#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER TWENTY ONE 💀
💀 EXTRA CREDIT 💀

"Silent Madness" (1984)
* dir: Simon Nuchtern
* Horror / Slasher / One Perfectly Deployed Electric Drill Press
[ ★★★ / ★★★★★ ]

Ya gotta love a film that gets spurred on by a clerical error.

I watched this one in 3D...which only means that I got to view yet another tastelessly generic demonization of the mentally ill, but this time in THREE DIMENSIONS!

Look, I don't know what else to say. This specific kind of flick is quite literally a dime a dozen, and there's precious little to distinguish "Silent Madness" from countless other movies from the same subgenre, even ones that happened to release in the same damn year ("Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter", anyone?).

At least it was quite solidly paced, with some decently atmospheric direction from Simon Nuchtern, some gorgeous sunny East Coast location shooting, and an uncommonly strong central performance from Belinda Montgomery as the headstrong new doctor fighting an uphill battle against bullshit bureaucracy, conspiratorial cover-ups, and retrograde sexism. And while none of the actual attacks here are that much to write home about (and largely occur off-screen), there's a handful of standout suspense sequences to keep you suitably on-edge in between all of the relatively engaging mechanisms of the larger plotline, a plotline that at the very least is refreshingly uninterested in the "sexy frolicking teens being methodically slaughtered" modus operandi that is typically the slasher film's bread and butter.

But, if I'm being totally honest, there's a bit too much procedure here for me (and entirely too much shoe leather), often to the point where you can almost forget what kind of movie you're actually watching. Although this admittedly does help "Silent Madness" stand out a bit from the exceedingly crowded aforementioned stalk-and-slash genre field, I still feel like it could have been dialed back considerably and ended up landing twice as effectively.

I'll say this for sure, though: the damn thing certainly looks quite gorgeous, especially considering the director's only previous work was in obscure nudie flicks. Although, fun fact...the same cinematographer as "Friday The 13th Part III"! Which looks similarly beautiful in ways that you might not expect. Hm. I think I actually might know who to really reward the most credit to in this case...