Dead Silence has plenty of what fans of the genre seem to desire most -- scares and gore. A coherent storyline doesn't seem to be too important in the scheme of things, so the fact that Dead Silence is dead stupid is likely not relevant.

On the scare front, Dead Silence was filmed in Elora, Ont., and involves ventriloquist dummies, certainly two of the most ghastly things we can think of. Not a film the studio wanted critics to see in advance, Dead Silence is a horror/ghost story about smalltown cruelty, revenge across several generations and getting your tongue ripped out. (Na nakes uh nar na nalk, bu na dead, za noo nares?)

The film has that dodgy aura of having been messed with in editing; why hire Amber Valletta or Donnie Wahlberg and then give them so little screen time?

On the plus side, Dead Silence was co-written and directed by James Wan, a member of the so-called "Splat Pack" for his writer/director work on creepshows such as the Saw movies.

The film has plenty of unsettling atmosphere, tension and general graveyard oogie-boogie, but you can't care about the characters or their incomprehensible predicament, so those chills and thrills never go all the way to gripping. They stop at griping. There is a difference.

Ryan Kwanten stars in Dead Silence as Jamie, a young man whose wife is brutally murdered soon after someone leaves a package at their home: A package containing a ventriloquist's dummy in his own little box. Jamie's wife talks to the dummy and poses it and puts in on the bed and things like that. Ewww. Familiarity breeds homicide, etc. She's dead, her tongue ripped out. The detective on the case (Wahlberg) suspects Jamie of the murder but has no proof. Jamie goes home to the village of Raven's Fair to arrange his wife's funeral, where he visits his father (Bob Gunton) and his father's new wife, Ella (Valletta).

In Raven's Fair, where Jamie grew up, everyone knows the children's verse about Mary Shaw, who had no children, only dolls, and if you scream she rips your tongue out at the seam, or something like that which doesn't scan. In flashback, we learn that the real Mary Shaw was a ventriloquist, that she was accused of a child's disappearance, and that the locals exacted their revenge. Murdered and not mourned, Mary Shaw sought revenge on the townspeople as only a ghost can.

Getting to the bottom of the Mary Shaw story involves visits to graveyards late at night, conversations with half-wits (n.b. not the filmmakers), sequences inside funeral homes, flashbacks, claustrophobic scenarios, heart-clutching music, and like that. It's really and truly creepy. And stupid -- did we mention stupid?
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