• Directed by Simon Nuchtern
• Written by William P. Milling
• Starring
  • Belinda Montgomery
  • Roderick Cook
  • David Greenan
• Produced by William P. Milling and Simon Nuchtern

OK, quiz time: A movie released in 1984. A bad guy named Kruger. A killer who comes back a generation later. Boiler rooms.

That’s right, it’s the appropriately forgotten horror thriller Silent Madness. Oh, were you thinking of some other film? Musta been something in the national gestalt that year.

The Kruger in question is a supercilious psychiatrist, on staff at Cresthaven, a (ahem) facility for those with (ahem) mental illness. His recent program has been getting him good grades with the brass, and with good reason; by accelerating the release of patients, he’s tightening up the budget.

Naturally, the “good doctor” in all of this, Dr. Joan Gilmore, is female and pretty (because males, or ugly females for that matter, are unable to look past matters of budget), and objects strongly. Her objections become even stronger when she finds out that Dr. Kruger intended to release the harmless John Howard — but the “client” mistakenly released was Howard Johns, the psychopath behind the notorious “sorority massacre” of seventeen years before in the flyspeck town of Barrington (at, naturally enough, the Barrington College for Women).

I have to point out, lest you think this movie is actually taking place in out universe, that Dr. Kruger had kept Johns in the secure and supersecret “Ward L,” in which he keeps the incurable prisoners in body bags, fed with tubes and drained with catheters and electrically “exercised” once a day. The idea that there is no state oversight in all of this, nor has the state pulled a bunch of medical licenses, is an obvious sign that we are dealing with a parallel universe.

And speaking of obvious signs, one that the ostensibly intelligent Dr. Gilmore somehow overlooks: When she confronts Dr. Kruger about the mixed-up release, his first question is, “Have you told anybody else?” DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.

Well, Dr. Gilmore manages to bring the problem to the attention of high muckamuck Dr. Anderson, at which time Dr. Kruger covers adroitly by saying that Johns is actually deceased, and he’ll have the paperwork back from the state soon to prove it. Dr. Anderson tries to smooth things over and asks Dr. Gilmore to take the weekend off instead of her normal schedule.

Naturally, Dr. Gilmore decides to play amateur detective, and sets out the three hours from Manhattan to Barrington to see if the possibly-still-alive Johns has gone back to the scene of the previous massacre.

Good thing she does, too, because interspersed with this we’ve already seen three murders. Yes, Johns is alive, and yes, he’s back in the boiler room of the Delta Omega sorority house, and yes, he’s trying to fulfill the cinematic imperative of new and novel murders (using a sledgehammer, a thrown hatchet, and a vice on a head so far), and yes, because this film was originally in 3-D, there are just oodles of things coming right at the screen.

I should point out that the alternate universe is in evidence again. Look up at the cover at the top of this webpage. Passably villainous, right? okay, Howard Johns looks sort of like that, if you were describing him over the phone to the artist, and really taking liberties. The real Johns is nowhere near so diabolical; instead, he’s dull and mean looking with dark circles under his eyes and unremarkable male pattern baldness. Remember Bruce Willis’ character in 12 Monkeys? Now imagine if that character had had a stupider younger brother.

Dr. Gilmore arrives and talks first to the fatso sheriff, who proves singularly unhelpful, despite the fact that he was on hand during Johns’ first rampage, and even has a scar to prove it. She then heads over to the newspaper office, where Mark the editor is eager to help (apparently, aside from the uniformly alluring sorority girls, there’s not an attractive single woman in town, so he has to jump at the out-of-towners).

Alternate universe update: I don’t care how small you say a town is, if it’s big enough to have a college (even a little one), it’s big enough to have more than a single law enforcement officer, and the newspaper office should have more than the hunky young editor and his spinster assistant as the total staff. Also, in this alternate universe, they apparently have a “fall break” mid-semester, meaning that all but the requisite handful of sorority girls have gone on vacation.

In keeping with the general feeling of unreality, Mark hits upon a great plan: they’ll fake Dr. Gilmore’s history as a former Delta Omega sister, and have her stay in the house a couple of days to see if she can find Johns. The idea of what to do when she finds him has never come up; I think these two characters have probably read more genteel Agatha Christie novels than they’ve seen slasher flicks.

We meet (again — we’ve already had a filler scene with them) the last few sorority sisters, as well as their house mother, an old biddy named Miss Collins, with an inexplicable Euro (German?) accent. And we also get the background on the massacre, in B&W, no less: Johns was the young, mute, slow janitor who spied on the sisters during hazing in the boiler room (he especially liked the spanking, apparently); the sisters decided to have some fun with him, taunting him with their bodies, until he finally snapped, grabbed something which I suppose was a nail gun (kinda looked like an early-period phaser) and went to town.

I want you to realize how far into the movie we’ve come without much happening. (All right, there have been several murders by now, but they feel like nothing more than filler.) Dr. Gilmore sees nothing wrong with simply poking around to find a possibly homicidal maniac. So Gilmore pokes around, and runs into Johns, but he gets scared off by the security guard (who doesn’t actually see him), and Dr. Kruger sends his two spooky-ass attendants to retrieve Johns, and “subdue” Gilmore (one attendant gives a far-too-long monologue on how he’s going to rape the drugged Gilmore on the ride back), and then Gilmore and Mark discover that all the girls’ tires have been slashed and their phone lines cut.

And I’m still waiting for it to get good…

There are two big problems here:

1) The tension just doesn’t crank up. The murders interspersed with the main story seem more like commercial breaks — commercial breaks in a movie so dull that you look forward to the commercial breaks. Even when the tires get slashed and the phone lines cut, there’s not a lot of urgency; at best, it gives the viewer the sense of anticipation that hey, they’ll have to wrap all this up pretty soon.

2) There’s nobody worth caring about. Johns is neither a wisecracking killer like Freddy nor an ominous boogeyman like Michael Myers; he’s just some dull guy killing girls. Dr. Gilmore is, well, “nice” — neither engaging nor spunky. Her instances of initiative — exploring Ward L without permission, chasing after Johns to Barrington — seem more to be ill-considered examples of impetuous lack of foresight than any sort of endearing willfulness.

In other words, there’s not really much here to make this movie worth renting. In our universe, anyway.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 14
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• blatant 3-D setups: 11
• girls playing Dragon’s Lair: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0