Silent Thunder

• Directed by Isaac Medeiros
• October 13, 2023

A US Marshal along with two bank robbers set out to rescue a group of prostitutes abducted by a gang of desert dwelling cannibals. This sounds familiar…

Horror Westerns are not nearly as prolific as they could be. Or often as good. The isolation of the Old West alone makes this underused subgenre fertile ground for chills and scares. The ones we do get are often cheesy or badly made or just never get to the heights they should for numerous reasons.

I am not against heavy dialogue, but Silent Thunder has heavy dialogue that accomplishes so very little if it accomplishes anything. The pointless speechification makes the movie boring despite opening relatively strong. While on a small budget the moment with the bounty hunters promises something weird and then the story dives right into a lot of dull yapping.

By default as the most famous name present, Ted McGinley stars in this as the grizzled Marshal Spencer Sunday thrust into an uncertain situation. I know who Ted McGinley is and I’m pretty familiar with a good chunk of his résumé, but I had trouble recognizing him in character. A few extra pounds aside, he dives into the part in a way that would put some of the better character actors out there to shame.

Sunday has two outlaws in custody named Don (Jack Lucarelli) and Quinn (Jonathan Stoddard) with all three eventually going after the threat because one of them has a personal connection to one of the victims. Sunday for reasons unfathomable to me takes a backseat in the movie to the two chuckleheads he is escorting despite being far more interesting.

There are a number of attractive women hired to play prostitutes. They obviously cast them because they were attractive enough and could do some acting. The same could be said of anybody yanked from the street. Often wooden, they were barely engaging. More importantly, they looked like they just came from the mall or a photo shoot and haven’t been living in the West with their very modern appearance.

They matter to the story because eventually everybody here runs afoul of some cannibals (possibly monsters) that kidnap women and rape them to breed more of their kind. Though I have not seen it yet, from what I can tell this liberally borrows from Bone Tomahawk. If you do that you need to make it interesting and I think I have already driven home my thoughts there.

As I hinted Silent Thunder has trouble deciding to the main character is. Is it the marshal? Is it the women? Is it the two boobs that Sunday captured? It moves from each yet never makes this an ensemble piece. So-and-so is the main one then director Isaac Medeiros gets a little bored and moves on.

Silent Thunder is close to being a guilty pleasure at the minimum but never quite makes it because it doesn’t know who it’s specifically about or if it’s about the group and it never gets really scary or disturbing. The scares are undercut by the largely bad acting with McGinley doing far too much work while others are there for a paycheck and presumably a banging craft services table. 

Silent Thunder is not a bad movie nor is it great but it is a missed opportunity. At the minimum it needed to decide who the main character was or if there was none and it was about the group. You won’t feel completely disappointed but. You will be surprised though how well Jefferson Darcy does.