Dead Silence: Movie Review (2007)

(Originally published 2007)

The new James Wan movie, “Dead Silence,” features a ventriloquist’s dummy named Billy who comes to life in crashes of thunder and lightning to savagely eat the tongues of those who come too close to it. So right away, you know if the movie is for you.

For the rest of us, things are predictably bleak.

The movie, which Wan based on a screenplay by Leigh Whannell (his co-creator on the equally dumb “Saw” franchise), will surprise absolutely nobody that, so far, it's the worst movie of the year.

The film sends out rays of stupidity. It's an orgy of bad choices and miscalculations. It’s pointless, it's shabbily produced, it isn't scary, it fears humor. It just is, which isn't enough. The best that can be said for it is that it does feature a title that at least gets to the heart of what the movie elicits from its audience. Listen closely and you can hear in the dead silence the movie courts what's also dying onscreen--the two brain cells that conceived the movie.

The film stars Ryan Kwanten as Jamie, who receives a mysterious package that, once opened, turns out to reveal Billy himself. Since neither Ryan nor his wife, Lisa (Laura Regan), know what to make of the doll (in Jamie's hometown, dolls are considered trouble), they stop trying and instead order takeout. Trouble is, when Jamie returns with the food, he finds that Lisa herself has become dinner--her jaw and her tongue are missing.

Could Billy also have had hunger pangs? Jamie has his suspicions. So does Donnie Wahlberg’s Detective Lipton, though his suspicions have nothing to do with Billy and everything to do with Jamie. Still, since he doesn’t arrest Jamie for Lisa's murder, Jamie conveniently is allowed to dive into the rest of the plot, which involves his uneasy relationship with his father and hot new stepmother (Bob Gunton, Amber Valletta), and the powers of evil that boil within the angry she-ghost Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts), a dead ventriloquist whose dark past with dummies fuels her rage.

What "Dead Silence" misses is what the “Child’s Play” franchise embraced. If you’re going to feature a killer doll in your horror film, you better go for the camp aspect of it, let loose and have a little fun. Otherwise, you've somehow taken this way too seriously and cut your own throat.

That's the case here. "Dead Silence" couldn't make a clown happy.

Grade: F

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Labels: Horror