Silent Rage (1982)

Silent Rage (1982)

 

Starring: Chuck Norris, Ron Silver, Steven Keats, Toni Kalem, William Finley, Brian Libby, Stephen Furst, Stephanie Dunnam, Joyce Ingle, Jay De Plano, Lillette Zoe Raley
Director: Michael Miller
Action Director: Aaron Norris

 

Silent Rage is a bit of an odd-duck in Chuck Norris’s filmography. It is more horror flick than chopsockey movie, with Chuck Norris playing his typical cowboy hat-wearin’ Texas lawman whose quarry just happens to be a dime store rip-off of Michael Meyers. There are some fights, to be sure, but the film on the whole is more of a “thriller” than “action flick.” Sadly, exploitation director Michael Miller (Street Girls and Jackson County Jail) can’t really commit to a specific genre or tone and the film stands out more as a curio within Chuck Norris’s filmography than a highlight of the same.

It really sucks to be John Kirby (Brian Libby, who had roles in Air Force One and Heat). He obviously has some anxiety disorder bordering on complete psychosis. Living as a boarder in a house run by an obnoxious woman (Joyce Ingle) with equally-obnoxious children is obviously exacerbating the problem. As much as his doctor, Tom Halman (Timecop’s Ron Silver), wants to help, the brain meds he’s been prescribing to Kirby have reached the limit of their usefulness. One day, a particularly nervous Kirby drops spills the pills and simply snaps. He takes an axe to his landlady and her husband while the kids are out. When Sheriff Dan Stevens (Chuck Norris) come to investigate, Kirby tries to cut him down, too. Although Stevens ultimately subdues and arrests the wacko, Kirby breaks free and attacks the deputies before they finally fill him full of lead and bring him down.

The hospital that Kirby is brought to doubles as a research institute, of which Halman is a part. Although Kirby is still “alive” after the doctors extract the bullets from him, there is no registered brain activity from the poor sucker. That’s when Halman’s superior, Dr. Philip Spires (Steven Keats, of Death Wish and The Friends of Eddie Coyle), has an idea: why not try some of their research medicines on him? If they restore brain activity to a vegetable, it may be one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time. If not, then they can brush off their failure as Kirby having succumbed to multiple gunshot wounds and Sheriff Stevens would be none the wiser. Dr. Halman is against this sort of unethical approach to experimentation, but Spires goes behind his back and does it anyway. Lo and behold, the drug they administer to Kirby not only restores his brain activity, but gives him a Wolverine-esque healing factor, too!

So, while Dr. Spires and his colleague, Dr. Vaughn (William Finley, of Sisters and The Phantom of Paradise), are playing God, Dan Stevens it out ridding the town of unruly bikers and trying to win back an old flame, Allison Halman (Toni Kalem, who did most of her work on television). Halman is Tom’s younger sister and a receptionist at the hospital her brother works at, although there is never any conflict of interests there. Eventually, Kirby regains full consciousness and picks up his killing spree where he left off. Unfortunately for Sheriff Stevens, he’s now practically invincible.

The problem with Silent Rage is that after an exciting opening scene—two axe murders and prolonged scuffle between Brian Libby and Chuck Norris—the film flounders around for the next forty minutes until it finally finds its focus again. The subplot involving the biker gang and their turning the local bar into an orgy of female toplessness—I still get wowed by seeing nudity in a Chuck Norris film, considering his later conversion to born-again Christianity—exists mainly to throw in some sexploitation and a fight scene so the audience doesn’t get bored. The same can be said about the subplot involving Sheriff Dan and Allison, which also gives us some R-rated sex and helps pad out the running time until THINGS GET REAL in the second half. We don’t even get any tension between Dan and Dr. Halman; it’s just Chuck Norris and his super-hairy chest in a topless sex montage. I suppose that gave audiences of 1982 their money’s worth at the time, but it does rob the movie of much of its forward momentum.

Things do pick up once Tom Kirby sneaks out of the hospital and starts killing once again. Those scenes are genuinely suspenseful, although they often lack the exploitively violent edge that actual slashers possessed. Kirby is an ersatz Michael Meyers (much of the third act takes place in a hospital, like Halloween 2), to be sure, and he does kill quite a few people, but you almost wish that director Miller would have gone the full nine yards in making it as brutal as it could be. He had already met the horror movie standard for bare boobies on display, why not own up to what he’s doing and make it a gorefest, too? Silent Rage is no more violent than your typical martial arts potboiler of that time, and for one that veers into slasher territory for much of its running time, you’d think they’d could have gone further.

The martial arts action is limited, as might be expected for a film like this. The first encounter between Dan Stevens and John Kirby is less tang soo do showcase and more brawl. The showstopper is the bar fight with the biker gang, which is one of Chuck’s best group fights, period. He does some great kicking in this scene, including a number of double kicks. During his final showdown with Kirby—who has come back to life multiple times by this point—the two have a fight scene in a forest, with Chuck unleashing his skills while Libby just takes it. Chuck’s moves are fine, although some viewers may lament the lack of an equally-talented adversary. That rather sums up the film the whole: some individual moments are fine, but the lack of a talented director keeps this from being either a slang-bang action movie or brutal, scary horror film. It doesn’t commit to one, so it ends up not being much of anything.