Silent Madness (1984)

 

Silent Madness was one of those movies that just had a bad sense of timing all around. It came out too late in the 80s slasher craze to make an impression. By the time it was released in 1984, there had already been 3 sequels to Friday the 13th, two to Halloween, and innumerable knock-offs with such titles as My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me, and so on. It also came out the year after 3D's big year so nobody was showing 3D movies at that time. It also came out right at the same time as Nightmare on Elm Street, which just totally bumped it out of theatres. As such, very few people saw it as it was originally intended. It didn't help the movie any that it doesn't really do anything that any other film in the genre does. In a bizarre way, it's a mash up between Halloween and the first Friday the 13th. 

The movie starts at Cresthaven Mental Hospital, somewhere in Manhattan. Cresthaven is overcrowded and understaffed, so a couple of incompetent doctors decide to release people back into society that they figure aren't a danger. Due to an absurd clerical error, one Howard Johns, a dangerous psychotic, is released instead of a simpleton named John Howard. Fearless Dr. Joan Gilmore (Belinda Montgomery) tumbles to this and tries to warn the upper management. They brush her off and claim that Johns is actually dead. Meanwhile, Johns somehow manages to get back to his old stomping grounds, Barrington School For Girls. See, Johns was the janitor there 20 years ago when he snapped and killed a bunch of sorority girls with a nail gun. How exactly Johns gets back to the college is never explained especially when we're told the school is over three hours away from the hospital. No matter. He's back and killing a new batch of sorority girls, some of whom don't even get names. Gilmore takes a weekend off and goes back to the school to track Johns down. The hospital decides to cover up and sends two demented orderlies after both Gilmore and Johns. 

Did you follow all of that? No. Doesn't matter. With a film like this you just tend to go along for the ride and enjoy the kills. Even when they're done with a hilarious cartoon ax.

The most creative thing the movie seems to have done is had then 34 year old Montgomery playing the film's Final Girl and not one of the teenagers. Montgomery does what she can with this, but while she seems to be trying to give a performance, Viveca Lindfors as the House Mom and Sidney Lassick as the Sheriff decide to say "to heck with it" and go wildly over the top. As do the insane orderlies. In fact, Montgomery seems to be the only one in the film not overacting!

At the end of the day this is your standard issue stalk and slash. The victims barely have names let alone personalities and the killer is the usual mute madman. Gore hounds will be a little disappointed that a lot of the admittedly inventive kills cut away before getting too gory and there's very little nudity for this type of thing. Is it better than it's kissing cousin Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D? Maybe. The characters act a little less stupid. Well, most of them. The orderlies aren't particularly bright and neither is Lassick's sheriff. Some of the actors are a little better than in the 1982 slasher but that's a pretty low bar to be honest. Bizarrely, there's not one night scene anywhere in the movie. The only other slasher film that I can think of anything like that is the miserable 1997 3D cheapie Camp Blood, a movie so bad it makes this one look like Citizen Kane.

All things considered, I kinda like this movie. No, it's not very good. As I've pointed out before, none of the 80s 3D movies are any good, but this one is one of the slightly better ones. It's not something I'd watch every month or even every year, but I can see myself returning to it from time to time if only to get a laugh. 

Silent Madness came and went in October of 1984, overshadowed by Nightmare on Elm Street. It had a VHS release and a poor bootleg 3D version that wasn't even in the full widescreen. It's long been neglected and mostly forgotten except for by die hard slasher fans and 3D fans. Vinegar Syndrome and the 3D Film Archive decided somewhere along the way that Silent Madness was worth saving and now there's a beautiful 3D Blu Ray of it available. The Blu Ray includes 3 versions of the film: a 3D Blu Ray version requiring the proper TV and Blu Ray player, a 2D version (of course) and an anaglyphic (red/cyan) version that is probably the best anaglyphic video presentation I've ever seen. There's also a mess of extras on it including a fairly interesting documentary on the making of the movie and the original sizzle reel done for the movie.

If you're a 3D completist, you obviously need this disc. The 3D Film Archive worked their usual magic on it and as such it looks a lot better than most of the other 80s 3D films that have gotten a 3D Blu Ray release--Friday the 13th Part 3 included. The inclusion of the anaglyph version allows a wider audience to watch the movie in 3D. As I said, it's a much better anaglyph version than anything I've seen over the last 40 years of watching these things. Supposedly the 3D Film Archive will be doing this more and more on future releases.

I met Belinda Montgomery a few years ago at a Chiller Theatre convention and admitted to her that I liked her in a movie that I knew was a stupid movie. When she asked which one, I mentioned this one. She rolled her eyes and said "That is a stupid movie!"

Yes, Ms. Montgomery, it really is. But I kinda get a kick out of it.

Friday the 13th Part 3 3D (1982)

Friday the 13th Part 3 was the first major 3D movie of the 1980s. I, of course, am using the term major in a rather loose sense. But it was bigger budgeted than the two that preceded it--1981's Comin' At Ya! and the 1982 Demi Moore sci-fi horror flick Parasite--and it was the first one to be released by a major studio. It was also the first major hit in 3D in the 1980s. So in a way, it shares those things with 1953's House of Wax. However, that's where the similarities end.

The first of the Part 3 in 3D movies of the era, Friday the 13th Part 3 is generally considered the best of the 3D movies of the 80s. It's also the film that gave Jason his iconic hockey mask (he had a flour sack over his head in the previous film). Having finally watched it in 3D, I will say that the 3D is quite spectacular. The movie, on the other hand, is quite craptacular. I mean, this is the movie Scream referenced with the joke about running up the stairs instead of out the front door. It literally happens in the movie.

I see dead people

The opening five minutes (in 2D) are the end of the previous film. After burying a machete in Jason's arm, that film's final girl leaves. Jason, of course, is not dead, and he promptly gets up and walks off the wound. He heads over to a general store owned by an annoying couple named Harold and Edna, steals some clothes from them and murders them after a set up that feels like it takes forever.

Meantime, another bunch of dumb teens are getting together to go have a quiet weekend in the woods. They are Chris (Dana Kimmel), who is suffering PTSD from an encounter with Jason two years earlier, stoners Chuck and Chili, pregnant Debbie and her show-off boyfriend Andy, annoying prankster Shelly, and his reluctant date Vera. At the cabin they meet up with Chris's horny boyfriend Rick, who can't understand that she doesn't want to have sex due to what happened to her previously. None of these characters except for Final Girl Chris have any personality. They exist merely to be killed off by Jason. Shelly and Vera run afoul of a trio of bikers in a convenience store, who also have no personality but are there to also add to the body count. Death by meat clever, knitting needle, pitchfork, machete, fire poker, electrocution, spear gun, knife, and having one's eyeball popped out of their head ensues. 

The Lucky One

I get that you shouldn't expect too much from a film like this, but it would be nice if there was something to recommend it beyond the 3D. It's my understanding that this is one of the better entries in this series and all I can say about that is that I can't begin to imagine what the lesser entries are like. Most of the acting is non-existent, the characters are just tropes, and frankly, the movie isn't even scary. There's no real suspense to it. The big slaughter happens an hour into the film and is done with in about 10 minutes of screen time. I also understand that the gore effects were tamed to avoid trouble with the MPAA and there's very little nudity in it, too, which I always heard was a big part of these movies.

Instead director Steve Miner put all his eggs in the 3D basket with this one. Like most of the 80s crop of 3D movies, Friday the 13th Part 3 is more interested in what it can throw out of the screen than it is in telling a story. All manner of objects fly towards the audience, and not just implements of death from our hockey masked madman. Wallets, weed joints, popcorn, juggling fruit, and a yoyo coming flying our way along with the fire poker, spear gun, pitchfork, knives, and eyeballs. Some of the effects are pretty impressive while others are just plain stupid. For almost 40 years I heard about the legendary eyeball effect when Rick's head is crushed. Imagine my disappointment at how silly it looked when I finally saw it.

Come on, give me a ride, babe!

Despite the visual assault on the audience, the 3D is surprisingly well shot for this era. I don't know if Shout Factory made alignment corrections or it always looked like this, but the movie doesn't hurt one's eyeballs in quite the same way some of it's contemporaries like Comin' At Ya! do. 3D movies of the 80s had a bad habit of getting their gimmick shots too close to the camera, which made them physically uncomfortable to watch. Though there are some gimmick shots that come way out of the screen in this one, they don't reach the point of ripping your eyeballs out of your head watching them. 

As I've said before, none of the 80s 3D movies are what anyone would call good movies. In 3D they are sometimes fun and that goes for this film, too. I'd never watch it in 2D, though. I suppose if you're going to pick just one 3D movie from the 80s to watch, this is probably the one (though I'm partial to Jaws 3-D myself). Just don't expect anything as good as House of Wax.

3-D Thursday: The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)

The poster for The Flesh and Blood Show, a 1972 part 3-D slasher film directed by Paul Walker, promises "an appalling amalgam of carnage and carnality". If you're a gorehound and you read that sentence and got palpitations of excitement, please calm down. I can guarantee that you will find the movie a shattering disappointment. I'm no gorehound and I found it to be a shattering disappointment.

The Flesh and Blood Show is the old saw Agatha Christie used for And Then There Were None. A group of people are invited to remote location by an unknown person who starts picking them off. In this case it's a group of actors and the location is an abandoned seaside theatre. They're there to rehearse a Grand Guignol style review called The Flesh and Blood Show.  When one of the actresses is murdered, instead of leaving, the cast and director stick around to continue rehearsals and maybe find the killer. Unlike Christie's classic, the cast isn't stranded at the theater. They can leave anytime they want to. Well, no one ever accused characters in a slasher movie of being intelligent.

As much blood as you will see

Conventional stupidity of slasher movie characters to one side--including those that wander off all alone knowing full well that a killer is nearby--there's a larger problem with the movie. If you haven't seen it and, as I say, are a gorehound, you'd probably expect there to be a lot of gory murders. But there aren't. Point in fact, all of the killings are off-screen. The poster shows us a woman being decapitated and while there is such an incident, she's decapitated offscreen and when we she her head, it doesn't look any different from the other wax heads it's next to. There's maybe six murders in this and not a single one of them happens before our eyes or is even remotely bloody. The bloodiest the movie gets is at the beginning when a guy walks into the room of two of the actresses with a knife in his gut. However, that scene is a practical joke and a fake out. For a movie called The Flesh and Blood Show, you'd expect at least some blood and will likely be confused by the lack of same.

On the other hand, the film does deliver a fair amount of Flesh for that part of the title. Virtually every young actress in the film takes off their clothes at one point or another. One even opens her apartment door in the middle of the night stark naked because of course she does. So, if you like movies with lots of beautiful naked women, you'll like this. If you're hoping those naked women get killed off creatively a la Friday the 13th, you're not going to like this movie.

The Flesh and Blood Show was one of those Part-3-D movies released back in the 60s and 70s. The vast majority of the movie is in 2-D, with a ten minute segment towards the end in black and white 3-D. Why black and white, besides the fact that it was a flashback to the 1940s? Because the 3-D segment was originally in anaglyphic 3-D. Even Paul Walker knew that anaglyphic 3-D in color looks rotten, so he shot that segment in black and white. The only problem is, the segment is so dark that the 3-D is practically non-existent. Kino released the movie on 3-D Blu Ray with both the anaglyphic version and the 3-D TV version and they both look pretty poorly. There's maybe three well lit shots in the entire segment. To make matters worse, to watch this sucker in 3-D, you have to watch the 2-D parts up until the flashback begins, go to the menu, select the 3-D way you want to watch it, watch that segment, go back to the menu, and find the end of the film in the chapter selections! It's too much work for a film this poorly done with 3-D this bad.

This, by the way, was Walker's second 3-D film. He had earlier shot a soft-core sexploitation film called The 3-Dimensions of Greta, also using anaglyphic segments. Something Weird Video has that one on DVD, but after this film, I have no desire to seek that one out. It doesn't help that I've seen Something Weird's other anaglyphic 3D DVDs and they all stink.


One amusing piece of trivia for fans of General Hospital. Both this movie and Greta have a very young Tristan Rogers in them, ten years before he played Robert Scorpio. This explains how I came to watch this movie, too. Being one of the very early vintage 3D Blu Ray releases, I bought it just to support vintage 3D releases. I never had any interest in nor any intention to actually watch the dumb thing. However, a friend of mine came over one day and learning of this movie and Mr. Rogers being in it, begged to watch it. The moral of the story is that if you happen to buy this movie just to support 3D Blu Ray and you have a friend who watches General Hospital every day of his life, don't mention it to him or you, too, will be sadly subjected to this.