You awake. The red glow seems diminished, the sound has stopped but your head feels thick and heavy…congested. As your sleep wracked eyes adjust you see why the glow is reduced, a bright shaft of sunlight spears from an opening in the upper side of the cavern. Tumbled rocks from the opening suggest whatever made the hole came from outside, the black object perhaps?
Making your way towards the…sphere, it’s a sphere, you stumble and throw out a hand to break your fall, grazing your palm in the process. You cry out! In…silence. You make no sound, not your voice, not your feet on the rocks. Nothing. Did that sound deafen you. Is this temporary…or…
You scramble away from the object, turning towards the opening, towards the sunlight, eager to get away from the sound which you can no longer hear. The scattered rocks and scree form a treacherous slope up to the exit hole and you scrabble your way up and out into a brilliant blue skied day.
As soon as you exit the cavern the sound of rushing water fills your ears. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard. Before you a narrow gorge splits a valley not much wider. A road twists and turns up either side, joined by a simple metal bridge spanning the turbulent crevasse, the rushing river that formed it the source of the sound.
Looking down you see a clear path down the grassy slope to the edge of the road. The grass of the path is not just trampled though, in fact it barely looks disturbed. Except for the fact that it’s dead. Wilted and brown next to the bright green either side, you don’t like the look of it.
Keeping to one side, you follow it down.
A somewhat more silly entry this time. James Wan’s 2007 film ‘Dead Silence’.
This is essentially a haunted doll film but using a ventriloquist dummy and a dark history surrounding it’s operator to give the film it’s own flavour. We follow the film’s protagonist Jamie Ashen, played by Ryan Kwanten as he searches for the truth behind the loss of his wife, all whilst being shadowed by a Police Detective played by Donnie Wahlberg, who I hadn’t really heard of, but he’s the brother of Mark Wahlberg, who I definitely have heard of.
This film has a very late 90s early 2000s ‘Dark Castle’ look to it, which I certainly don’t see as a bad thing, which you’ll see when I get round to reviewing ‘House on Haunted Hill’ or ’13 Ghosts’…‘Ghost Ship’, not so much. But essentially it’s a bit campy, but still creepy, and characters are somewhat caricatures. It’s very different in tone to Wan’s later supernatural work like ‘Insidious’ or ‘The Conjuring’ which are much more serious.
The film does manage to be creepy, but it’s short lived and only lasts so long as the source, mostly the dummy, or lack thereof is happening. This isn’t a film that’s going to leave you on edge after it’s over. Mostly the film relies on jump scares, which as I just mentioned have a short shelf life in our minds.
What I will say is that the film is fun. It’s an entertaining horror film, one to watch with friends, quite likely to laugh at or share in the gross out moments and go “Oooooh” at the reveals. Fun. Nothing special though.
One of the effects which is used in the film is the silence aspect. When something supernatural is about to happen the sound of various objects reduces, then stops. Or at least that what I think it should do, in fact what seems to happen is they slow down or at the very least get deeper before they stop. This leaves me unclear if sound is just ceasing or if time is actually stopping as well, though if it is then nothing else is implying that. It’s a minor quibble but something that bugged me since it’s one of the more interesting ‘gimmicks’ in the film.
The dummy design is good and it sticks to a classic look which is good to see. No attempt has been made to make the dummy extra creepy, it’s a dummy they’re creepy how they are. Despite other parts of this film being a bit over the top the use of the dummy is actually well done and subtle, for the most part.
As I said earlier the look of the film is a little larger than life and this means it has some fun sets. The old town of Raven’s Fair has that New England gothic look to it and of particular mention is the town’s Theatre which is a full on fog bound evil villain’s castle of a building mixed with the nostalgia of somewhere once full of life. If there’s one area where this film does well it’s with the sets.
The use of special effects if the film is limited mostly to the supernatural aspects but they honestly detract from the practical stuff which is great.
What about the plot, does it hold up? Well the main story is pretty one dimensional, we essentially follow the same character for 90% of the film but the pacing is good and I never found it dragged, even when watching it second time. It tries to make things overly complicated towards the end and I wouldn’t say any of the characters really grab you. What did grab me though was the flashback story about half way through introducing us to the character Mary Shaw, more on that in the spoiler section but it stood out to me and helped to break up the otherwise linear style.
Score time. Quite an easy one to score this one, It’s decidedly middle of the road, as is my scoring system. 3 Tongues out of 5. Looking for a group film that’s got some creep factor without causing you a sleepless night, something not too cerebral, then this probably won’t disappoint, but it won’t do anything else either.
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
So there’s a twist in the film. I avoided mentioning it in the main review, well I mentioned reveals, because if you say a film has a twist then people end up trying to work that out rather than watching it as they should. The twist is actually pretty fun, well half of it is, the other half I felt wasn’t explained well enough. Part way into the film we meet Jamie’s father, played by Bob Gunton of ‘Shawshank Redemption’ fame! Now wheelchair bound after a supposed stroke and never without the helping hand of his young wife, played by Amber Valletta.
It turns out the reason we never see them apart is because Jamie’s poor father has been hollowed out as is in fact a corpse dummy being controlled by his wife who has been vocalising for him as well. Great, that’s quite fun, and sick, we see some of Wan’s penchant for macabre contraptions come through here. Now what wasn’t that obvious to me, but maybe I’m a dummy…hah…is that the wife is a doll, the perfect doll in fact and possessed by Mary Shaw. Initially that went right over my head as a lot is revealed at the point in the film and I figured she was a relative or something, even though it never says that, oh I don’t know! It just didn’t come through for me.
Now I actually watched this film twice, as I’d seen it a few months back but felt that wasn’t recent enough to give it a proper review, so knowing the twist actually made it fairly watchable the 2nd time and I noticed the wife’s hand position and the twitchy movements of the dad, it really does deserve some kudos for that.
The method of killing in the film puts me in mind of ‘Saw’ and the reverse bear trap. It’s suitably gruesome though not as viscerally graphic as what we see in the ‘Saw’ films, again this is more fantasy than reality. It was an interesting idea to make it so that if you scream you die but ultimately it makes it more cheesy and you start getting worked up about what counts as a scream…well at least I did.
So about that flashback story. One of the characters reminisces about going to Mary Shaw’s show back in the 40s and we get a great scene where a kid says he can see Mary’s lips moving and she then has an argument with Billy, the Dummy, with the two talking over each other. This shuts the kid up. But then what really shuts the kid up is going missing a couple of weeks later and never being seen again. Not that is until much later in the film where Jamie and the detective discover his corpse has been made into a puppet. This is probably the most disturbing story within the film and it’s then totally ruined when they’re like “Wow we solved a 70 year old missing persons case” they seem so unfazed and blasé about finding a fucking puppet made out of a child’s corpse!
It could make me scre…
Summerisle 