No One Heard the Scream

"No One Heard the Scream" has many of the tropes of a mystery, or even giallo, film. However it largely eschews these genres for most of the run-time, creating less a genre film than a twisted drama about two people pushed to the edge of experience.

The protagonist is an expensive mistress for rich men who witnesses her neighbour disposing of his wife's body. The neighbour takes her hostage and the duo go on a trip to the ocean to dump the body in the sea.

Along the way, the movie loses its original thriller-aspect and becomes a drama about two people in a strange situation. The actress, particularly, is a problem, so cold and inert. When the movie makes its predictable, if belated, detour into homoeroticism with the introduction of an unnecessary nephew of hers, it's almost a relief to see something on screen other than hardened, impassive faces.

There is a romance that feels unlikely and forced, and you are forced to make the conclusion that the openly gay Eloy de la Iglesia just wasn't comfortable shooting romance, love or eroticism between men and women.

Perhaps this extended to his casting of the female lead. She looks like someone who was probably a knockout about five years ago. Would men who can afford to keep an expensive mistress use someone her age?

Then there is a conclusion, which is also a little hard to swallow, and smacks of the tawdry plot developments we got from the giallo genre. It seems like the movie is doubling back on itself, forgetting the progress it made as an interesting drama, and saying "See! This was a thriller, after all!"

I don't know if de la Iglesia ever really made genre pictures; even "The Cannibal Man", notorious Video Nasty though it may be, was perhaps equal parts drama. It also featured an unnecessary young male character as a source of homoeroticism.

Perhaps de la Iglesia, who was a superb filmmaker, needed to be encouraged to make dramas and leave behind genre tropes. For the rest of his career, that's what he seemed to do, thankfully.

Why Savilla didn't immediately call the police is the big flaw in the screenplay. The dialogue is stilted as is often the case with translated conversations. I only made it to the end because of Carmen Sevilla. The music selections were awful. I have to add that the twist ending was a huge surprise and creative.

No heard a scream or Nadie oyo' gritar is a suspenseful and thrilling Spanish movie. After leaving his lover Oscar : Antonio Casas in the metropolis London, Elisa :Carmen Sevilla goes to her lonely urbanization, a solitary building with a few neighbours and a deaf porter : Goyo Lebrero. One day, Elisa sees how her next man door Miguel, Vicente Parra, throws down a murdered woman into the elevator. Then, Miguel threatens and coerces her to disappear the corpse. Along the way Elisa falls in love for him .Things go awry when there shows up her nephew and lover, Tony Isbert.

This thrilling picture has a twisted plot plenty of turns and surprises. Harshly paced in fits and starts and taking parts here and there of other suspense movies. The picture displays an interesting intrigue in Hitchcockian style with tension, suspense, thrills and an unexpected denouement. It belongs to a quartet of Eloy de la Iglesia films characterized by enhancing the erotic and suspenseful aspects such as El Techo de Cristal, La semana del asesino, and Una gota de sangre para vivir amando.

It contains an evocative and adequate cinematography by Francisco Fraile. As well as an anticlimatic musical score by Fernando Garcia Morcillo. The motion picture was professionally direted by Eloy de La Iglesia, but it has failures, flaws and gaps. Eloy de la Iglesia was a talented Spanish movies director , he began working in cinema in 1966 , at his 22 years old , he debuted in a kiddies production , ¨Fantasy 3¨(66) . Following a sordid melodrama ¨Algo Amargo En La Boca¨ (67) and a boxing story , ¨Cuadrilatero¨(69) . De La Iglesia realizes a lot of thrilling pictures with erotic background as ¨Techo Cristal¨(70) , ¨Nadie Oyó Gritar¨ (72) , ¨Gota Sangre Para Seguir Amando¨ (73) , and scabrous tales as ¨Juegos Amor Prohibido¨(75) , ¨Otra Alcoba¨ (76) . And concerning youthful gay : ¨Placeres Ocultos¨(76) , ¨El Sacerdote¨(78) and politicians : ¨The Deputy ¨, ¨Mujer Del Ministro¨ . Although he became notorious in the years of the Spanish transition to democracy with shocking and polemic films as ¨El Pico 1¨ and 2¨ , ¨Cólegas¨ , ¨Navajeros¨, ¨La Estanquera De Vallecas¨ (87) . All of them dealt with druggies , dope sellers , delinquency , terrorism , underworld suburban and generational problems are the habitual subjects in his films , and specially dedicated to the underworld of heroin ; as well as the gay world . Passing of time hasn't had mercy with most of those movies , but they represented a time and a way of life in the history of Spain ; and now they may seem a little bit naive . His last films were an academic rendition based on Henry James' novel : ¨The turn of the screw¨ and ¨Los Novios Búlgaros¨.

This is another film by interesting Spanish director Eloy Inglesias. It might be the least interesting of the four films of his I've seen, but it has the same themes that seem to run through all his work--apartment living, voyeurism, domestic murder, and repressed homosexuality. It also features two of his regular actors Vincent Parra ("Cannibal Man) and Carmen Sevilla ("The Glass Ceiling"). Sevilla plays a high-priced call girl who herself is keeping a younger male lover. She comes out the door of her luxury high-rise apartment one day and witnesses her neighbor (Parra) dropping a body,apparently his wife, down the elevator shaft. This may seem like another knock-off of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (which Inglesias had already "knocked off" in his film "The Glass Ceiling"). But it goes in a different direction when the man kidnaps her at gunpoint and forces her to help him get rid of the body. A strange relationship develops between them.

This movie is pretty illogical as Sevilla's character passes up several opportunities to turn her neighbor in, even before she develops a Stockholm-syndrome-type relationship with him. There's a twist at the end which is pretty ridiculous, but certainly unexpected. It's really this absurdity though that marks this as a kind of Spanish giallo (an "amarillo"?) since it lacks the over-top delerium of most Italian-Spanish gialli, and is a little more of a subdued character study. If it were more logical, it would be much more in the realm of Hitchcock or Claude Chabrol than in the realm of the gialli.

Inglesias also dials back the homoeroticism a little here. Unlike in "Cannibal Man" there is no intimation that his male characters are closeted homosexuals. Sevilla in some ways may perhaps be a kind of female stand-in for the gay director, and he certainly fetishes the two male actors, who frequently appear shirtless while the beautiful Sevilla (to the disappointment of heterosexual males everywhere) does not. This is probably the weakest of Inglesias' films that I've seen, but it's certainly not bad.

I can't deny "No One Heard the Scream" turned out a massive disappointment to me. My expectations for this - supposedly - Spanish Giallo were quite high, but it didn't fulfil any of those, and that was actually also the case for that other exploitation effort "Cannibal Man" from the same writer/director Eloy de la Iglesia. Perhaps the work of this reasonably acclaimed Spanish cult director isn't for me.

The main reason why I really couldn't get into this flick is because I didn't believe ANY of the story's pivotal aspects. I can not see the prudish and uptight Elisa (Carmen Sevilla) as a deluxe escort girl. I do not see a relentless wife killer and cover-up strategist in the nervous and repressed homosexual Miguel (Vincente Parra). I will not accept that police officers do not open car trunks when people are behaving so strangely about it. Most of all, I can't believe for a second that an odd romance develops between an alleged killer and the witness who's reluctantly forced to help him disposing the body. We all heard of Stockholm Syndrome, but this is ridiculous!

"No One Heard the Scream" may look interesting and exciting, but it's a terribly boring. Well, in fact, it becomes boring after half an hour. The first 30 minutes are mainly frustrating. Terribly frustrating because Elisa has more than a dozen of opportunities to alert the police and turn in her neighbor after witnessing how he clumsily attempts to dump a woman's body in the elevator shaft, but she doesn't. When it becomes obvious that she'll not report him to the police, for whatever reason, the film becomes dull and even more implausible. There's an - admittedly unforeseeable - twist at the end that initially comes across as ingenious and clever, but I advise you not to contemplate or analyze it, because it also doesn't make much sense.