Being a grown man, horror movies don’t scare me anymore. I watch them primarily for the gratifying quantities of violence and controversy (and occasionally the plot). When I was a kid, I watched so many horror movies I was desensitized to them fairly early, leaving very few subgenres that actually frightened me. One always did the trick, though: killer toys. The most ridiculed subgenre of horror, and yet it’s the one that always kept me up at night. Because of this, I hold a certain nostalgic affection for these types of movies. The killer toy subgenre pretty much died with Charles Band’s career, but once in a blue moon, a good one manages to slip through the cracks. While “Dead Silence” is a bit more of a ghost story than a killer toy flick, it manages to fit both bills and be pretty good the whole way through.
A long time ago, a small town ventriloquist named Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts) was accused of murdering a young boy and subsequently killed by an angry mob. She was buried alongside her vast collection of ventriloquist dummies and a curse soon befell the people of the town and all their descendants. One-by-one, every person who hailed from the town is found dead, with their tongues cut out of their mouths.
Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) is drawn back home after receiving a mysterious package containing a creepy dummy named “Billy”. When Jamie’s wife (Amber Valletta) is brutally murdered shortly afterward, with her tongue cut out, Jamie decides to uncover the mystery of Mary Shaw and put her to rest once and for all. What he finds, however, is that Mary and all one hundred of her dummies are missing from their graves.
Oh shit.
If what you’re expecting from “Dead Silence” is something akin to “Child’s Play”, “Dolls”, “Dolly Dearest” or “Puppet Master”: killer dummies running around with kitchen knives, brought to life via puppetry, stop-motion, CGI or midgets in costumes…then I’m afraid you have another thing coming. While the freaky dummies are most certainly alive in this movie, they don’t get up and run around in circles like Slappy from “Night of the Living Dummy”. All the killings in “Dead Silence” are performed by the ghost of Mary Shaw, with the dummies being used primarily as window-dressing to set the mood and gear the audience up for Mary’s arrival. That’s why I said “Dead Silence” is just as much a ghost story as it is a killer toy story, if not a little bit more. As a matter of fact, if you removed the dummies, it would be almost a total duplicate of “Darkness Falls”…only, you know, not completely terrible.
But don’t let the lack of actual killer dummies deter you; it was a wise decision on the part of Director James Wan. Having the dummies come to life in such a manner could have very easily turned “Dead Silence” into a campfest in all the wrong ways. The more subtle effects, such as “glass eyes following you around the room” or a dummy turning its head on its own power, convey a much better sense of dread then a wooden puppet skittering about, stabbing things. And to be quite honest, ventriloquist dummies are creepy-looking by nature, so you don’t have to do a whole lot to make them scary.
“Dead Silence” manages to stand a few feet taller than most of the rotten dreck the horror industry has been pumping out these days. However, it just doesn’t stand out as much as it could. The premise of “old ghost story lures main character back to his hometown to face his childhood fear” isn’t anything new and outside of a cut-and-paste villain, “Dead Silence” doesn’t do anything particularly original with the template. “Boogieman”, “They” and the aforementioned “Darkness Falls” have all beaten the story to death recently, and “Dead Silence” only triumphs over those titles by having creepy dolls in it.
Still, while it may not have the most original plot, Wan manages to craft some excellent atmosphere (the scene where the mortician remembers his first encounter with the ghost of Mary is fantastic) and it has a great twist ending. You’d definitely do well to at least rent it.
Grade: B- (as in “But in the world of fanfiction, ‘Dead Silence’ is actually a sequel to ‘Magic’!”)
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