Dead Silence
(2007)
review by Died with Boots On

“Beware the stare of Mary Shaw, she had no children, only dolls.  And if you see her in your dreams, be sure you never, ever scream.”  From writer Leigh Whannell and writer/director James Wan, the writer and writer/director of the ‘Saw’ franchise, ‘Dead Silence’ is a ghost story about a bone-chilling ventriloquist dummy that kills people, except this one does it without a little red tricycle.  This movie literally almost scared the piss out of me, and I went to the bathroom beforehand.

Jamie (Kwanten) and Ella (Valletta) are a young and in love married couple.  When Ella jokes about Jamie ordering take-out, there is a knock at the door.  Jamie answers it, and finds a big black steamer trunk wrapped in brown paper and tied with a piece of twine on the other side.  He carries it inside the apartment, and he and his wife open it.  Inside the trunk is a creepy looking vaudeville ventriloquist dummy.  While Jamie is out in a thunder storm getting Chinese take-out, Ella is propping the doll up in their bed, offering to give it seven minutes in heaven with her old Barbie dolls if it makes Jamie scream.  She covers it with a sheet, and then looks at herself in the mirror, stuffing a pillow up her shirt to see what she looks like pregnant.  With that, the music playing in the other room begins to die.  And then the ticking clock.  And then the whistling teakettle.  Just like that, everything is dead silent.  Stupidly, Ella ventures back into the bedroom.  She tears the sheet from the ventriloquist dummy, and flies backward through the door into the hall, where she vomits blood.  She turns back around, screams, and is yanked back into the room.  Jamie returns to find the teakettle whistling on the lit stove.  He takes it off, and calls to Ella.  Ella calls seductively back that she is in the bedroom.  Jamie puts a rose between his teeth, and hurries into the bedroom.  Slipping in the pool of blood on the floor, he becomes frightened.  He looks into the bedroom and sees a bloody sheet covering something on the bed.  He can hear Ella’s laughter as he walks toward it.  He rips it off in horror as he gazes at Ella’s dead body, her body twisted in rigor mortis and her tongue cut clean out of her throat.

Jamie becomes the one and only suspect in his wife’s grizzly murder.  Detective Jim Lipton says his one fatal mistake was buying his wife a rose.  He can’t remember how many times a husband buys his wife a rose before he kills her.  Jamie is at a loss for words.  He returns home and rips the velvet lining out of the trunk.  Burned into the wood underneath is “Mary Shaw and Billy.”  Jamie returns to his hometown for his wife’s funeral.  The mortician (Michael Fairman) recognizes the work of Mary Shaw when he unzips the body bag and sees Ella with her tongue cut out.  With Detective Lipton breathing down his neck and Mary Shaw’s dummy killing off the people of Ravens Fair, Jamie must solve the mystery of his wife’s murder before it’s too late.

This is a movie for the fans of ‘Saw.’  James Wan does not disappoint.  ‘Dead Silence’ literally chilled me.  My teeth were chattering and my spine was tingling and I jumped half a dozen times.  While this isn’t a splatter-fest, it’s certainly got gore.  There is one scene in the first act where Ella turns to face the camera while slipping around on her own bloody vomit.  The dramatic turn of her head is shot in strobe-light-vision, a technique all too common in ‘Saw.’  The original score is, in fact, original, though, while some of the crescendos are reminiscent of ‘Saw.’  The piano work, while unsettling, is a little cliché.  While he was working with a bigger budget, Wan still managed to complete ‘Dead Silence’ in six short months and seventeen even shorter days.

My favorite movie in the world for make-up effects has always been ‘The Ring.’  When the closet door opens and Amber Tamblyn’s mutilated, waterlogged, bloated, mangled, deformed body slumps over and her jaw falls open, I gasp in fright every time.  I have a new favorite.  Patrick Baxter, who did special make-up effects for ‘Saw II,’ ‘Land of the Dead,’ ‘Silent Hill,’ ‘Wrong Turn,’ ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ and most recently, ‘300’ and ‘Dead Silence,’ is a very talented man.  The dead bodies with their tongues cut out of their heads are blood-curdling.  I hope to see more from this guy in the near future.

Leigh Whannell does another bang-up job screenwriting.  The back-story develops throughout the entire picture, and results in a completely unexpected plot twist in the last minute or so.  Do not fear.  The plot twist is what makes this movie great.  Without it, it would have been a pretty unrewarding story with no satisfying ending.  The foreshadowing won’t hit you over the head, but it is definitely there, which makes for a bigger adrenaline rush when the film reveals the carefully placed clues in the second act.  All in all, Dead Silence’ is a lot better than critics are willing to admit.  Unlike the two hour and forty minute ‘Zodiac,’ this movie is the perfect length.  I highly recommend it.