Dead Silence: Critic Reviews

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

The film's playfully self-aware touches (like a grand old theater named the Guignol) distract from its leaden pacing, three too many final twists and various behavioral idiocies.

A reasonable shocker.

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.

Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential.

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 gothic chiller in which morbid atmospherics and simmering suspense build to an ingenious third-act climax.

Formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.

Saw creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan know scary: all that stuff that heebie-jeebied you when you were a kid. (Or as Entertainment Weekly would say: Dead Silence is awash with atavistic horror tropes.)

The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design.

Director Wan demonstrates that he's equally effective working in a more classical vein, especially with his skillful use of chilling low-key sound effects and silence in several scary sequences.

The movies have always asked us to suspend our disbelief, but Dead Silence demands our ignorance of its own derivations. A conflation of the horror genre's laziest tropes, plot angles and shorthands.

A Nightmare on Dummy St. from Saw creators.

Plodding and bereft of suspense, "Dead Silence" is an irredeemable jumble of cliche genre fragments.

"Dead Silence" is not going to reinvent the genre. It's actually a big pile of nonsense, but that doesn't stop it from being fun nonetheless.

It's awful. It eats your soul, it's so awful.

All Wan and Whannell know is shock-and-awe tactics. They may shock, but there's no awe.

For the love of Chucky, avoid this insipid attempt at reviving the killer doll horror.

...an ambitious misfire.

There's something quaintly charming about the filmmakers' unabashed affection for their inspirational source material, although the sense of over-familiarity means that none of it is in the least bit scary.

Poorly written, badly directed and ultimately scare-free horror flick that's further hindered by dismal performances and unintentionally laughable dialogue.

"Who's the dummy now?" she rasps. Well, you are if you waste your hard-earned on this tepid retread of Dickie Attenborough's 1978 Magic, a curious stumble from Leigh Whannell and James Wan after the success of their Saw gore-fests.

there's something about its overblown stormy-night atmospherics and reliably dismal dialogue that's bad in almost a fun way. I'd rather laugh through this kind of harmless, rickety schlock, any day, than grimace through Saw III.