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Beware the
stare of Mary Shaw... When Jamie's wife
dies under mysterious circumstances, Jamie finds out
about the legend of Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist who
considered her dolls to be her children. He decides
to find out more about the legend and discovers that
the ghost of Mary Shaw has killed several people.
But why? And is there any way to stop her?
Oh James. Fog? Curses? Legends? Ghosts? Killer dummies?
Lanterns? Locals killing a woman when a child goes
missing? What? Did you just look up the word horror
movie on google and see what words came up? Horror
flicks are bombing at the box-office at the moment
and people are wondering why? Perhaps it's because
they're all generic ghost stories with absolutely
nothing new to say? Not even the creators of Saw
managed to come up with something fresh. I think we
can safely say that there's been an inflation of
horror flick recently and while James Wan may have
breathed some fresh new life into the genre, I'm
pretty sure he's also going to be the death of the
ghost genre for a while.
Dead Silence is an extremely unoriginal horror flick
where a ghost ventriliquist and her dummies goes on
a killing rampage by ripping people's tounges out.
There's not a whole lot more to it than that. The
movie felt like a remake of the South Korean horror
flick "Doll Master" and I'm pretty sure that they
got a lot of inspiration from that as some scenes
are almost identical. Dead Silence also brought
memories back from Darkness Falls and several other
horror flicks. But the thing is, while Dead Silence
should have been a watchable, yet unoriginal horror
flick, the title delivered a little too much. The
crowd was silent throughout the entire movie since
there was nothing to scream about. There were no
good scares, and the ones that were, were so obvious
that they weren’t even scary (I mean, a ghost in
a mirror? Come on!)
Jamie Ashen (played by Ryan Kwanten) is a shallow
character and he doesn't seem to grief his dead
wife too much since he's busy looking for ghosts.
Seriously, who cares about ghost stories if your
wife just died? Then we have the second character
in the movie (make no mistake, there are only two
real characters in the movie), Detective Jim Lipton
(played by a stiff Donnie Wahlberg) who's really
nothing more than your stereotypical, suspicious
cop who won't believe anything until it's too late.
How much more cliché can horror movies really get?
Sure, James Wan's Saw was a great movie but this is
far from Saw quality. It's got a couple of silly
twists (and they are REALLY silly, I choked on my
popcorn as I started to laugh), some poor scares,
a predictable and unoriginal story and a protagonist
that's impossible to root for. Someone kill the ghost
genre for a while! Please! Maybe that's what James
was really trying to do here?
Jaws ripped open, unnecessary gore. Might as well
have rated this PG-13 and made a couple of extra
bucks on it, I doubt the R-rated audience will be
less than impressed anyway.
What a surprise! Piano music! I did not see that
coming. Yawn.
I'm really hoping that James Wan only made this to
kill off the ghost genre for a while before it gets
completely out of hand because Dead Silence was a
ridiculously generic trip which felt way too familiar.
Dead Silence will leave the audience silent as there
is nothing to scream about, except for perhaps the
lackluster and thin story-line.
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