31 Days of Halloween: It Came from Tubi: Wan’s Killer Doll Film Fails to Impress

 Dead Silence - James Wan - 2007

 

★-Day 14 of the Nightmare on Film Street 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge. It came from Tubi. Should have stayed there. Yeesh. Went with Dead Silence by James Wan. I also watched a few others on Tubi, but this is the official pick. Spoiler, it’s fucking terrible. 

Not a huge director James Wan fan. Actually, I don’t think I’ve cared for any of his movies. Even the huge ones. Maybe especially the huge ones. This flick was extremely lame. There was an interesting twist at the end that I, for one, did not see coming. It’s up there with Sleepaway Camp in terms of shock and WTF, but I see a lot of complaints that it was obvious the whole time. Bullshit. 
 
Gist is one Jamie Ashen returns to his eerie hometown of Raven’s Fair to investigate the mysterious and brutal murder of his wife, Lisa. The investigation leads him to uncover the dark legend of Mary Shaw, a vengeful ventriloquist whose ghost, along with her creepy dolls, haunts the town. As Jamie delves deeper, he learns that Mary Shaw’s curse involves gruesome deaths where victims’ tongues are cut out, and he must confront this ghost lady and her toys to stop the killings. Lame. 
 

Acting is especially terrible, not that the dialogue gave them anything to work with. Main guy, Ryan Kwanten, can’t carry a movie. He appears to have a solid career in mostly television. He was one of the stars of True Blood and appeared in Them and the Creepshow revival. Donnie Wahlberg plays the detective investigating the wife’s murder and assumes Jamie did it. His “thing” is that he is constantly shaving with an electric razor. Even in public, which is gross. 
 
Others include Bob Gunton who plays the Ashen patriarch. He’ll always be the Warden in The Shawshank Redemption. Amber Valletta plays the hot stepmother boning old Warden Norton. Only other person I recognized was Laura Regan, the dead wife. She was one of the creepy psychic pod people in Minority Report and played Jennifer Crane in Mad Men. 
 
Style is that same digital crap that you see in all Wan’s work. Whether it is Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring, one of their many sequels, or his more recent flicks Aquaman/Malignant, all his movies have a look. I find most of them pretty blah. This movie, way worse though.