Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

I wasn't expecting much out of this movie to be totally honest. I mean, come on, another "dolls come to life and kill innocent people" movie? How many of those have their been? How can this movie do what hasn't been done a thousand times already?

Well, maybe Dead Silence didn't break any new ground in the horror genre, and the movie certainly isn't miles above other similar kinds of horror storylines, but what it succeeded in doing was scare the living heck out of me, and the best thing of all was that the dolls were VERY unpredictable in how they chose to torture and kill people.

In other words, the dolls didn't always come to life at the moment the people turned their backs- oh sure, *sometimes* they would, but most of the time not. That was a surprising highlight for me and added a bit of creativity to the horror genre. You were never sure when they were going to strike.

Of course we ALL get the creeps thinking about dolls moving their eyeballs around, and that happens here.

The storyline is really good too, because it's half mystery/half horror. It's about a young husband trying to figure out what or who was possessing the dolls to come to life and kill people (and his wife). The story works, because there was tons of suspense, and you got the feeling something frightening was going to happen at any moment.

Another thing that scared the pants straight off my legs was what happened just BEFORE the dolls would go into "killing mode". The surroundings would gradually become quiet, and whatever was making a sound would give off this frightening dying sound (similar to playing a cassette tape in a tape player with low batteries).

Then the people would hear nothing but silence (hence the name of the movie) and the dolls would do their cold-hearted killing spree on whoever was around.

Very good movie worth watching over and over.

Looked forward to seeing this movie ever since we made the acquaintance of star Ryan Kwanten on TRUEBLOOD, the HBO scripted series in which he plays the heroine's dumb brother. He's great in that, but now that I've seen him in DEAD SILENCE, I can only surmise that on TRUEBLOOD, it's his buttocks that do all his acting for him, and they should be awarded the Emmy for the superlative work he puts them through on that show. Here they are continually hidden underneath an unsavory pair of jeans, and thus poor Ryan has literally nothing to work with. In a way this acting theory matches the premise of DEAD SILENCE, a film that asks us to believe that an entire town, Raven's Fair, has only a few residents in it, and all of them are controlled by the vengeful spirit of Mary Shaw, an amateur ventriloquist of the early 1950s who loved both children and dolls until one snippy little rich boy spoiled her show by exclaiming loudly that he could see her lips moving.

In consequence everything starts going wrong for both Mary Shaw and everyone she knows.

The film suffers from an extremely low budget. They could only afford to hire about four actors, to represent not only the populace of the godforsaken town, but also the entire population of NYC. They could only afford three colors also, so everything is drenched in deep blue, except when Jamie gets into a red car or a horrible ghost tears out red tongues from people's mouths. And there's black as the third color, but how cheap can you get? But they really could have saved money, as well as improving the film about 1,000 per cent, by leaving the pants off Ryan Kwanten and his unforgettable assets. Oh what a waste.