If you want to kill some time with a high-energy action movie, Tubi has just the right thing for you. A forgotten Chuck Norris classic. According to IMDb, Silent Rage came out in 1982 and has a soundtrack with Katey Sagal from Futurama. The martial arts in the movie are amazing, and the villain is basically injected with the “Captain America super soldier serum.” People often call this movie the “human Terminator” because its main villain is almost impossible to kill. This gives Chuck Norris a lot to chew on while he shows off his black belt skills by doing crazy high kicks.
In the movie Silent Rage, Chuck Norris plays Sheriff Daniel Stevens, who is trying to stop a crazy man with superpowers from destroying a small Texas town. John Kirby, played by Brian Libby, has violent outbursts because his mental illness isn’t being treated. When the police catch him in the middle of a double murder, they have to shoot him, which almost kills him. When Kirby is rushed to the hospital, two geneticist doctors suggest using the latest cell-repair technology to bring Kirby back from the brink of death.
The treatment heals Kirby miraculously, but it backfires on the doctors when the cells repair themselves too quickly, turning Kirby into a monster like Wolverine from the X-Men who can almost never be hurt because he can heal himself. Chuck Norris’ character then spends the rest of the movie trying to stop Kirby from destroying the town while Kirby goes on a violent rampage and kills or hurts almost everyone who gets in his way. In a series of fights, Norris’ character Dan and Libby’s character John Kirby fight each other with guns, fists, and roundhouse kicks. This leads to one of the most amazing action set pieces of the 1980s, in which Kirby is kicked through a tavern window and then down a well.
Silent Rage is known for Chuck Norris’ great stunt choreography and the high-energy action set pieces that happen all over the movie. It is said that director Michael Miller spent weeks talking to the best geneticists in the country to prepare for the movie. This was done so that the science fiction idea of self-healing cells could be shown in a realistic way. The film was the first one made by Chuck Norris’ newly formed production company, Topkick Productions. Topkick Productions later made the hit TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, in which Norris starred for almost 200 episodes from 1993 to 2001.
Chuck Norris has been the gold standard for tough guys in movies for a long time, which made him a popular meme in the early 2000s. If “Still a better love story than Twilight” or “But then I took an arrow to the knee” were classic internet jokes in the early days of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, they would be on Mount Rushmore with Chuck Norris being an unstoppable badass and bacon making everything taste better. Silent Rage is one of the many movies that put the martial artist-turned-actor on the map. It taught a whole generation of kids that with enough determination and high-intensity training, they could roundhouse kick their problems away.
Forced Vengeance, the Missing in Action trilogy, and The Way of the Dragon, starring Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee, are also in this genre. Chuck Norris is more likely to play himself in movies these days, taking advantage of the running joke about how tough he is. Most recently, Norris lent his voice to the action-comedy crime video game Crime Boss: Rockay City, along with other action stars like Danny Glover, Michael Madsen, and Danny Trejo.
No one knows where Chuck Norris’ high-flying kicks will show up next. The actor is now 83 years old and has made a lot of money from movies and TV. He also has six grandchildren to take care of, so don’t expect him to be a big box office draw this year. As for his legacy, you can watch free movies like “Silent Rage” or keep an eye out for the many new martial arts stars who were probably inspired by the many movies he made from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
