While it's right and just that B-movie aficionados everywhere today celebrate the 70th birthday of Chuck Norris, it'd be tough to argue that any of the conservative chop-socky master's efforts actually belong on any list devoted to the best -- or worst -- cinema has to offer. The exception is 1982's Silent Rage, which even three decades on stands as a strong contender for the most bizarre tagline in Hollywood history. It's not so much a marketing blurb as a short synopsis that also manages to blur actor and character. And like the poster, the trailer leads us to think it's all about Chuck.
Norris is in it, all right, just not as much as we'd hope, nor doing enough of what we want. As if trying an early version of Walker, Texas Ranger he inhabits the form of Dan Stevens, a taciturn Lone Star-state sheriff whose best friend appears to be his cowboy hat. We open not on him but on jittery nutjob John Kirby losing his shit in a rooming house and taking to the landlady and a fellow lodger with an ax. Stevens arrives and subdues Kirby but, remarkably, this is one maniac who can snap his handcuffs and kick the door off a cop car before being blasted full of holes. Delivered to the local hospital, a trio of Nobel Prize-obsessed boffins pump the mortally wounded Kirby full of their experimental plot device, the drug Mitogen 35, which sends his brain waves crazier, heals his injuries and gives him supernatural strength. Later, Kirby will escape, do some darkened-house POV stalking and slashing a la Halloween, return to the medical facility to ape Halloween II, and finally go head-first down a well so he can [SPOILER ALERT] pop up in a final freeze frame lifted from Friday the 13th.
When I say later, I mean later because, perhaps fittingly for a movie about a Frankenstein-style monster, Silent Rage is stitched together from wildly disparate parts. In his autobiography, The Secret Of Inner Strength, Norris recounts that the film was based on a story by his younger brother Aaron, who "felt it was time I played a lover as well as a fighter." Thus much of the film's horror-skewed moments occur without Chuck but with the trio of scientists arguing about what to do with Brian Libby's silent but rage-filled Kirby before they succumb to his knife, syringe or bargain-basement throttling. Ron Silver, Steven Keats and William Finley have fun with the amusingly stinky dialogue ("What if he killed somebody?" asks Finley, reasonably, given he's talking about a recently resurrected murderous maniac on the loose. "Don't be ridiculous!" snaps Keats.)
Norris's fightin' and lovin' moments are grafted into the plot most awkwardly. In a scene that bears no relation to the rest of the film, our sheriff takes on a couple dozen bikers in bar, with the rebel rousers politely presenting themselves one at a time for our man's righteous justice. This half-hearted sequence climaxes with the main villain obligingly riding his bike up a ramp and into the big stick that soft-spoken Chuck's wields.
Silent Rage's love story is approximately as heartfelt and convincing. Seems that six years ago, Dan walked away from a relationship with the comely Alison, sister to Ron Silver's scientist. When they meet again, she slaps his face and tells him not to bother trying to talk her into bed. As if he would -- the dude barely speaks, regardless of the situation. But, as jump cuts would have it, they're next making out in Chuck's first "heavy love scene," as he describes it in Inner Strength. Most amusingly, as was noted in the New York Times review at the time, director Michael Miller shoots a romantic montage -- hammock swinging, chardonnay drinking on the verandah -- with Norris sans shirt. Funny doesn't quite cover it, in more than one sense.
With its leaden pace and long stretches without dialogue -- this really has too much filler, not enough killer -- Silent Rage is one bad movie best enlivened by loud lounge-room commentary. Why does Kirby suddenly have a futuristic gray jumpsuit with matching shoes? Why do his murders get less creative, to the point where he just starts squeezing people to death? Why do characters walk away from the fallen bad guy when this is one slasher-killer whose regenerative powers guarantee he's going to get up?
Ultimately, the question Silent Rage raises is: Why did Chuck Norris do this movie when he's required to do little in the way of martial arts? Generously, you might say it was to stretch his range with the aforementioned romance angle. Then again, Norris notes in his book how, just prior to this going into production, his fee had risen to $250,000 a film. Which makes it tempting to think he saw how much he wasn't in the script and decided it was a sweet payday.
As if to make up for this, the poster uses his name three times. Fans weren't fooled, though, and while Chuck's Good Guys Wear Black, A Force Of One and The Octagon had been hits, Silent Rage fought below its weight at the box-office, though it gained a small and rapid home-video fanbase. But Norris, and the filmmakers he worked with, learned from the experience, and he'd soon be back on top -- or at least high on the B-list -- with the likes of Lone Wolf McQuade, Missing In Action, Code Of Silence and Invasion U.S.A. These flicks didn't try to rip-off slasher tropes, make Chuck a romantic lead or hide his absence with essay-length taglines. Instead, they winningly focused on what Norris did best: fighting bad guys with fists, feet and firepower.
Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, Michael Adams' pop-culture memoir about his quest to find the world's worst movie, is available now at Amazon.