Day Thirteen: Dead Silence (2007)
Today’s post was originally going to concern William Castle’s Homicidal, but I’m afraid your humble writer fell asleep right around the time a chilly blonde nearly disemboweled a priest, and woke up to find said chilly blonde now acting as some sort of chilly caretaker. A transformation had clearly been missed, and it would be unfair to Mr. Castle to proceed. So instead of a woman with a Norman Bates complex (I wouldn’t even know that much if it weren’t for Robert Osbourne’s intro), we get an army of ventriloquist dummies to compliment last week’s killer Zuni fetish doll.
The dummies are the co-stars of Dead Silence, which was released earlier this year by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, who a few years ago ushered in the now yearly tradition of the Jigsaw Killer with their first film, Saw. These two seem to be trying to create a similar superhero here as well, this time its called Mary Shaw, and dummies aside, she bears quite a resemblance to Freddy Krueger.
No one of a sound mind can call the first Saw a good movie, but it had gumption. I respected how two men only a few years older than myself could scrape a few bucks together, lure a few decent stars, and make a shoestring thriller that caught on. The acting and writing are, to be nice, not good, but its important to note that they’re not awful in that calculating mannequin Gilmore Girls/Maxim spread way that plagues most bad horror movies these days. Saw is awful in that refreshing, nostalgically awful way that you remember from 1980s movies, or further back in, yes, William Castle movies. Cary Elwes’s performance in Saw is particularly diffcult to believe, and even more difficult to forget.
I go on about Saw because there isn’t too much in Dead Silence to go on about. There’s remarkably little ventriloquist dummy action for a film about an army of ventriloquist dummies terrorizing a small town. There’s even less screen time devoted to Wan and Whannell’s new boogeyman, Mary Shaw, who’s the keeper of the dummies. Primarly we’re treated to bad dialogue between Donnie Wahlberg’s cop and a bland actor not worth looking up who’s returned to his hometown of Raven’s Claw (I think) to avenge the death of his wife, who’s the victim of a particularly nasty curse placed on his family many years prior.
Your inner gears may already be rejecting this. Why kill the wife and not him? There may have been an explanation offered, but I think its because the movie would only be about ten minutes long otherwise. Wan and Whannell should’ve further examined this possibility: lower budget, lower shooting schedule, the same amount of dummy action, and a gimmick worthy of Castle: The movie too scary to be 90 minutes long!
Dead Silence is not an offense, you won’t leave it angry, but it is boring, and its just competent enough in the acting department to deny us the unintentional pleasure of the first Saw. The film has a twist at the end that is stupid, but appealingly nuts, it should have been promoted to Act I to start things off in a wilder direction. Wan has a few nice atmospheric touches (like the old Universal logo, or the theatre that looks like Frankenstein’s castle from Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman) but they aren’t enough. Unless you’re trying to smooth things over with a significant other who’s notably taken with dummies, I’d skip this one.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
I liked SAW. Afterwards it didn’t make any sense, but while watchin’ it I was entertained and that’s really all I want. I wouldn’t say it the best, or the worst… but it had something. Something that it can’t reproduce in sequels (not that I’ve seen any- just guessing). It was like Seven mixed with bad horror.