Silent Rage

1982 film by Michael Miller
Miller said the film was written with Chuck Norris in mind. "You don’t hire Chuck Norris not to do karate. It wasn’t like it was an old John Wayne script that they ended up giving to Chuck. He does his thing. I think the idea was to try and broaden the audience in that it wasn’t a karate movie. In my mind, it was a Frankenstein movie. It was like Frankenstein meets Chuck." Miller says Norris was most comfortable fighting. The actor improvised a love scene with Toni Kalem, "and that was a big deal for him," said Miller. "I said, “Just talk and have fun,” I told him. He did, and it’s a nice little scene."

RiffTrax released Silent Rage on demand on September 6, 2013.

The film was released theatrically in the United States by Columbia Pictures in April 1982. It grossed $10,490,791 at the box office.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 67% based on 6 reviews. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 31 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Variety wrote that the film "seems as if it were made with a demographics sampler entitled '10 Sleazy Ways To Cash In On The Exploitation Market.' The only trouble is the filmmakers have employed all ten techniques in one picture. The result is a combination horror kung fu oater woman in peril mad scientist film with more unintentional laughs than probably appear possible in the space of 100 minutes." John Corry of The New York Times thought that the only interesting scenes are those with the mad scientists, as Norris has "no screen presence to speak of." Rita Kempley of The Washington Post called Norris' martial arts "a curious footnote in a formula horror film". Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times praised the "shrewd, witty script." Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two and a half stars out of four and wrote, "As in 'Jackson County Jail,' his 1976 sleeper hit, Miller has given some inventive, energetic touches to a crude formula film. He doesn't deal in sophisticated material, but he's surprisingly sophisticated in the way he handles his raw material." Jimmy Summers wrote in BoxOffice magazine, "How you take all this depends a great deal on whether you accept it as tongue in cheek satire or simply dismiss it as dumb filmmaking. Considering how corny and obvious most of it is, you hope for the sake of the filmmakers they meant to be tongue in cheek." Norris said that he received negative feedback from fans over his love scenes. He subsequently resolved to avoid them in the future.

Miller said he hoped to make sequels. "At the end, the guy is still not dead. But that never happened. I would have liked that. You can see that this guy is not a slasher. He kills people the way Frankenstein’s creature kills people. He throws them and bang." Miller says the reason was "I don’t think this was one of Chuck’s favorite pictures. He went to the screening, and I think that was the last time I ever saw him. He seemed to enjoy it, but he wasn’t sure it was going to work. It was outside of the formulas he’d been doing. I think he was too much of a gentleman to ever say, “I don’t like this.” I just don’t think this was in his wheelhouse. He didn’t do any more slasher type pictures."