Wow. Where do I begin? "Silent Rage" is awful, awful stuff, barely valid even as a campy, so-bad-it's-good time. Chuck Norris is stiff as a board (though maybe it's the tight blue jeans) as the sheriff of a small Texas town where a bug-faced psychopath strikes, killing 2 residents of a boardinghouse; after an ineptly-shot and unexciting chase, the psycho is gunned down...but still alive. Scientists at a local institute/monkey farm (including Ron Silver and De Palma vet William Finley) repeatedly inject him with an experimental serum that revives him as an indestructible killing machine in a silver jumpsuit. Their reasoning? Well, because they can...and it's cool and stuff. "We're scientists, not moralists!" one belligerent egghead posits. While the premise has some camp value, Joseph Fraley's terrible script isn't as ambitious as it is juvenile--right down to the obnoxious, overweight deputy (Stephen Furst), the pointless sequence where Norris takes on a dozen biker badasses single-handedly, the tacked-on romantic subplot, and scenes that shamelessly borrow from the first two "Halloween" films. Though "Silent Rage" builds some suspense in its last act, with the killer stalking various characters through the institution, director Michael Miller shoots the climactic showdown as a repetitive series of extreme close-ups and long shots of unexciting stunt work that goes on far too long (another absurdity is the scene's complete lack of musical score), with a "surprise" ending that is anything but. Why this wasn't given the MST3K treatment is beyond me.
Review of Silent Rage
