Dead Silence (2007) Critic Reviews

Terrified of puppets? Enjoy being scared? Then you'll be half-satisfied with Dead Silence, a rote horror pantomime.Read the full review

Boasts nothing new under the sun, but it does provide a few decent scares.Read the full review

Again coaxing the worst imaginable performances out of his actors (see also: Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in "Saw"), Wan casts charisma-free unknown Ryan Kwanten as a young married man whose small-town past catches up to him.Read the full review

This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.Read the full review

The director, James Wan, and the writer, Leigh Whannell (the team behind the controversially brutal "Saw" series), deliver the mandatory shocks and gross-outs, backed by dissonant bursts of music and made almost elegant by the cinematographer John R. Leonetti's desaturated images.Read the full review

Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.Read the full review

There's no attempt at humor in Dead Silence, but the biggest sin in the film is the lack of scares.Read the full review