Psychock

College student Scotty Parker waits too long to apply for on campus housing and as a result must rent a room at a spooky seaside mansion owned by the equally spooky Engels family. Soon, one of the other college student renters is brutally murdered and Scotty unknowingly begins to unravel the secrets of the Engels family and the murders.

The creepy, atmospheric little gem is a homage to Psycho through and through. Though it is a slow-burner, there is always an uneasiness present as the viewer is made aware through minor clues that something is not right with the Engels family. There is little to no gore; instead the focus on on building tension leading into the frantic and frenzied climax. Barbara Steele steals the film without saying a word and her performance will certainly give you chills. Highly underrated and one of the better entries into the early 80's slasher genre, though today's audience may be turned off by the slow pace.

FrightMeter Grade: B

Four college-bound students arrive too late for on-campus housing and are then forced to rent rooms in the creepy old hilltop mansion inhabited by a weird family hiding a dark and disturbing secret. Yvonne De Carlo is the mysterious matriarch who always stays upstairs and always seems to be guarding the attic, and Brad Rearden is her strange son. Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schreiber are detectives called in to investigate when a brutal murder occurs at the eerie place. There's also a nice role for sixties scream queen Barbara Steele. I"ll admit, before I actually saw the film I thought, considering the release date and R rating, that this was just going to be another one of those bloody teen slasher flicks. I couldn't have been more wrong! There actually is a plot, a surprisingly low body count, and even the few characters that do get knocked off are appealing in their own strange way, so you can't help but care what happens to these people. And above all, there is some terrific suspense sequences. It usually takes alot to get my adrenaline running, but at some points in the film, I literally jumped out of my seat! Any horror movie that can do this for me is truly something special. It appears to have been made on a small budget, but the cast handles it all so professionally that it hardly matters. Indeed, there are some real professionals involved, including horror mavens Barbara Steele and Yvonne DeCarlo. Unfortunately, it's a tough movie to find and not likely to be sitting on the shelf of your local retail/rental store, but it's well worth the extra effort.

For a film as cliche ridden as Silent Scream, it's a minor miracle that it came out as enjoyable and fun as it did. The story is well-worn and only slightly remixed for the late 70's/early 80's slasher craze. A young college student finds herself without housing, so she finds a room for rent at a spooky beachside home operated by a repressed young man and his nearly mute mother. Pretty soon, the bodies are piling up and family secrets are flying out of closets left and right.

Only a useless cop subplot (featuring Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schrieber) kills the pacing here and there and feels extraneous. The cast happens to be a likable, agreeable bunch with the charming and spunky Rebecca Balding leading. Veterans Yvonne DeCarlo and Barbara Steele show up to add some class to the seedy proceedings and it works. Silent Scream feels like a cut above most of the early slasher glut due to an emphasis on suspense, mood, and interesting characters.

This is another one of those 80's slashers that came out during the golden age, but has long been forgotten about despite the fact that it was a smash hit when it came out grossing $15 million at the box office, so I asked myself if this was so big then why isn't it more remembered, I mean this made more money than such other slasher gems such as (My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday To Me & House On Sorority Row).

Then I finally got round to seeing this and okay it's not quite up there with the other gems, but it's still worth checking out. The beginning is quite interesting and sets the tone for whats to come, like teens staying in an old Gothic mansion then getting picked off one by one by a murderous presence hiding in the attic. The performances also makes this movie work especially from genre stars Babara Steele and Yvonne De Carlo. And the gloomy atmosphere but Unfortunately it is this over-reliance on the past that proves to be the films' ultimate downfall as it gets boring very fast and This movie is nothing special. There's barely any blood or gore and the story tends to drag on at times, especially since the deaths take too long to happen and are too quick when they do.

All in all Silent Scream does set the creepy and Gothic tone well, but it does boring and far paced but overall the film works simply down the good turns from the cast.

This movie scared the bejezzus out of me when I was a kid. I think I was scarred for life. I haven't seen the movie since I was a kid, but at that age I went to see a movie more than once so I still recall the movie pretty well. Silent Scream was one of the first ‘psycho killer on a rampage' kinds of horror movies I had ever seen. Most of my childhood movie experiences were supernatural gore fests. I had gone through life blissfully believing that all things horrific where relegated to the realm of the supernatural, where they couldn't hurt me. That ended for me in the summer of 1980: the year Silent Scream and Friday the 13th came out. I was glued to my seat, eyes like saucers, watching some wacked-out person hacking people up with a butcher knife or trying to pull them through a hole in the attic wall so they could hack them up. It was pure magic for an adolescent boy. It didn't matter that there was no mystery to figure out. All that mattered was that I was getting the you-know-what scared out of me and loving it. I look back now and think of how truly silly those kinds of movies were but, hey, they were great summer entertainment for a junior high school kid. I still have a soft place in my heart for all of those mindless slasher movies. I would recommend Silent Scream for anyone who loves classic ‘80's horror (the best decade for horror in my opinion). Here are some other recommendations for horror/thriller from my childhood (I'll try to stick to the less well known ones): Humanoids from the Deep, The Boogens, The Boogeyman, Sleepaway Camp, Dead of Winter,Evil Speak, Scanners (well known but a must), Mausoleum, Motel Hell, Blood Beach, Happy Birthday to Me, April Fools Day, Sole Survivor, Galaxy of Terror. There is also from the seventies: Suspiria, Alice Sweet Alice, The Other, Burnt Offerings, Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, Piranha and Giant Spider Invasion: most of which I saw in the eighties. There are a lot more that don't come to mind right away but suffice to say that I made it my goal to see all the horror movies I could when I was young and there were a ton of them. I'm sure I loved them all. Please feel free to contact me for any recommendations to give or receive.