Amber Valletta Movie:

		List Price: $14.98		Label: Universal Studios Salesrank: 42149 Released: June 26, 2007
		Our Price: $4.50
		Used Price: $1.48
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 05/06/2008 Run time: 90 minutes Rating: R

Dead Silence (Rated Widescreen Edition) Reviews:
Dead Silence-DVD
2009-01-07 - The DVD was so scratched up, I couldn't watch most of it. Think twice when buying from this seller.

Split decision for The Rotten Review
2008-12-31 - "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.

"True Bloods"Ryan Kwantan{Jason}staring role
2008-12-08 - 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.

GOOD OLD FASHIONED HORROR FILM ! VENTRILOQUIST DOLLS ARE SCARY!
2008-01-26 - 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. 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!

dummy please
2007-07-30 - I almost turned this off a few times due the lame actors and leaps in logic. But staying with it paid off a little. I still would have to say thumbs down. There are some good parts, the lady villain is way creepy and the doll itself is too. The death scenes are probably the most disappointing and how they arrive to these scenes only enforces the characters stupidity. The main good guy believes this dummy doll killed his wife (horrifically) so then why is the idiot driving the doll around town not in the trunk!! And propping the creeped out doll by his bed before sleeping? SORRY! First order of business is to send the that freaky doll down the river.

The ending almost saves this movie but by then I hardly cared.