“We’ve got ‘em plugged in, juiced up, twenty-four hours a day.”

Drake’s rating: I think I slept at a Howard Johns once

Drake’s review: Slasher films were running out of steam by 1984, having had a healthy five-year run in which scads of disfigured madmen wielding axes, machetes, and chainsaws chased down teenagers, college co-eds and camp counselors with wild abandon. Unsurprisingly, that formula had a limited shelf life and new ideas were going to be necessary to keep it going, which Wes Craven certainly realized when he leaned heavily on the supernatural elements for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

But ‘84 also saw the release of Silent Madness, a little slasher flick that contained a few surprises of its own. The first of these is the film’s choice of its Final Girl, who is not a girl at all. She is in fact a woman in her early thirties, and a medical professional at that.

Dr. Joan Gilmore (Belinda Montgomery) is a psychiatrist at a mental institution which has had the misfortune of releasing a homicidal patient due to a clerical error. Even more unfortunate is that the patient, one Howard Johns (Solly Marx, Neon Maniacs), has decided to continue on with the murder spree he started a few decades back. Johns immediately kills a couple making out in a van before making a beeline for the sorority house where he made headlines for the “Sorority Slaughter.”

Now the mental institution, for their part, tells Dr. Gilmore, “Oops, yeah, we SAID we released Johns by accident but what we REALLY meant is that he died last week, silly us,” but she’s not buying it. Gilmore takes off for the college where the sorority is located and meets up with local reporter Mark McGowan (David Greenan), who agrees to help her out. The local sheriff accepts Gilmore’s tale as well, at least until he contacts the mental institution and they sell him on the “Oh, no, Johns is dead, HONEST” story. Still, Gilmore isn’t about to let Johns go around killing everyone he meets and so she goes undercover at the sorority house, claiming to be a former member looking for a place to say for a few nights.

While at the sorority house Dr. Gilmore finds out more about Johns’ past, including the facts that he was a troubled custodian who worked there and that the murder spree happened after he was teased and hazed by several girls. From there her search for the killer continues, but it won’t be easy going since Johns is well-acquainted with the house and all of its hiding places. Plus, the mental institution itself is almost as great a threat. Having decided that their mistake can’t be made public, they need Dr. Gilmore out of the way and have dispatched a pair of creepy attendants to bring her back.

As Dr. Gilmore finds out while trying to find Johns and also evade her own employers, a woman’s work is never done.

Silent Madness is one of those films that just fell between the cracks. Released by Almi Pictures, a distributor of low-budget movies such as The House by the Cemetery and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, it seems to have had a scattered theatrical run in 1984 and possibly into ‘85.

And then it just disappeared.

One of the problems here may be that it was shot in 3-D, and some of the resulting effects stand out in a particularly garish way on a home viewing. Some of these sequences incorporate a rotoscoping technique, which is especially jarring when a thrown axe turns into a cartoon image at the last second as it hurtles towards the camera.

Still, Silent Madness has some good things going for it, including the actors involved. Belinda Montgomery and David Greenan make for a likable pairing, and it’s refreshing to see the lead actors taken seriously when they make dire warnings about a crazed killer on the loose. Granted, the slasher’s victims are primarily the young women of the sorority, a well-worn trope, but there are still a few elements here that make this flick a fun watch. It’s not the revolutionary take on the genre that A Nightmare on Elm Street was, but Silent Madness certainly had some ideas of its own and is more than just another bargain-basement slasher.

Slightly more, at the very least, which in 1984 was an accomplishment in itself.

Intermission!

• That is a pretty sweet T-series MG that Dr. Gilmore is driving. I’ve worked on one of those, and that’s a horror story all by itself.
• Sci-fi fans may recognize Belinda Montgomery from her role on “The Man from Atlantis,” a late ‘70s show about an amphibious man. It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.
• I love flashbacks that go B&W just to show you they occurred in the past.
• Oh, man, that blue shag interior in the van. That dude is just refusing to let the ‘70s go.
• Howard Johns is such a great name for a slasher villain. No menace at all, and it makes you want to say, “Oh, Howie!” every time a new body is found.
• The gore is pretty light in this one, which suits the general feel of the movie. It definitely leans into suspense and mystery as much as it does the slasher elements.
• Hey, she’s playing Dragon’s Lair! Anyone else remember that game? No? Yeah, um… (clears throat) Me, neither.
• This is a good looking movie, by the way, and takes advantage of its shooting locations.
• Silent Madness finally made it onto Blu-ray in 2020 thanks to Vinegar Syndrome, and it’s a well-deserved release. Now I just have to pester them to get the rights to Ruckus…