Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) has left his hometown of Ravens Fair to start build a family with his new wife Lisa (Laura Regan) in the big city. All is perfect until his beautiful girl is murdered, her tongue ripped out and her body left on the bed posed like a ventriloquist’s doll.

Followed by the dogged Detective Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) who suspects he is the murderer, Jamie returns to Ravens Fair to unravel the horrific mysteries behind the town’s sordid past hopefully uncovering his wife’s killer in the process. With all the clues pointing to the notorious Mary Shaw, a celebrated vaudevillian and ventriloquist thought responsible for the disappearance of young boy back in the 1940’s and now subject to chilling nursery rhymes about her brutal death, both men come to suspect something supernatural is ominously closing in on them.

Dead Silence is about as poor a follow-up for director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell to their hit debut Saw as any I could possibly imagine. There is little wit and even less ingenuity here, the film lacking suspense, shocks and scares almost the entire way through. Maybe it’s just me, but if I was making a list of three things I couldn’t be without when making a horror film those would probably top the list. Thus, Wan and Whannell’s new thriller is the one thing it absolutely should not be no matter what its shortcomings: it’s boring.

This is really a feat, if you think about it, because murderous dolls are scary. Lethal ventriloquist dummies? Even scarier. Just the sight of them is enough to send shivers up my spine. Remember Talking Tina from that classic Twilight Zone episode? She’s terrifying. Same thing goes for that little runt in the Anthony Hopkins’ cult thriller Magic, and I could go on for days about how the first glimpses of Sid in an early episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave me nightmares for more than a couple restless nights.

But the filmmakers here just blow it. Their central inanimate creepizoid Billy looks the part (his beady eye movements admittedly made me squirm a couple of times) but in the end he’s about as scary as a bag of day-old M&M’s. The thought of people getting turned into dolls themselves is also wasted, Stuart Gordon doing a much better job of playing with that particular theme with his 1987 B-movie freak-out Dolls than either Wan or Whannell do here.

Then there is Mary Shaw. For the life of me, every time I saw her all I could think about was that crazy ghostly killer in Darkness Falls. Where she responded to light Mary responds to sound, a person’s screams the key allowing her to unlock their dollified doom. Great concept, just the idea of it made me relatively eager to see this one, but it’s handled so lackadaisically by the time the film was over it was almost difficult to remember what excited me about it so much in the first place.

On the plus side, I appreciate the old-school (reminiscent of early John Carpenter, including Charlie Clouser’s wickedly clever score) vibe Wan is trying to evoke, and any movie with perfectly deadpan supporting performances from Bob Gunton and Michael Fairman can’t be all bad. Of the leads, Wahlberg certainly has a grand time camping it up in vintage Jeffry Combs-like, while another Saw alumni production designer Julie Berghoff easily unleashes the most creative work of her entire young career.

I just wish the film wasn’t so lame. Kwanten is a bland hero, while model-turned-actress Amber Valletta should probably reevaluate her ambitions after the putrid double-whammy of this and Premonition releasing to theaters on the same day. But it is Wan and Whannell who falter the most, the good will generated by their 2004 debut Saw absolutely decimated by this lifeless sophomore effort. It’s just not very good, and the sounds generated by Dead Silence aren’t screams of excitement but yawns of boredom.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)