Silent Scream starts with one of the most annoying opening sequences I've seen in a while. An entire scene involving police pulling up outside, going into, searching & making a gruesome discovery in the attic of a large Mansion is shown in highly irritating slow-motion & seems to go on forever. Not a good start, only a few minutes in & Silent Scream has already got on my nerves! Silent Scream then goes into flashback as the story which leads to this event is told. Student Scotty Parker (Rebecca Balding) has transfered to Santa Rey College at very short notice & once enrolled she sets about finding a room to stay in. After no luck searching Scotty comes across an old Victorian Mansion situated high on some cliffs above the sea & beach whose owners, Mrs. Engels (Yvonne De Carlo) & her geeky weird son Mason (Brad Rearden) rent their spare rooms out to students just like Scotty. Already living there are two more students named Doris Prichart (Juli Andelman) & Jack Towne (Steve Doubet). Scotty accepts one of two available rooms, the other is taken by another student named Peter Ransom (John Widelock) at the same time. That night the four new friends decide to go out to dinner. On their way back home a drunk Peter, after being a jerk, gets left behind & is murdered. His body is discovered the next morning, Lieutenant Sandy McGiver (Cameron Mitchell) & his partner Sergeant Manny Ruggin (Avery Schreiber) are on the case. They question Scotty, Doris & Jack but get nowhere, they then decide to investigate the Engels family to see if they can dig something up on them. Eventually they do but are they in time to save the students from a dark secret that has been hidden for years!
Executive produced, co-written & directed by Denny Harris I thought Silent Scream was a waste of time & throughly unimpressive. The script by Harris, Wallace C.Bennett, Jim Wheat & Ken Wheat is extremely slow, nothing significant happens for long stretches. It's over half an hour of tedium, poor character development & scene setting before anything that even resembles horror takes place. The body count is extremely low with just one death for over an hour! The ending was also a big disappointment with a dull so-called shocking revelation that really isn't anything like being shocking, surprising or interesting. In fact Silent Scream ends as you would expect it to, I honestly thought the filmmakers would have tried to come up with a twist ending & catch potential viewers out but no such luck unfortunately. Forget about any blood or gore, just a few red splashes on curtains, clothes & walls & while watching the end credits I noticed there wasn't any special effects credit listed which tells you everything you need to know! There is a sex scene but no explicit nudity. Technically Silent Scream isn't too bad, the house & locations used look OK even if the talentless Harris can't evoke any kind of atmosphere from them & generally speaking it's adequately made throughout although it ain't going to exactly knock your socks off. Acting is alright, there are some genre veterans in here including Yvonne De Carlo, Cameron Mitchell & Barbara Steele. Overall Silent Scream at best is merely watchable as there is nothing really wrong with it I suppose, but at worst it sucks because it's far too slow, uneventful & nothing of interest really happens for most of it's running time. Unfortunately for both me & Silent Scream the negative aspects of the film easily outweighed the positive, better luck next time chaps. The more I think about it the more I think Silent Scream would have worked a lot better as a half an hour Tales from the Crypt (1989 - 1996) episode. There are much better horror films available, watch one of those instead.
Executive produced, co-written & directed by Denny Harris I thought Silent Scream was a waste of time & throughly unimpressive. The script by Harris, Wallace C.Bennett, Jim Wheat & Ken Wheat is extremely slow, nothing significant happens for long stretches. It's over half an hour of tedium, poor character development & scene setting before anything that even resembles horror takes place. The body count is extremely low with just one death for over an hour! The ending was also a big disappointment with a dull so-called shocking revelation that really isn't anything like being shocking, surprising or interesting. In fact Silent Scream ends as you would expect it to, I honestly thought the filmmakers would have tried to come up with a twist ending & catch potential viewers out but no such luck unfortunately. Forget about any blood or gore, just a few red splashes on curtains, clothes & walls & while watching the end credits I noticed there wasn't any special effects credit listed which tells you everything you need to know! There is a sex scene but no explicit nudity. Technically Silent Scream isn't too bad, the house & locations used look OK even if the talentless Harris can't evoke any kind of atmosphere from them & generally speaking it's adequately made throughout although it ain't going to exactly knock your socks off. Acting is alright, there are some genre veterans in here including Yvonne De Carlo, Cameron Mitchell & Barbara Steele. Overall Silent Scream at best is merely watchable as there is nothing really wrong with it I suppose, but at worst it sucks because it's far too slow, uneventful & nothing of interest really happens for most of it's running time. Unfortunately for both me & Silent Scream the negative aspects of the film easily outweighed the positive, better luck next time chaps. The more I think about it the more I think Silent Scream would have worked a lot better as a half an hour Tales from the Crypt (1989 - 1996) episode. There are much better horror films available, watch one of those instead.