Customer Reviews

Dead Silence (Rated Widescreen Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One day, Jamie (Ryan Kwanten) and his wife find a box with no return address on their doorstep: It contains a ventriloquist dummy. When Jamie goes to buy takeout that night, he comes back to find his wife's been murdered and her tongue's been cut out. He becomes the number one suspect in Detective Lipton's (Donnie Wahlberg) investigation. Upon returning to his hometown of Raven's Fair to bury her, he begins to think that there might be more behind his wife's murder than he first thought. The old poem about Mary Shaw and her 101 dolls to scare the kids might have been true after all. He starts digging and soon finds out a lot of nasty things about Raven's Fair.

From James Wan and Leigh Whannell, co writers of the Saw films comes a creepy killer doll movie. James Wan, who's directing his second film (he only directed the first Saw film), masterfully directs this very atmospheric film; the fog, eerie lighting, zoom outs, and gloomy score by Charlie Clouser (also a Saw veteran) all contribute in making this film an above average horror film. You can tell that this project was done by true horror fans that are passionate about their craft. Don't expect a Saw-type film; this isn't a torture, gore and guts kind of movie, more of a sinister ghost story and it works on most levels.

The film had the touch of classic fifties and eighties horror films which I think it paid great homage to. If you've been missing good old-fashioned horror flicks without all that ultra violence, this movie's for you. Kwanten is very believable as the protagonist. Wahlberg, whose screen time is minimal, steals the scene every shot he gets. The supporting cast is filled with familiar faces and does a good job as well. The special effects were nicely done and the doll designs oozed creepiness to boot. There were a few reactions from the characters that made me wince; Lisa goes back to the bedroom after everything stops and goes dead quiet (Dead Silence, get it?) when she should have been running out of there, also, after Jamie's done burying the doll and he sees shadows moving around his car, no one in their right mind would've opened their door to check what it was (but that's what characters did in eighties horror movies). The finale had a good build-up and in true Whannell-Wan fashion, yes, there's a cool twist-ending. Make sure to pay attention to the pan of the camera during the confrontation near the end, you'll be able to spot a cameo from a character from the Saw films (kind of like Where's Waldo).

If you're part of the new kids who dig their horror movies with buckets of blood, lots of gruesome torture scenes and plenty of violence, then this might not be the film for you. Although, if you're a fan of those old killer doll movies a la Dolls (1987), Puppet Master (1989) and Child's Play (1988), then you'll really dig Dead Silence.

This movie, from the guys who brought us the SAW trilogy, is going to disappoint anyone who is expecting that sort of gore, torture and griminess. Okay, it is grimy, but it is not gory. Despite an R rating, it's a fairly tame CREEPY supernatural story. It feels very old school, almost like an episode of NIGHT GALLERY.

The creepy ventriloquist's doll Billy, who actually does almost nothing in the movie...is the STAR. Just sitting there, lovingly photographed in shadow...he'll make the hairs on your neck stand up. We respond to him in an illogical way, but it can't be helped. Those dummies are just a little weird.

The story of DEAD SILENCE is not terribly original, but it does stay true to the expectations of the form. It also has a decent surprise ending that you'll probably see coming...but only a few minutes before our "hero" does. My wife, 14 year old daughter and I were all quite satisfied. This is a genre film that for a change of pace, actually delivers some solid chills...unlike THE MESSENGERS, DARK WATER, etc. etc.

It does have some problems, though. Namely Ryan Kwantan, the lead actor in the film who is such a dreadful actor I felt actually angry at him for ruining the film. Totally incapable of any display of convincing emotion. Just the pits. And Donnie Wahlberg mostly looks bored by his character...a cop who is the worst law-enforcement officer ever and apparently works for a police force that consists of just him. The film is low-budget, but some decent CGI work saves it. But the poor casting really shows the low-budget seams.

It's an okay film that could have been more.

What a breath of fresh air this film was to watch!.....or should I say a breath of good old fashioned "Universal" chills? I finally watched this movie and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of creepy atmosphere it had. The dolls in this movie are freaky looking and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up more than once while watching this classic style fright flick.

This is a "ghost story" in every sense of the words and ventriloquist dolls are very, very scary! There are some clever plot twist and excellent camera work in this spooky thrill ride that plays like your riding through an old creepy dark ride at an amusement park or carnival. I also found that the use of 'silence'("Dead Silence")when things are about to go wrong, was ingenious and it worked like the music in 'Jaws' did, whenever it went silent you knew something bad was going to happen! This is one of the cleverest horror movies I've seen in a while and it has little or no gore.

The unrated version has a little more visual blood(very little)and also a plot point which helps to make the story make more sense. I liked both versions of the film and I'm not sure if it matters which one you buy. I just wish that the studios would stop releasing these film on separate releases when there is so little difference.....no wonder it didn't sell well. This is a great Halloween flick to start that night with a good fright! Look quick for the "Saw Puppet" on the floor amongst the debris! Stay up late, turn out the lights and watch this alone!......you'll see what I mean!

I wanted to see a film with "True Blood"star ,Ryan Kwantan."Dead Silence"is not bad,but I wouldn't want to watch it again.Ryan does a great job,and the ending is scary especially if you are scared of creepy dolls coming to life,and its not a happy ending for Ryan.

This movie was great. I would like to thank the writer and director for putting together a true horror film. The story unfolds very carefully, but it will continue to keep your attention.

I'm going to go against the grain with this one. I found DEAD SILENCE to be an enjoyable movie. Sure it's done by the same guys that brought us the 'SAW' trilogy, but here they're showing us that they have versitility. I really liked the gray wash on this movie, and I had read that it was a tribute to the Hammer films. Now the film did have a little suspense, but did anyone expect the ending of it?

I must say i really enjoyed this movie and found that it held my attention for the 90 so mintues of running time - which in my books is enough to give the film 3 stars.

I am sick of hearing people state that this " isn't like SAW" or "this proves that SAW was a fluke". I mean it's a different movie and to be honest there are enough SAW movies that i didn't feel like watching a clone (though SAW 4 is stupidly on it's way - leave it with 3).

With the perfomance: I live in Australia so most of us will remember the main male charater as Vinnie from a series here called Home and Away. I have to say he was bland in his performance on that show and he was bland in this. His reaction to some of the going -ons around him such as his wife being brutally murdered didn't click but maybe the directors were looking for a somber performance and not a dramantic performance and blame can be centred on them for not providing the actor with some range.

But then as i alluded to - he was crap on Home and Away too.

You would think if your partner was murdered in a ghastly way you would react for some weeks after (maybe he had post-tramatic stress). As others have said, the imagery in this film was great and the backstory of the villan Mary Shaw was a highlight (this woman is damn creepy). I did enjoy Donnie Walburg's performance but i can't help but feel that if i am identifying him as the best actor in this then it shows how woeful the other's were.

The movie has been promoted as more of a killer doll movie but it isn't. The main villan is a ghost not a doll. She just uses the doll to keep herself from slipping into the afterlife for good. She needs an instrument to hold her in the real world and that just happens to be the 101 dolls she created (her children). So don't expect any doll massacre action cause it's not there. Infact i would say the dolls don't kill anything they just allow the sprirt of Mary Shaw to come through.

The movie did remind me alot of Darkness Falls, which i will go on record as saying is damn good though most people hate it. Personally i feel that Darkness Falls is a little more superiour than Dead Silence but Dead Silence has a more Hollywood feel to it which some like.

Have to say the sound dropping out (hence Dead Silence) whenever there is going to be some supernatural mayhem was good and quite effective and the lavish scenery suited this type of gothic like ghost story.

Overall, Dead Silence is a decent little horror flick more in the style of a suspense ghost tale than an action packed horror film with gore. If you go in thinking SAW, you are gunna be disappointed. Enjoy it for what it is, a decent yarn and a entertaining 90 minutes. The movie really is quite tame.

I will be buying this on DVD simply cause i love horror movies and like the backstory of Mary Shaw and the fairytale like quality of both the scenery and overall feel of the film. For most though, it's a rental at the most.

Married couple Jamie and Lisa recieve a package from an unknown sender. The contents? A ventriloquist dummy, a most unusual "gift" under normal circumstances, but a bad omen to our recipients. You see, Jamie's childhood town of Raven's Fair hasn't been faring too well over the years since the death of local star Mary Shaw. I'll give you three guesses as to what she was popular for, but you're no dummy. Anywho, after Mary's burial (as well as her 101 dolls; the cemetery owner must have banked that day), horrible deaths began occurring to where the victims ended up tongueless. What is the connection, you may ask. Why Lisa quickly meets the same fate, you may ponder. No worries, Jamie will do the dirty work for you and return to Raven's Fair for answers. Some answers will, unfortunately, be left unanswered in this somewhat hokey offering from "Saw" creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell. You can't chalk everything up as "because it's a supernatural thing", after all. At least the really, really good ending (I love the rare occassions when I don't see it coming) salvages an otherwise average, by the numbers modern horror chiller. 5.5/10

This movie is irritating as soon as it begins. The tacky post-production looks like something a highschool student who just learned how to use filters would do to make their movie look "cool." The stop-motion and excessive use of very unrealistic "old-movie" grain overlays in the introductory credits and in transition scenes throughout the movie draws attention to itself in a way that completely distracts from anything they're actually showing on screen, and makes the images themselves more abstract and much less scary. The fifteen-year-old who edited this REALLY needs to learn some restraint.

Aside from that, the plot really isn't worth commenting on. It's filled with holes, and the ending defies the little logic that was there.

A few of the scenes of the dummies, particularly the ones set in the past, are genuinely creepy. That's pretty much the extent to which this movie is any good.

"Silent Scream"
(A simple horror movie that unexpectedly caused a split among Our Rotten Staff, something you'd expect in a presidential election, but not at The Rotten Review.

In any event, our Liberal Progressive Wing gets the first shot.)

FROM THE LEFT: Remember "The Ring", "Skeleton Key" or the first Phantasm? How about "Blair Witch", "Darkness Falls" or "Silent Hill"? Apparently, the makers of "Dead Silence" were hoping you'd forget - as their movie is a pastiche that borrows against those other movies, essentially using thrills available in the public domain.

It starts out with Jamie Ashen, a young married dude with a family history. Living away from home, life is good, until he comes home to find his expecting wife brutally murdered, her body (especially her face) mutilated. His only clue is a menacing ventriloquist dummy mysteriously sent to him before the murder. Linking the doll to his hometown, Jamie returns home and finds the town in the last stages of decrepitude - stores closing, people disappeared. The only safe business is the funeral home. Jamie finds his rich father has remarried a comely young woman named Ella, a useful device for us to learn that Jamie's father is a man who uses people and then replaces and erases them. He will soon learn that the town, and especially his family, share a dark secret relating to Mary Shaw, a malevolent crone killed when she was suspected of having something to do with the year's past death of a boy who would have been Jamie's uncle, and that Jamie's wife shared a grisly fate suffered by many other citizens of the town. Donnie Wahlberg plays a big-city detective who will drive the plot forward by suspecting and then assisting Jamie - it's a device that was old when used in "The Exorcist" and "The Sentinel", and those movies came out in the `70's!!

Is it the vengeful ghost of Mary Shaw come to wreak vengeance? Will others suffer that same fate? Will you be forced to sit through numerous fake-scares followed immediately by the real one? You betcha!!

What really kills the movie is the way that it offers nothing new. The script prepares you for Weapons of Mass Terror, and it isn't until you're knee deep in corpses that you realize how you've been bamboozled with nothing more than bits of other movies. Good movies can scare you, but bad movies like this scare you in a way that embarrasses you - getting you to lower your expectations with no real payoff in the end. I suppose that our staff's resident Neo-Cons will love this movie, given how cravenly they fear anything new or imaginative.

*****

FROM THE RIGHT: my so-called "progressive" colleagues have gotten this movie wrong. Like any liberals, they go for instant-gratification: where's the WMT? Why did we choose this movie when we could have enjoyed that other movie? Osama doesn't even appear in this movie? We may be Neocons", but we know that a horror movie is more than the sum of some scary moments.

"Dead Silence" is an interesting study in horror because it contains many scary ideas - most of them admittedly dated, deliberately so. This is the movie's most inventive idea - tricking you with some obvious plot devices and amateurishly expository dialog and, once you're defenses are down, jabbing you with genuinely effective chills. Mary Shaw is an uncommonly seductive villainess because, unlike the ghostly evils at the heart of movies like "Darkness Falls", she's not a woman who is hiding anything - she performed her evil magic and let everybody think it was just ventriloquism. The secret of the movie is just how much of its evil is actually in plain sight. Best of all, "Dead Silence" does this repeatedly - making you think you're watching a parody of a horror movie, then going for your jugular with a sincere scare. If anything, the movie is weakest when emulating more recent contemporary movies like "The Ring" and best when it channels great old TV movies like "Burnt Offerings", "Dark Night of the Scarecrow" and "Don't be afraid of the Dark". The direction keeps things chilled with a great eye towards scene transitions and settings (besides Mary Shaw's ruined theater, we have the dying town and especially the Ashen family manor - the last of these possessed of an interior dotted with the most consistently ominous examples of portraiture. You keep expecting the pictures to grab you). And lest you think otherwise, the movie closes with a genuine surprise ending.

TO SUM IT UP - we offer this assessment from our resident Whig:

"Dead Silence" is definitely a guilty pleasure - like a candybar, your enjoyment has nothing to do with surprises. At a shade over an hour and a half, it's a brisk story, but one that keeps you watching.