A Whisper to a Scream (1989)

Director:

Robert Bergman

Writers:

Robert Bergman (writer)
Jerry Ciccoritti (writer)

Release Date:

22 July 1989 (Canada)

Genre:

Thriller

Tagline:

Seduction begins with a whisper. Murder ends with a scream.

Plot:

A young girl who was frustrated in her desire to become acrtress starts to work for a telephone-sex company...

Plot Keywords:

Telephone Sex | Artist | Angel | Stripper | Mistaken Identity

Cast

Nadia Capone	...	Gabrielle Robbins
Michael A. Miranda	...	Frank Hernandez (as Silvio Oliviero)
Yaphet Kotto	...	Jules Tallard
Lawrence Bayne	...	Olwyn Peters
Michael Lebovic	...	Tulio DeSana
Denise Ryan	...	Mia Baker
Danny Wengle	...	Bork
Soo Garay	...	Mimi
Klea Scott	...	Sasha
Leslie Kelly	...	Delta
Susan Hamann	...	Blue Belle
Denise Daigle	...	Paloma
Audrey Rose	...	Tiger Rose
Annette Shaffer	...	Ujena
Leanne Burton	...	Leah

Also Known As:

Love You to Death (UK)

Runtime:

96 min

Country:

Canada

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Iceland:16 | USA:R

Company:

Distant Horizons

Quotes:

[first title card]
Title Card: ...We Muses put on wings and flew/from his towers to safety./King Pyneus, now driven mad, cried out,/"wherever you go I will follow."/He leaped and fell and stained the earth/with scattered bone and blood. - Ovid, The Metamorpheses

A scream that fizzles out to less than a whisper.

There's a number of movies and songs that use "a whisper to a scream," why is that? Is it a quote from something?

Gabrielle we first see dressed in wings as a muse, performing for Delta, who is some sort of video artist. Owen is an announcer and soundman for a strange strip club called Sybil's Cave, and while he has one of the strippers in his loft home, he observes her and takes her for an angel. He has the stripper first making sex sounds, then making strangled noises - it's while he's strangling her because she wasn't doing it well enough that he sees Gabrielle. He lets the stripper go with an apology; this is one of the plot holes, since why this stripper doesn't later suggest the guy as a suspect when two of her co-workers are murdered is a mystery.

Gabrielle's boyfriend is a very temperamental artist named Frank, who's not meeting with much success. She takes a job at a room off the changing room of Sybil's Cave where the women do side work as phone sex operators for a service they call Whispers. The club also has a night where it is a "postmodern cabaret" (!), but we don't see that. We do see the weird strip acts, one woman dressed as a tribal African doing an African-like dance, another as a football player, another as Aprodite splashing water in a bucket.

Owen sees Gabrielle at the club, and makes a call to the sex line. For some reason she decides to imitate the voice of the Southern belle stripper on the stage at that time. He then invites the belle to his loft to record her, and kills her. He uses the recordings to add to something he calls "Canticles" which he plays in the background during his calls to Gabrielle. Again, the first stripper heard that tape, so that was another clue she had that was ignored. The video box asks "does he know that all the voices belong to Gabrielle?" Well, yes, he does from the very start.

Gabrielle doesn't make the connection between her imitating a stripper's voice and those strippers being killed right after until practically the end. She also suspects her boyfriend Frank of being the killer, but doesn't say this to the police, because she's afraid they'd shoot him on sight (?).

With Delta's help, Gabrielle realizes the killer's odd poetry on the phone is from the Song of Solomon. Quite a lot of it is quoted in the movie, by Delta, by Gabrielle, and by Owen.

None too good. People into peculiar dance scenes or mediocre thrillers might like it.