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Critics Consensus: More tasteful than recent slasher flicks, but Dead Silence is undone by boring characters, bland dialogue, and an unnecessary and obvious twist ending.
Critic Consensus: More tasteful than recent slasher flicks, but Dead Silence is undone by boring characters, bland dialogue, and an unnecessary and obvious twist ending.
All Critics (78) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (15) | Rotten (63) | DVD (10)
Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense.
A reasonable shocker.
It's affectionately done, but rather pointless.
Even without the mechanized death that made the Saw movies such a sensation, it doesn't take long to realize that director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell are merely trying to replace one twisty, gimmicky franchise with another.
Terrified of puppets? Enjoy being scared? Then you'll be half-satisfied with Dead Silence, a rote horror pantomime.
Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential.
Mediocre and illogical retro horror pic about a malevolent dummy.
If you're in the mood for a Saturday afternoon-ish throwback thriller, you could certainly do a hell of a lot worse than this one.
A very creepy little ditty that works once it rears up to the second half.
A Nightmare on Dummy St. from Saw creators.
All dolls are inherently freaky, but there's something seriously bent about a little wooden man with bulging eyes, shiny cheeks, and perfect chompers.
Plodding and bereft of suspense, "Dead Silence" is an irredeemable jumble of cliché genre fragments.
A creepy horror movie that builds an ominous atmosphere with an ambitious production design and great eerie cinematography (of course, James Wan), and even if the efficient story is nothing really special or original, it offers a nice twist in the end.
Super Reviewer
I kinda liked it...though I'm probably in the minority. I'm terrified of puppets/dolls coming alive, so this movie freaked me out. I've watched so many horror films and I'm not phased by anything...except puppets/dolls. Ever since I was a kid, I thought they were just so fucking creepy. So this movie definitely scared me more than most of the horror films I've watched. I thought it was pretty decent. And damnnn Ryan Kwanten...every time his gorgeous Australian accent slipped through....I loved it. The characters were fairly underdeveloped, and it was kind of predictable, but whatever. It was a pretty good B-movie. The pacing seemed a little fast for my taste, maybe that's why the characters weren't developed as well. But other than that, I can't complain. The twist at the end was cool. I'd watch it again.
There are two things in this world that creeps the hell out of me: the first being clowns and the second being evil puppets. Terrifyingly enough, this movie has both! Now, I'll be honest here and say that I didn't expect much out of this film. In fact, I was but a word of discouragement away from skipping it altogether. But I'm very pleased that I didn't, because this was so much better than I first gave it credit for. In similiarity to Insidious, it's a very atmospheric production, with spooky, nightmarish settings, enveloped in mist and spine-tingling tension. Although the characters are one-dimensional and pretty brainless in their actions, there's a lot to love about the movie in terms of scare factors and excitement. All-around, the directing is superb, and it feels like one of those old-school horror movies that I used to watch as a kid. Surely not to everyone's taste, but if you like Kwan's other films, then you'll probably enjoy this one as well. And did I mention how seriously creepy it is?
A creepy horror film with a high production value and good cast. There might not be a high enough body count for some, or for it to be classed as a slasher anyway. However it does have a spooky atmasphere with the creepy dolls. Not the most original or scary film, but at least it tried something new and different, among the endless carbon copy horrors being released these days. I have to add for a horror film the photography is great, you really can tell the attention to detail in every shot, from the angle, framing, lighting and colours. You don't notice that in many horror films!
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