Chuck Norris Versus the Off-Brand Michael Myers

Chuck Norris is such an all-around, world-renowned, American Icon Exemplar of Badassery that to go over the fact of exactly WHY seems as if you're running a hamster wheel in some godforsaken dimension where movies this good go to die. (I have no idea what any of that is supposed to mean, but it sounded cool tripping off my tongue and out of my brain pan so there it is.)

This movie Silent Rage, is so vastly entertaining, beginning with axe murders, bloodletting, splattery goodness, and a lot of impressive biker mamas with surgically-augmented mammaries, that it's hard to slow down and be even a little reasonable about it. It's good. It's good. Damn it, it ain't got no "bad" in it, ya' dig me?

A mentally dysfunctional (to put it mildly) psychopath, "John" (Brian Libby), goes on a killing spree, murders his mother (or I guess that's who she's supposed to be), and is gunned down for all of his trouble. Chuck, as small-town Sherriff Dan Stevens, is there, with his three-hundred-pound stand-in for Don Knotts, "Deputy Charlie" (Stephen Furst), to kick psycho ass and take names. He almost gets his head blown off for the trouble.

Chuck is taking up with the sister of a superdoctor research scientist played by Ron Silver, and the psycho, laid out on the slab, is injected with some Frankesrteinian B-Movie smokey beaker super-secret formula that makes him a genetic mutant kill machine. (Hm, "genetic mutant kill machine."I like the sound of that phrase.)

He can be slashed and the wound will immediately close, like his skin is some shit they found at the UFO crash in Roswell. Anyway, as good of an idea as it was to inject a newly-dead psychopathic killer with a super serum that makes him damn near invincible, the eggheads (sans Silver) all pay for their rather egregious decision. Anyway, Sherrif Stevens, when he's not whoppin' up on whole bars full of curiously obnoxious, sadistic, and not-very-bright bikers, is making the beast with two backs with Silver's sister Alison (Toni Kalem). John, silent, clad in off-brand Michael Myers overalls, but unmasked (also quite tall and rather menacing but with a good full head of hair) kills everything in sight and then goes to a mountain cabin and kills some more. And so you know Dan Stevens is gonna whoop up on that ass at some point. And brother, the aud is agog at the menace and the fury inherent in that final reckoning melee.

(I'm just a goddamned wordsmith, aren't I?)

Of course, there are a number of good moments stolen from better pictures, including one we've already referenced, and the direction here is not on a par with John Carpenter's IMHO. Regardless of that (and regardless of the fact that the John character is shot and falls through a window to the ground below, where it is believed he is dead, but he is not--sound familiar?) the film is so much dopey, campy fun, you won't even stop to recognize the fact that it's pure Grade-A, B-Movie slopolla.

Because in the end, fun is all that matters. I have to accord Silent Rage a heaping big pile of turkey wampum, kemosabe (again, I have no fucking clue as to what I'm sayin' here, but it was probably meant to be witty), and proclaim it and its aromatic redolence of unwashed biker, fat small-town deputy, huge hooters, and lots and lots of unbathed psychopath, as a cinematic barnyard extravaganza. But there are no chickens to pluck. At the end of the picture, there is only CHUCK.

Har-har.

Silent Rage (ft. Chuck Norris) | Full Movie | CineStream

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