Movies of My Misspent Youth: Silent Rage

A while back I wrote about how one of the pleasures of co-hosting Kill by Kill is revisiting movies I once dismissed as garbage, only to find that they now have a certain sort of idiotic charm. Maybe I've gotten soft in my old age, or maybe it's just the joy of dissecting them with other people, but stuff like Tom Selleck's killer robot flick Runaway, or the skill of gymnastics with the kill of karate known as Gymkata, is almost lovable now. They're poignant tributes to a time when low budget action nonsense was made with sincerity, instead of a knowing wink at the audience.

And now we can add 1982's Silent Rage to that esteemed list. Sure, its plot is so thin it might as well have been written on a dry cleaning ticket, it has the least sexy sex scene since 1975's Mitchell (in which the leading man stops in the middle to pick up a six-pack of beer from a nightstand with his foot), and the hero has all the charisma of a Sears auto center, but it's still more entertaining than whatever massively budgeted action slop Netflix is putting out, with ten times the earnestness.

Silent Rage marked the beginning of Chuck Norris's transition to mainstream stardom, after spending several years Americanizing martial arts (read: making them more appealing to white people) in such movies as A Force of One and The Octagon. In a decade stuffed to bursting with action heroes, Norris always hovered somewhere in the second to third tier, below Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme, but above Dolph Lundgren and American Ninja's Michael Dudikoff. While none of his colleagues were ever praised for their thespian skills, Norris was always particularly stiff and uncomfortable when required to do anything else but deliver roundhouse kicks to someone's face. He made human pumice stone Charles Bronson seem warm and cuddly, which makes him the perfect good guy for what can be described as "High Noon meets Frankenstein meets Enter the Dragon, but it's also a slasher movie."

Though Norris's movies would eventually become notable for their overt xenophobia, here his nemesis is made in the good ol' tariff-free U.S. of A. Texas sheriff Dan Stevens (no relation to Downton Abbey heartthrob turned horror weirdo Dan Stevens) is called to the scene of an ax murder committed by John Kirby (Brian Libby), a tall glass of crazy who thoughtfully sticks around long enough to get knocked around by Sheriff Dan and then shot to death by his collection of bumbling deputies.

Apparently the only corpse available at the local research hospital, Kirby's body is spirited away to the laboratory of one Dr. Paul Spires (Steven Keats) and his creepy assistant (a perfectly cast William Finley), where they use him as a test subject for a cell-regenerating serum. That Kirby just killed two people an hour ago is of little consequence to Dr. Paul, as evidently he's working on a deadline and has no time to heed the warnings of Kirby's psychiatrist, Dr. Tom Halman (Ron Silver). Silver, God rest his soul, gives his role the same intensity as when he performed Mamet on Broadway, whereas Norris can't even be bothered to open his eyes all the way. Silver later shows up as a corpse hanging on the back of a door, and is still more energetic in that scene than Chuck Norris is in the entire movie.

As it turns out, cell regeneration serums do nothing to cure mental illness. It does, however, turn Kirby into the perfect killing machine, unnaturally strong, practically invincible, and not caring much who sees him skulking around. He weaves a path of destruction, with Sheriff Dan hot on his trail. It's not too urgent a situation, though, as Sheriff Dan has time to both take on an entire biker gang by himself, and rekindle a romance with his old flame, Allison (Toni Kalem, the future Mrs. Sal "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero), who happens to be Dr. Tom's sister, not that it has any relevance to the plot. Allison is reluctant to get back together with Sheriff Dan, but all he has to do to change her mind is work that Sheriff Dan magic, which apparently consists of poking at her face and shoulder like he's about to give her a wet willie.

The love scene in Silent Rage has become somewhat notorious in that (a) it's very long, (b) it's set to a theme song called "It's Time to Love," and (c) Norris's fans disliked it so much he vowed never to do another one again. Norris, for his part, looks about as uncomfortable as he does doing anything that doesn't involve defenestrating someone. The only time he looks more uncomfortable is when he attempts comic banter with his number one deputy Charlie (Stephen Furst), who is so dumb and ill-suited for his job (which involves carrying a loaded weapon) that one assumes everyone else more qualified left town or died at some point.

Actually, I'm wrong, there is one scene in which Sheriff Dan looks even more uncomfortable, and that's when Kirby fatally bear hugs Deputy Charlie, who dies in Sheriff Dan's arms. "He hurt me, Dan," Deputy Charlie gasps. "He hurt me bad." It's meant to be the tragic "darkest hour before the dawn" moment, and Sheriff Dan greets it by looking like someone hastily shoved a bag of damp laundry at him.

Because, like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Chuck Norris has never appeared in a film where he doesn't win in the end, he manages to defeat Kirby, despite Kirby being an unstoppable killing machine who can murder a man just by hugging him too hard. Though one would think that cutting off his head or running him through a woodchipper might be more effective, because this was meant to get a sequel, Sheriff Dan just throws Kirby into a well, which Kirby bursts out of Carrie-style just as the credits roll.

Alas, there would be no Silent Rage 2: Kirby Lives. Though the film was a modest success, as per director Michael Miller, Norris had no further interest in doing slasher-type movies. Not when there was a far more dangerous threat in the midst: foreign people, whom he shot, defenestrated, and, of course, kicked in the face in several movies throughout the rest of the 80s, before moving to television with the improbably popular Walker, Texas Ranger, another cowboy who's not too comfortable with the small talk and the emotions and the having more than one facial expression besides "annoyed grimace." Later, Norris would, of course, become the subject of a mildly amusing at best meme, and then endorse failed Presidential candidate and noted dog killer Mike Huckabee in 2016.

Other than his few attempts at doing comedy (which were terrible in their own way), Norris's films in the 80s and beyond were often joyless and self-serious, as if doing stuff like Delta Force and Invasion U.S.A. were brave patriotic acts in the face of the encroaching brown menace. They weren't even unintentionally funny, whereas Silent Rage is very funny without trying to be. It's Chuck Norris's best film, and another call to return to a time when movies were just allowed to be lousy, without it being deliberate meta commentary on genre pictures and the people who watch them.