Blu-ray Review: No One Heard The Scream (1973)

Jet-setting, gold diggin’ beauty Elisa (Carmen Sevilla delivering the sexy in spades) peeps her neighbor Miguel (Vincente Parra), chucking his dead wife, Nuria (María Asquerino) down an elevator shaft… but it’s a double-peep back-fire as Miguel sees her seeing him and forces her to help him thus making her an accomplice and more likely to keep her flappin’ yapper closed, ya see?
As you may not expect, Elisa digs on this action and goes balls deep in helping Miguel keep that lil’ indiscretion on the down low… until she doesn’t and tries to kill him… and then things go completely sideways. Spanish giallo (sort of) ensues!
Coming hot on the heels of the previous year’s Cannibal Man (which I set my eerie eyeballs right here), but predating perhaps his most well-known work; the juvenile delinquent pictures he dove head first into in the early ‘80s (and which I covered right here), Eloy de la Iglesia’s  No One Heard the Scream is a beautifully lensed suspense shocker that has more than a passing similarly to it’s cinematic peer; Italy’s giallo thrillers which also feature artsy-fartsy cinematography and design, beautiful women, and murder biz… not to mention fantastic scores (which this film also possesses thanks to composer Fernando García Morcillo).
While tonally different than most of his output, de la Iglesia nevertheless provides a great sense of steadily growing tension throughout the film (derailed a tad by a predictable twist along the way), and the film succeeds in no small part to the game performance of Sevilla who owns the screen as the shifty sex-pot that is easy to believe would have both older and younger men falling head-over-heels for her as they do in the picture… and her interactions with Parra are absolutely dead-on and make the picture engaging as all hell to watch (it also adds more drama then one would find in a giallo).
Speaking of “watching” things, you won’t be watching many special features on this Blu-ray release from Severin as an interview with film scholar Dr. Andy Willis comprising the entirety of the offerings at hand.
No One Heard the Scream, while containing many of the stylistic elements of the giallo picture is, at it’s core, a thriller that isn’t afraid to dip it’s toes into socio-political commentary, pitch black humor, and yeah, that ol’ death dealin’ goodness we all know and love, and honestly shouldn’t be missed!