Dead Silence 2007

 Seeing Jigsaw puppet up in Guignol theater while Kwanten looks for Mary Shaw...well, "Henry"...was cool. The movie, not so much. The dummies, with the eyes and heads turning, mouthes sometimes opening, not bad at all in their eerieness. The human corpse dummy, kinda farfetched and preposterous. Mary Shaw reminded me of the specter from Darkness Falls (2003). In fact, this film has certain similarities to Darkness Falls. Billy, the doll, is an effective Ventriloquist dummy, and the marketing sure tried to capitalize on that. Mary Shaw, for me, is a bit too jump cut CGI phantom. Judith Roberts does have some ghoulish makeup, as Mary Shaw needs that quality considering she's a local curse with a poem and backstory of a township responsible for her murder due to a missing boy related to Kwanten's family. The boy corpse puppet with strings is the stuff of nightmares. James Wan, even when the story isn't so great, can manage to whip up some creeps. Wahlberg as the skeptical, cynical detective cracking-wise and following Kwanten to Raven's Fair does seem to be written in the film as levity...too bad he screamed when he saw Shaw. Valletta as Kwanten's stepmom, her whole revelation, just doesn't work to me. Gunton, I did feel, was creepy as the oddly behaving, pallor-skinned father of Kwanten. This is just a mixed bag for me. Great cemetery scenes, a rickety, decaying theater, and cheap neon-sign hotel; Wan knows how to use the Hollywood production machine to make big set pieces atmospheric and spooky. This is certainly a style over substance film.  Oh, the broken mouths of victims have a strong visual impact, but Wan never really lays his camera on the grisly results too long. The opening death didn't necessarily knock my block off, so maybe the rough start sort of tainted the remaining product. 2.5/5

I failed to mention that the film has a coroner played by Michael Fairman who I thought could really summon some real fear and anxiety. With a wife succumbing to ongoing dementia -- but able to remain coherent enough to try and warn Kwanten about Mary Shaw -- and the past experiences in this town, truly aware of what has destroyed it, Fairman has all that terror visibly speaking even when he doesn't "say her name." The flashback to when he was a kid visiting the coffin set up in a parlor, accidentally turning it over with Mary's "puppet corpse" might keep a few up at night.