We can sometimes go five or six years without a horror movie about a ventriloquist's dummy. But then a movie like 2007's Dead Silence comes along and the world is normal again. It's a James Wan movie so the script is ridiculous and the cinematography is terrible. I kind of enjoyed this one, though, for some reason.
I swear, Wan must employ the laziest cinematographers in the industry. The interior sets are always conspicuously, unrealistically massive so it must be easy to move the camera and equipment around, yet the lighting is all over the place, like they didn't want to adjust anything between shots. This is despite the fact that this movie repeatedly uses the "flashing shadows" gimmick, where something stationary suddenly changes when it's briefly hidden by a rhythmically passing shadow.
The jump scares work and I kind of like how the victims get their tongues cut out if they scream when the monster is present. Though it relies on the idea that everyone screams when they see something scary. I'd have been really safe, I don't even know how to scream.
The movie also features the idea of human corpses being turned into ventriloquist dummies which leads to one of the most spectacularly stupid twist endings I've ever seen from the era of twist endings.
I kind of enjoyed the cheesiness of this movie, though. It's like the Taco Bell nachos of horror movies.
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