Movie Review: Dead Silence

Posted on March 19, 2007

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. This is going to be a shorter review, I should think, because I saw Dead Silence in an actual theatre, so I didn’t have my notebook. It was Sarah’s birthday, and this is what she wanted to see. Nothing good on IMDB, so I’ll do the basic plot summary myself. Jamie Ashen finds a mysterious package on his doorstep, an antique ventriloquist’s dummy. He runs out for takeout and his wife decides to set the doll up and freak out Ashen. Upon his return, he finds his wife dead, her face disfigured. A homocide detective (played by Donny Wahlberg, the only name on the cast list that I’ve ever heard of) let’s it be known that he suspects Jamie, whilst Jamie returns to his hometown, where local legend, in the form of a childhood rhyme, tells of a woman who had dolls instead of children and if you screamed when she saw you, you would die. There he meets his estranged father, a cagey undertaker, the undertaker’s crazy wife, and finds that the detective has followed him there. Then a bunch of stuff happens involving ventriloquist dummies, local legend, and a pisspoor attempt at suspense.

I find dolls and ventriloquist dummies quite frightening, and the one in this movie was crafted to be quite so. My great grandmother in Butte has a room full of them that I had to sleep in on many occasions; these nights of terror remain burned into my memory forever. Aside from the creepy factor of the dummy, the standard cliches of trendy horror are there. The soundtrack is tense throughout, whenever the dummy attacks all sound fades out to silence except the breathing of the victim. Then there’s a simultaneous loud noise, orchestra hit, and something scary pops up on screen. Everyone screams and blah. The gore is kept to a relative minimum, which really surprises me, being as this movie was produced by the same group that puts out the Saw series, some of the goriest movies of recent times. The suspense is often drawn out far too long; scenes become more tedious than they are tensive. Really tedious. And than there is my least favorite trendy horror cliche of all. The blue color filter. All of these bad horror movies use a blue color filter during filming, that casts a sense of darkness over the print and removes the vividness of light and color. And it’s always done so heavy-handedly that it’s boring. As one IMDB reviewer so aptly described it, it’s “cinematic wallpaper”. I can generally tell I absolutely won’t like a movie just by watching the trailer to see if it’s entirely done with the blue filter. Get a new technique, bargain basement cinematographers.

The writing is drab, the twists are not very surprising, or interesting. I was often checking my watch to see if the movie was done yet. It’s a bland way to spend 90 minutes. The characters are boring and hard to care about. The acting is unspectacular. Ryan Kwanten as Ashen is a generic good looking guy that are flooding Hollywood movies without being good enough to be considered leading men. And his accent kept switching from standard New England small town to New York City, which was confusing. Donny Wahlberg as the detective was just trying to hard. And for some reason the character is shaving. Always with the electric razor. That’s not a good character quirk, that’s just retarded and weird.

The high school crowd will eat this up like they do every other trite, poorly-produced horror film that comes out, but for lovers of the genre this movie will blow. For people that like movies, it will blow. For people that haven’t suffered serious head trauma, it will blow. Good day.

View the trailer.

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