Originally titled The Retreat until the marketing wizards at Lion's Gate bought the rights and the changed the title to Silent Scream for reasons that are only known to those who made the decision, this movie proves to be as uninspired and predictable as a bottom of the barrel slasher movie can get.

At any rate, the movie begins when Professor Barren (Peter Carey) invites a few of the students from his psychology class up to his cabin in the middle of nowhere for reasons that are never really properly explained. Let's just assume it's to get them away from school for a while to relax, because pretty much as soon as they arrive they all start humping one another. Once they're done humping, they get knocked off one at a time by a mysterious killer in a big, puffy winter jacket in various moderately grisly murder set pieces.

Once the first batch of dumb teenagers are dead, a second batch arrive. It seems that the professor had the good sense to send the kids up there in two different groups. Group number two arrives and wonders where their friends have gotten off to. They find a severed nipple in the snow outside but for some reason this doesn't clue them in to go get help or call the cops, instead they shack up in the cabin and start humping. Once that's done, the film just more or less repeats what happened to the first batch of students, just at a much slower pace, until the killer is ultimately revealed (and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out just who our friendly neighborhood maniac is).

Think of every cliché associated with the slasher genre, put them all in a blender and mash it all up – that's more or less what the filmmakers behind Silent Scream did. This movie brings absolutely nothing new to the genre, nor does it do anything particularly well. Add to this the fact that the last two thirds of the film pretty much just repeat what happened in the first third of the film, and you're left with a rather uninspired attempt that fails to entertain or to scare. While it's true that there is some appealing female flesh on display and there are a couple of moderately nasty kill scenes, none of these are interesting enough that we're able to look past the painfully obvious shortcomings that make up so much of the movie. There's very little, if any, real character development, the protagonists don't act or think like logical human beings and instead just wander into obviously dangerous settings knowing full well that a homicidal maniac is on the loose, and the reasoning behind their decision to go to the cabin in the first place is more or less left up to our imagination. Had the filmmaker's put more effort into making the story a little more interesting and a little more logical, they could have had a decent Urban Legend or I Know What You Did Last Summer in the snow knock off but instead this film isn't as good as even the lesser entries in those lackluster franchises.

To the film's credit, there are some inspired moments where the filmmakers do manage to make the cabin feel slightly claustrophobic and the cinematography isn't half bad for a low budget movie, but the reality is that this movie is a bit of a stinker.