Dead Silence

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.

It's affectionately done, but rather pointless.

Even without the mechanized death that made the Saw movies such a sensation, it doesn't take long to realize that director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell are merely trying to replace one twisty, gimmicky franchise with another.

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

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

Armed with a decent budget, director James Wan and co-screenwriter Leigh Wannell fashion at least a dozen sequences that are spooky even while they defy logic.

If you're in the mood for a Saturday afternoon-ish throwback thriller, you could certainly do a hell of a lot worse than this one.

A very creepy little ditty that works once it rears up to the second half.

A Nightmare on Dummy St. from Saw creators.

All dolls are inherently freaky, but there's something seriously bent about a little wooden man with bulging eyes, shiny cheeks, and perfect chompers.

Plodding and bereft of suspense, "Dead Silence" is an irredeemable jumble of cliché 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.