GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/16/07)

Having helped define, for better or worse, the horror film for these early days of the 21st century, the creators of Saw pay homage to a variety of old school scare pictures with Dead Silence, which opens with a variant of the old plane-circling-the-globe title card that graced such Universal '30s classics as Dracula and Frankenstein. Unfortunately, director/writer James Wan and co-writer Leigh Wannell's story, which grafts the old murderous-dummy routine — which reached its artistic apex in 1944's Dead of Night, its commercial peak with 1978's still-scary Magic, and its nadir in 1964's Devil Doll — to the cursed-town theme of A Nightmare on Elm Street, is too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares. Suffice it to say that the picture's climax features a clown doll. No. Really.

There's also remarkably bland lead Ryan Kwanten, who delivers the movie's first inadvertent laugh line, a little too early on. Trying to explain himself to police detective Wahlberg after his wife is brutally murdered within mere minutes of the couple taking anonymous delivery of an old ventriloquist's dummy, he exclaims, "In the town where I'm from, a ventriloquist's dummy is a bad omen." Do tell. Kwanten's character then hies to said town, Wahlberg's cop not far behind. Once returned to the old homestead of Raven's Fair, he finds his strangely subdued dad, an attractive, overfamiliar stepmom, and a cadre of creepy locals whose uninspired embodiers are depressing reminders that all the great old horror-movie character actors are well and truly dead.

While one might wish to commend Wan and company for making a horror pic that's less reliant on gore and gross sadism than the ones that they're normally associated are, what they're serving up as an alternative really lacks. Almost everything wrong with Silence is contained in the opening couplet of "poem" the Raven's Fair elders recited to their children to warn them about the evil spirit haunting their town: "Beware the stare of Mary Shaw/She had no children, only dolls." You'd think that when concocting a fake nursery rhyme you'd do a little better than to make the actual rhymes approximate ones.

— Glenn Kenny