SilRag-icon

This review must begin with a con­fes­sion:  Chuck Norris has always been Your Humble Reviewer’s least favorite action hero of the 1980’s.  Despite his for­mi­da­ble mar­tial arts skills, he was a painfully wooden pres­ence dur­ing that prime­time era of action film­mak­ing.  He also tended to choose dull vehi­cles for him­self: for every gem like Code Of Silence, there’s an equal-strength dud like Forced Vengeance in his fil­mog­ra­phy to bal­ance it out.  That said, there are a hand­ful of schlock-action gems buried in his fil­mog­ra­phy.  The best of these is Silent Rage, which is eas­ily the most eccen­tric and cre­ative flick Norris starred in dur­ing his heyday.

For starters, the story is unusu­ally ambi­tious for a Norris pro­gram­mer — the sci-fi/horror/action hybrid of a script starts off with a wacko named John Kirby (Brian Libby) tak­ing an axe to a few house­mates after a ner­vous break­down. He tan­gles with Chuck a bit then gets shot down as he’s try­ing to escape. His well-meaning doc­tor, Tom Halman (Ron Silver), tries to revive him — Kirby is a patient being stud­ied by the high-tech lab he works for — but the dam­age to his brain is too great.

However, Tom’s less scrupu­lous col­league Spires (Steven Keats) uses Kirby’s body to test an exper­i­men­tal cell regen­er­a­tion serum designed for super-fast heal­ing. It works all too well, turn­ing Kirby into a killer than instantly rebounds from gun­shots and car-crashes. Kirby ulti­mately crosses paths with Chuck and the end is result is what Joe Bob Briggs would call “Kung Fu City.”

Silent Rage is every bit as silly as it sounds but it’s much more skill­fully made than you might think. The script thank­fully has a sense of humor about itself — the evil doc­tor says stuff like “We’re sci­en­tists, not moral­ists” and a gra­tu­itous bar brawl pit­ting Norris against a gang of car­toon­ish bik­ers is worked in to allow Norris fans to get their kicks (it’s a big high­light of the flick, as funny as it bone-breaking).  The story’s bizarre com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments adds to its appeal, giv­ing it an off-kilter feel that really makes it stand out in the fre­quently hum­drum Norris filmography.

As for the act­ing, Norris is wooden as ever in the few dra­matic moments but the story mostly allows him to play his role with a dead­pan humor that works sur­pris­ingly well.  The inde­struc­tabil­ity gim­mick allows him to have a wor­thy foe for once in the fight scenes — and Libby’s gaunt yet hulk­ing pres­ence makes him a per­fect foil.  Silver deliv­ers a fun, off-the-cuff backup per­for­mance (he seems to be chan­nel­ing mid-1970’s Pacino here) and Keats chews scenery with élan as the bad guy sci­en­tist.  Elsewhere, exploita­tion fans will be happy to see the sup­port­ing roles filled with famil­iar faces like William Finley and Stephen Furst.

However, the best aspect of Silent Rage is the styl­ish direc­tion by Michael Miller. For those who don’t know the name, Miller was a b-movie vet who also directed the New World pic­tures fave Jackson County Jail before going on to a long career in t.v. movies. Here, Miller gives the story an impres­sive amount of style — the open­ing reel con­tains two impres­sive, painstak­ingly chore­o­graphed one-take shots done with a Steadicam. Despite a few pac­ing prob­lems in the sec­ond half (mainly due to the script) he keeps the story rolling and deftly blends the hor­ror and action ele­ments. It’s obvi­ous he did his home­work for the hor­ror side of the story because his use of prowl­ing cam­er­a­work and a min­i­mal­ist synth score evokes the feel of John Carpenter’s early work, par­tic­u­larly Halloween.

In short, Silent Rage offers cheap thrills, but they are well-crafted cheap thrills deliv­ered with a bizarro sense of flair.  Even if you don’t go for Chuck Norris flicks, this one’s weird enough to be worth hunt­ing down.