Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Blake Rivera If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Pamela De Graff 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.

FrightMeter College student Scotty Parker waits too long to apply for on campus housing and as a result must rent a room at a spooky seaside mansion owned by the equally spooky Engels family. Soon, one of the other college student renters is brutally murdered and Scotty unknowingly begins to unravel the secrets of the Engels family and the murders.The creepy, atmospheric little gem is a homage to Psycho through and through. Though it is a slow-burner, there is always an uneasiness present as the viewer is made aware through minor clues that something is not right with the Engels family. There is little to no gore; instead the focus on on building tension leading into the frantic and frenzied climax. Barbara Steele steals the film without saying a word and her performance will certainly give you chills. Highly underrated and one of the better entries into the early 80's slasher genre, though today's audience may be turned off by the slow pace.FrightMeter Grade: B

marymorrissey I never would have watched as much of it as I did if I weren't enough of a Barbara Steele fan to wait out just about anything. Thank heaven for variable speed fast forward in combination with subtitles which allows me to cut my viewing time in half or more for boring predictable movies like this...What really amazes still is the cast how did they manage to pull all these people together Avery scrubbier? Cameron Mitchell of course lived off this sort of movie, Yvonne decarlo (who is just awful in it), the divine Barbara. A couple of forgettable guys, the star...who is mostly enjoyable for her grown out Dorothy Hamel do. But the real find in this picture is Juli Andelman as Doris. If Divine had been actually female and about half as fat, the result would be Juli Andelman. Sorry, Juli, wherever you are, but really you ought to approach John Waters... As for Barbara Steele, well the phrase "she didn't have much to work with" would be the understatement of talkies. With no lines, she plays that character from 8 1/2 many years later having lost it and with a compulsion to stab stab stab! If you watched this movie and are just reading reviews cause you hated it so much here's a recommendation of a similar but great movie. I never liked any of the successful Paul Bartel vehiculars I ever saw, but an early movie he directed but did not write called "Private Parts" starring "Chip" from "My Three Sons" as the Norman Bates character is worth a look in fact it's worth a purchase and I don't even buy DVDs or VHSs. .. .actually this movie was so awful that it made "house of the devil" look relatively good

andybob-3 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.