Doubet as charming hunk Jack Towne, Juli Anderlman as the chipper Doris Prichart, and John Widerlock as the amiable Peter Ransom. Brad Rearden is also solid and credible as weird and neurotic bespectacled nerd Mason Engels. Roger Kellaway's elegantly eerie orchestral score does the blood-chilling trick. The stylish cinematography by Michael D. Murphy and David Shore gives the movie an attractive polished look. The spooky seaside house evokes a powerfully unsettling sense of vulnerability and isolation. Moreover, the plot offers some nice tweaking of the standard slice'n'dice conventions: the killer turns out to be a woman with a tragic and poignant back story, the heroine saves herself at the end, and the murder set pieces are effectively brutal and shocking without ever becoming too gory or disgusting. Highly recommended for 80's low-budget indie horror fans.

Four college students rent rooms at an old, creepy looking sea side house, run by an elderly woman and her rather reclusive son. Unbeknownst to them a mysterious stalker hiding somewhere in the house quietly watches and preys upon them one by one in typical slasher fashion.This movie would have been plenty creepy if there was some payoff every so often, but unfortunately it just keeps building up and building up to a climax that is neither particularly scary or surprising. It does have a few good moments here and there, such as a close-up of the unseen killer peering through a vent, or secretly breaking into the cobweb ridden crawlspace, but these moments are ultimately swallowed up by the relentlessly tedious pace. The cast does it's best with the material but there's simply nothing for them to work with. Balding, who shows plenty of charisma in her next film "The Boogens", is completely wasted in a thankless role that gives her little more to do other than stand around looking cute in spite of ridiculous looking clothes.4 out of 10, despite otherwise creepy direction this film is just too long, tedious and uneventful to hold you interest.