‘Dead Silence’ Cruises to Self-Preservation

Don’t be misled by the Spring Break, muscle-flexing bimbo opening of “Dead Silence” (at 8 tonight on KTTV Channel 11 and XETV Channel 6). Just when your expectations are at their lowest, the squealing Palm Springs poolside partying turns into a surprisingly taut, all-too-human story about the lengths to which best friends will go to save their skins.

Three cheerful co-eds in a white convertible burst into Palm Springs with the top down and the cap off the liquor bottle. They’re gorgeous, affable and reckless. Then the real world intrudes in a jolting desert highway accident that we won’t give away because it deserves to be experienced as a movie event. Suffice to say, none of the young women is physically hurt. Their turmoil, involving a vow of silence, goes much deeper than that.

The momentum of the script (by J. David Miles, from a story by executive producers Bob Bibb and Lewis Goldstein) draws you into the growing dilemma faced by the young women. The characters may be impossibly golden-looking and spoiled, but there’s a strong ongoing identity factor. It doesn’t take much to exchange places with their frailties and guilt. Who has never had an impulse to do the wrong thing on the altar of self-preservation?

Betrayal, cowardice and the unraveling of female bonding are at issue here, propelled by the convincing performances, under director Peter O’Fallon, of the trio of stars--Renee Estevez, Lisanne Falk and Carrie Mitchum.

Mitchum (granddaughter of Robert Mitchum) catches the desperation of decency overwhelmed by fear; Estevez (whose father is Martin Sheen) maneuvers, with the fury of a latter-day Lady Macbeth, to save herself no matter the cost, and, in the movie’s most spellbinding performance, the tremulous Falk slips into a personal hell.