Beware the stare of Mary Shaw (who dat?)
She has no children, only dolls (way to bring the
non-sequiturs!)
If you see her in your dreams (hanging with Freddy Kruger
I guess)
Be sure you never, ever scream (I’ll make-a make-a note
of it, rhymey)
Or she’ll rip your tongue out at the seam (must check the
anatomy books on this one)
So, yeah, good old Mary Shaw is so torqued that she has only
dolls that she’s going to rip your dream-scream tongue out. Big
deal! Seriously, behind an effective ad campaign, I was truly
excited for Dead Silence. After all, who doesn’t like scary
dolls? You got your Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror, the
evil clown doll from Poltergeist, that creepy little doll that
sat up by itself from the Halloween episode of The Waltons, and
on and on. Sadly, the MTV-style edits of scary ventriloquist
dummies from the Dead Silence trailers are as scary as it gets,
covering up a weak hack-job of a movie that lacks all of what
you want in a film: acting, tension, plausibility and enjoyment.
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The three minutes of DVD
extras I could stomach show a gleeful James Wan
(props for making it in Hollywood, James – but at
what price?) letting us in on the secret that the
‘legend’ of Mary Shaw is just something they cooked
up for the movie. Really? You mean there wasn’t a
horrifying old vaudeville hag who managed to become
a wild success - by scaring the shit out of her
audiences with a tortured ventriloquism act that
victimized children – before being murdered and
taking supernatural revenge on one specific (and
very large) family? I’m so disappointed. As I am
also disappointed by Dead Silence, which starts out
with tepid promise as a newlywed couple try to
figure out who sent them an evil dummy. |
 |
The dummy quickly
gets freaky - letting loose cinematic nods to Evil Dead and The
Ring – before surrendering to Hollywood Horror Twenty-first
Century style. This style employs horrible acting, (Donnie
Wahlberg as a cheesy gumshoe is the worst) any bombastic device
around for defusing what little tension is available,
telegraphing scares, and generally stirring up such a muddled
mess of pointless improbabilities that the complete series of
Full House begins to look like a Ken Burns documentary.
On the plus side,
Dead Silence - with its crazy old dowagers,
ventriloquism-graveyards, forbidden-island-music-halls and other
plot tics both stupid and stupider – gets mighty close to ‘so
bad it’s good’ status. Armed with the foreknowledge that Dead
Silence will only scare up laughs as you rip the tongues out of
some beer bottles, (I know that makes no sense) you may just
have a silent-good time. I know ‘silent-good time’ makes no
sense either, but look what I have to work with.
Now, on to other
small, inanimate, creepy guys who kill. Charles Band’s Full Moon
Entertainment is renowned for
cranking out low-budget tripe disguised as horror for the
indiscriminate teenybopper set – usually utilizing camp high-
concept titles as a bill of sale. Witness The Gingerdead Man
headlining a big creepy guy, Gary Busey, as a homicidal
maniac who gets the chair, but manages to continue his killing
spree by possessing a gingerbread man from beyond the grave.
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As a child I found the
story of the gingerbread man disturbing.
The creature seemed
willfully malicious and evil, while the story itself
didn’t seem to have any moral underpinnings; pastry
comes to life, torments people, then is eaten by a
fox or something while on the run. More like an
episode of Law & Order than anything else. |
That’s about the
size of Gingerdead Man, too. Busey’s just robbin’ and killin’ at
a pie store for no particular reason. Scary as hell, though,
Busey is – almost like he’s NEARLY THAT CRAZY IN REAL LIFE! What
happened Buddy? What happened the day the music died?
Anyway, a survivor
of the pie-holocaust – the very hot Robin Sydney as Sarah Leigh
(get it?) runs into trouble when an
Evil Developer tries to put her shop out of business, but worse,
Busey’s animated cookie is hot to turn her into sifted flour –
or something. Then a bunch of lame running around ensues as our
‘heroes’ try to avoid the cookie as it bakes, slices and dices
its enemies – with little tension, zero terror, tepid special
effects and lame attempts at humor doled out for our trouble.
Little trouble it
is, too, since minus a nine-minute end credits sequence The
Gingerdead Man is a sprightly one-hour-long. I’m not sure why I
was expecting anything better from Full Moon Entertainment, it’s
just that the lure of Busey as an evil cookie was too strong to
resist. That and I needed to watch something that would fit this
Double Bill, so that Felix wouldn’t kill me! But, since it ‘tis
the season, if you want to tank up on Rum and Eggnog and forget
all the pressures of a day shopping or hanging out with
relatives, these two mini-bombs will surely wipe your mind clean
of any Christmas cheer!
