Review of Dead Silence (1991) by Patrick M — 11 Oct 2010

Not really sure what to think of this one. Dead Silence is one of those horror movies that has a little nursery rhyme or poem as exposition and lead-in to the plot. Usually those movies are manipulative. Yeah...

Dead Silence is a horror movie about a killer dummy. I'm okay with that actually. I was able to suspend by disbelief and just sit back and watch. Until the characters were introduced. The protagonist was so bland from the beginning that I really expected him to just be one of those Drew Barrymore-types to just get killed off in the first scene. He's horrible and his dialogue is horribly-written.

Then comes Donnie Wahlberg eventually. There's this running joke that he's always shaving but it's done so poorly that I didn't even know it was supposed to be a joke until the end--I thought it was just something my friends and I noticed when we were making fun of the movie for being stupid.

Because if there's one thing Dead Silence is, it's stupid. Stupidly-premised, stupidly-written, stupidly-acted. However this movie does have a creepy, slow-moving atmosphere that I thought was fairly effective.

And there's a twist ending that I thought was fantastic actually. I didn't see it coming at all but apparently the consensus on the Tomatometer is that it's ridiculously obvious. I disagree.

Atmosphere and a solid twist were enough to make this tolerable, but not good.