Dead Silence

Much like some people are such complete assholes that it’s difficult to picture them as babies or toddlers, coddled by adoring parents, it’s hard to imagine Dead Silence in any form that would make anyone want to get behind it, financially or otherwise. Try as I might, I can’t envision some supportive roommate, agent, whoever, looking at a draft of the screenplay, then calling the writer up to say, “This movie about the ghostly ventriloquist? I really think you’ve got something here.”

Dead Silence opens with a young married couple, Jamie and Lisa Ashen, spending a quiet evening at home. We know immediately that they are doomed because it is apparent from the first frame that they are sublimely happy. Lisa giggles, talks in cute little voices, and wears a manic grin right up to the minute the camera zooms into her screaming throat. Everything is super great until a knock at the door alerts them to the delivery of a surprise package. It’s a ventriloquist’s dummy, perfectly preserved in a velvet-lined box. “Oh my God, that reminds me of that poem from when we were kids,” Lisa says. “Beware the stare of Mary Shaw . . .” but she can’t remember the rest. As we find out later, the poem in question is:

Beware the stare of Mary Shaw
She has no children, only dolls
And if you see her in your dreams
Be sure you never, ever scream

Ok, so it sounds silly now, but if I had heard that as a child and was told that Mary Shaw lived in my town and would come to me in my dreams and cut out my tongue, I sure as hell would remember the entire poem well into my adulthood. But Lisa can’t remember the rest of it and isn’t bothered by the dummy’s sudden appearance, so she sends Jamie out for some takeout and stays at home alone.

Beware the stare of . . . Oh, shit . . . Something about killer dolls . . . Ah, fuck it. Let's get some takeout.

Jamie returns, carrying a red rose he plans to give his perfect wife to celebrate their eternal happiness, only to do a Risky-Business-style slide across the hardwood floor on a pool of fresh blood. Lisa, propped up on their bed with her tongue ripped out, was brutally murdered, and Jamie knows that Billy, the dummy, had something to do with it.

After being taken into police custody, Jamie is interrogated by a wise-cracking cop, the film’s attempt at comic relief, played by Donnie Wahlberg, formerly of New Kids on the Block. Naturally, Donnie blames Jamie for Lisa’s death. In undoubtedly my favorite line of the film, Jamie earnestly explains to the cop, “Where I come from, a ventriloquist’s dummy is a bad omen.” As if a dummy, like a black cat or a cracked mirror, is one of those irritating things you might come across at any moment, and whose mysterious appearance outside your door would cause you to mutter, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. What next?”, not to shriek “What the fuck?!” and start kicking the thing down the hallway and away from you as hard as you can.

A killer dummy at the door? Oh, Christ. Today of all days!

Upon his release from custody, Jamie returns to his apartment to get Billy and the two embark on a road trip in a glossy red Mustang convertible. It is beyond me why Jamie would drive a convertible. He exists in a world of gloom, perpetually bathed in the gray-green light that has been so popular since “The Ring” came out. Jamie and Billy drive out to Ravens Fair (creepy enough for you?), where Jamie was born and raised, and get a motel room. It isn’t clear why Jamie has brought Billy along for the ride, considering that he believes the doll is responsible for his wife’s death, but I don’t think he has anything to worry about. From the way Billy keeps shyly stealing glances at Jamie from the passenger seat and awkwardly sidling up to his bed at the motel room, it appears that Billy has a plan for Jamie, one that might very well involve tongues but definitely does not include murder.

Dead silence turns to awkward silence during the drive to the motel.

From there, they visit Jamie’s father and new stepmother. His father, always a neglectful asshole, has suffered a stroke and is now confined to a wheelchair but has become a genuine, loving person. Ah, the healing powers of a debilitating stroke. Jamie also visits with the local mortician, with whom he seems to be on a first-name basis, to hash out the details of Lisa’s funeral.

Jamie is shocked to learn that an open-necked shirt is not appropriate funeral attire.

Through hushed conversation with his father and the mortician, Jamie discovers that according to Ravens Fair lore, in the 1940s a ventriloquist named Mary Shaw ran the local theatre. She was a beloved figure until a small boy mouthed off to her during a performance. The boy disappeared, Mary was blamed, and the townies dragged her into the woods, forced her to scream, and ripped out her tongue. Now she gets her revenge by cutting people’s tongues out and stealing their voices. Oh, and she had 101 hand-made dolls that were all buried alongside her in miniature coffins. She also wanted to be turned into a doll when she died. Though the locals were sufficiently enraged to murder and mutilate Mary Shaw, they apparently cooled down long enough to follow each bizarre edict of her will.

There's something about Mary. Maybe it's her wicked awesome tongue.

Once Jamie determines that Mary Shaw is behind Lisa’s murder, he heads out to her former home, an old Victorian theater situated on Lost Lake (with a prime location like that, who would have thought things would go so very wrong?). Lucky for him, there is a Convenient Rowboat waiting to take him across the lake to the rotting old theater, and a Convenient Oil Lamp to light his way. Mary’s possessions, though covered with dust and cobwebs, are still perfectly preserved. A quick flip through her scrapbook reveals that the young boy Mary Shaw murdered was none other than Michael Ashen, Jamie’s great-uncle.

Yes, it’s true. Jamie’s father explains that the people who killed Mary were Jamie’s ancestors, and that after the murder, they were all found with their tongues cut out. This is a family curse, one that would affect not only the killers, but “their children, and their children’s children.” He fails to explain if the curse affected their children’s children’s children, or how Jamie and his father came to be if all of the Ashens were killed by Mary Shaw. I think I know the answer to that first question, but even after two viewings I’m not really clear on the second one.

Ryan Kwanten, who plays Jamie, is cute and adorable but, it must be said, wears basically the same facial expression all the time. Killer dummy, family curse – it’s all the same to him. In any other movie, I would chalk that up to poor acting, but I have to tip my hat to anyone who can keep a straight face through this kind of material. He does it through more or less the entire film, and should receive some sort of award – maybe not for acting talent, but for perseverance and triumph over adversity.

Jamie is devastated to learn that his entire family is doomed.

Once the family curse is revealed, things move along pretty quickly. Jamie buries the doll, someone digs it back up, there’s a fire, a bunch of empty coffins, a clown in a wheelchair who sticks his tongue in Jamie’s ear, and a bunch of other scary shit too. Most importantly, though, there’s a shocking finale, and it’s worth sticking around for. Forget suspension of disbelief – this one requires suspension of all rational thought. It did make me feel a little bad for Jamie. The guy can’t catch a break. But something tells me he’ll take it all in stride.

Hey Donnie Wahlberg, not hanging quite so tough anymore, are you? Douche bag.

Most horror films by nature are illogical. Whether through the storyline, relatable characters, even the setting, the successful ones satisfy a viewer’s need for plausibility with at least minimal grounding in reality. At the very least, a decent scary movie is so unsettling that you aren’t motivated to weigh the logistics of every scene. Dead Silence meets none of these criteria. It’s not scary, and it makes no fucking sense. For one thing, this is supposed to be a family curse, directed very specifically at the Ashen family. But Mary Shaw takes out whoever she feels like, including the mortician, who poses no threat to anyone. She has a right to be pissed off, I suppose, but can't she take revenge within the parameters of her own unreality?

Dead Silence is a nasty-ass casserole of scary movie leftovers, but it still gets my highest recommendation. Ok, it’s not scary, but you’ll be up all night anyway. You’ll be lying in bed thinking, Wait a second, why are all the businesses in Raven’s Fair closing now? Didn’t all that shit take place in 1941? Or, Why does Jamie’s father have his ex-wives painted out of the family portraits? Why doesn’t he just take the paintings off the wall? Or, Does human flesh really take seventy years to decompose? Or, If Jamie is such a loving husband, why did he bury his wife in the world’s creepiest cemetery? You get the idea. Throw down seven dollars for any other movie, and it might leave your consciousness the minute it’s over. Spend a couple bucks on Dead Silence and it will stick with you for days. You’ll definitely get your money’s worth.