The Chuck Norris Report: Silent Rage

Chuck Norris is everywhere these days, so there's no need for me to go over why he is everywhere-- the reasons are clear: the man's a god. However, like all things that get blown out of proportion or become internet phenomena, there is a certain annoyance that comes with being a proprietor of said thing, especially if you liked it before it was cool.

Which is the case with Chuck Norris and I. I can't claim credit for making Chuck Norris hip, but I was definitely on the cusp of Norrisness before he hit it big. I suppose it was when Conan O'Brien started doing his Chuck Norris Lever bit that Chuck entered mainstream consciousness, but I was Chucking it up in my youth, watching 80s Chuck flicks and Walker Texas Ranger episodes.

But, alas, the purpose of this article isn't to illustrate my devotion to Chuck Norris, it's to set up a far larger purpose. This article, the first of what is many to come, will spotlight a Chuck Norris movie, and this feature will run until there are no more Chuck Norris films to be written about!

Insanity? Likely.

My crew Matt, Will, and Jake are similarly addicted to the Norris, so we're doing this thing as a team. We'll be going by the IMDb list of films Chuck has starred in as the definitive lexicon, right now a total of 34. On the right of the page will be an official list of viewed films, and every time I watch one, I will review it in a post. Having already watched a number of them, they will appear on the right (sadly) without posts of their own. Maybe one day I will do a "best-of" feature of those ones to let you know if they are worthwhile.

To kick things off tonight, we have the exact opposite of that: easily the worst Chuck Norris movie I've ever seen, and possibly the worst movie I've ever seen period-- hailing from 1982, it's Silent Rage.


What's more scary than how bad this movie was is the fact that while searching for that picture, I came across a website selling it as a poster. Actually, now that I think about it, that's awesome.

Since this is our first Chuck Norris post, we should probably go over the ground rules of how Chuck Norris movies work. You've got two main types: the kind where Chuck kicks ass with his hands and legs, and the kind where Chuck kicks ass with guns. Occasionally you get that special kind of Chuck movie where he does both. Silent Rage is, unfortunately, not that kind of Chuck movie.

The premise goes like this: a guy goes nuts and has to be taken down by police officers using force (ie. being shot like five times in the chest). He somehow doesn't die after this, and miraculously makes it into a surgery room to be operated on. Things don't go well, and all is lost until a crazed doctor tries his experimental formula on him, because what does he have to lose, right? The formula works, the patient stabilizes! Oh wait, he's become a superhuman with suppressed brain functions! Sounds familiar right? It's like Frankenstein plus Chuck Norris as a cop.

Only Chuck Norris is barely in the movie. We see Chuck at the start, and Chuck at the end, but other than a few moments of Chuck Norris lovemaking in between (and a scene where Chuck beats up a gang-- more on that later) Chuck is absent from the film. Instead, we are treated to an extremely tedious affair featuring bad actors, including the fat guy from Animal House, only he's not funny in this. Why is this so hard to watch? It's not necessarily the bad actors, but it's the inexistent plot.

There was literally no plot in Silent Rage! The story is: monster created, Chuck Norris has to kill monster. But the movie runs 103 minutes-- to get to the final battle, the viewer has to suffer through the minutia of the daily lives of characters you don't care about. And I'm talking minutia: there was a five minute scene between two unimportant characters talking about ordering a pizza! The plot was so thin, a fight scene was added just to liven it up (which, at this point, I can't really complain about). Despite the obvious fact that it was simply thrown in and didn't have anything to do with the main plot, it's a good Chuck sequence. Chuck arrives at a bar that has been overrun by a gang (how did he know to go there?), and decides to serve up some justice Chuck-style. Between this scene and the final scene where Chuck (spoilers) beats the bad guy, there's some good hand to hand action. Also to the movie's credit, there are many opportunities for awkward Chuck moments, which are always great for a laugh.

In the end, the problem with Silent Rage is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a Chuck Norris action film? Is it a horror film? A comedy? It tries to be all of these, and really doesn't come through. I mean, scroll up and look at that poster again-- there's a lot of promise there. What could have been a momentous edition to the Chuck Norris collection turns out pretty pointless. Avoid this one unless indeed you have seen all of Chuck's other 33 films. As of right now, it's the shittiest.

Well, at least we're one closer to the goal.