Eloy de la Iglesia spins romance out of body disposal in NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM, on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Elisa (Carmen Savila, KING OF KINGS) is a high-class call girl who regularly travels from Spain to England for a wealthy client. Approaching middle age, she wants something more out of life and decides at the last moment to forego her latest trip and stay at home in her apartment building during the long weekend with only the company of the deaf super (Antonio Casas, THE BIG GUNDOWN) and the under-construction building's only other tenants: mild-mannered Miguel (Vicente Parra, THE SPIRITUALIST) and his imperious wife Nuria (María Asquerino, RED RINGS OF FEAR). When Elisa stumbles upon Miguel dumping his wife's body down the shaft of one of the broken elevators, she barricades herself in her apartment. She is unable to call the police because Miguel keeps her line engaged pleading to speak to her in a civil manner. When he infiltrates her apartment via the adjoining balconies, he tells her at gunpoint that he has no plans to kill her; instead, he will ensure her silence by making her his accomplice in all of his subsequent steps to dispose of his wife's body and will claim that he killed his wife because of her if she phones the police. Miguel further cements her apparent complicity by picking the lake beside her vacation cabin to dump his wife's body, but they run into a number of obstacles on their way there, including a multi-casualty bus accident and Elisa's kept "nephew" Tony (Tony Isbert, THE DRACULA SAGA) who is puzzled at Elisa's apparent attraction to someone who cannot financially sustain both their lifestyles.

Although director Eloy de la Iglesia had first made a name for himself as a director with a popular children's film FANTASIA… 3 – actually taking advantage like a lot of directors at the time of a government grant for family-friendly entertainment – the first films to express his true voice, interests, and obsessions as a filmmaker were a quartet of films that mixed melodrama, eroticism, thriller elements, social concerns, and homoeroticism (expressed in mostly indirect ways to get around the censors). His fourth film THE GLASS CEILING was a psychological thriller in which Savilla played a housewife left alone in her apartment building during the week by her traveling salesman husband, and her uncertainty as to whether her upstairs neighbor (Paty Sheppard, WEREWOLF SHADOW) has murdered her own husband. The success of that undeservedly underseen film paved the way for the more daring CANNIBAL MAN in which Parra played a slaughterhouse worker whose already oppressive world becomes more claustrophobic as he must kill repeatedly to cover up an accidental death. NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM brings together Savilla and Parra in a scenario that reworks and refines elements of both prior films, including the marginalization of Miguel by murder and Elisa by her profession – indeed, she scoffs at Miguel's choice of her for an accomplice as someone apparently "respectable" and sensitive to scandal – and the romantic complications that ensue seemingly out of their shared alienation. If the ending seems like one twist too many, both the need of the censors not to reward crime and the apparent absurdity of the path to this ending are mitigated by the look on Elisa's face that has her reconciled to her place in life.

While CANNIBAL MAN's homoerotic elements were more pronounced because of the centrality of marginalized male characters, THE GLASS CEILING's ogling of Dean Selmier's sweaty, shirtless sculptor were obscured by the film taking the perspective of Savilla's frustrated heroine. The gaze is more complicated in NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM because Iglesia's camera ogles Isbert even before we are shown just how besotted Elisa is as much by Tony's body as the boundless possibilities of his relative youth; and the narrative tension of a sequence of Tony and Miguel sharing clothes may be Elisa's worry about what each will discover about her through the other, but there is an erotic undercurrent when one distinguishes Elisa's gaze from Iglesia's in the sleek photography of genre regular Francisco Fraille (DR. JEKYLL AND THE WEREWOLF, LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE) and some of the subtler passages of the diverse, jazzy scoring of Fernando García Morcillo (THE NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS, THE WITCHES MOUNTAIN).

NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM was unreleased in the United States theatrically or on home video, and apparently few other places since it was not dubbed into English unlike THE GLASS CEILING and CANNIBAL MAN. The only way to see it in English-friendly form was a poor quality English-subtitled multi-generational bootleg from Video Search of Miami. A more recent DVD release in Spain from Divisa unfortunately offered no English subtitle options. Severin Films comes to the rescue with a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray that the cover only states was sourced from an "HD scan from the original negative." Although such wording would seem to suggest an older master, the results are stunningly gorgeous throughout with wardrobe and décor accents that pop against the gray urban settings and the rustic lakeside scenes, as well as some nice fine detail in clothing, hair, and facial features in close-ups. The Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track contains a few instances of heavily-accented English during the opening London scenes but the post-dubbed audio is always clear. The canned sound effects have there limitations but the score sounds full-bodied throughout. Optional English subtitles are free of any standout errors.

The disc's sole extra is "Eloy de la Iglesia and the Spanish Giallo" (23:45), an interview with film scholar Andy Willis who notes the previous decade's upsurge in film production in Spain with Hollywood producer Samuel Bronston setting up a studio in Spain, making use of the talents of blacklisted screenwriters and the relatively lower production costs, and the influx of Italian co-productions' influence on genre filmmaking in Spain from westerns to the giallo. His discussion of the differences between the Italian and Spanish examples of the genre lead to a wider appreciation of de la Iglesia's thrillers beyond NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM with particular attention to CANNIBAL MAN (also recently given a great special edition release by Severin Films). (Eric Cotenas)