10/7-Dead Silence (2007)

Aw yiss, Dead Silence.

From director James Wan, who you may know from directing Saw, the Insidious series, The Conjuring, and apparently Fast & Furious 7 (RIP Paul Walker, click it or ticket for life).  I did not see this when it came out, but I remember a horror fan I went to high school with being really excited about this (shoutout to Rob O'Doherty!).  I was a little worried going into this movie because it only has 1 and 1/2 out of 5 stars on Netflix, which seems to take some trying to be that hated as a movie.  And at least for me, I don't understand the hate.  Sure, it wasn't a masterpiece, but as far as killer puppet movies go, it was pretty good.

So, Jaime Ashen (Jason Stackhouse from True Blood) and his wife, Lisa receive a mysterious package containing a ventriloquist dummy. The two remember a childhood ghost story about a ventriloquist who steals tongues. "Beware the stare of Mary Shaw. She had no children, only dolls. If you see her in your dreams, make sure you never ever scream, or she'll cut your tongue out at the seam."

When he goes to get dinner, she sets up the dummy to scare Jaime, but she notices then the music she had on is malfunctioning.  The tea kettle goes off but she can't hear it, nor the lightning flashing outside in the storm.  When she goes to check on the dummy, it murders her.  Jaime returns home, hears the blasting music and overboiling teakettle calling out to Lisa.  He sees blood on the floor, but he's Lisa's voice from the bedroom.  Following it, he finds her corpse with her mouth jacked up like a puppet.

This pillow is jaw-droppingly comfortable.

After meeting with Detective Donnie Wahlberg (the lesser Wahlberg), Jaime is not being charged with his wife's murder, but the detective is pretty convinced he did it.  Jaime breaks back into his apartment to steal the puppet and heads back to their home town to figure out what happened to Lisa and bury her there.  His hometown is basically a ghost town.  But as he arrives at his father's estate, we realize that his family is incredibly rich.  Jaime's dad and his young new wife assure him that there's nothing nefarious to worry about.

Not FDR

The local undertaker's crazy wife mutters that the dummy needs to be buried.  Jaime does so, but when he returns to his hotel room, the doll is sitting on the bed.  Pretty spooky actually.  But it's not supernatural, the detective followed Jaime and redug up the doll.  He believed the doll to be evidence which Jaime stole and buried to hide.  He returns to the undertaker to ask what the deal really is.

Turns out, Mary Shaw was a famous ventriloquist whose goal in life was to create a perfect puppet.  At a show the undertaking was attending as a child, a different boy heckled Mary, saying he could see her lips moving.  The boy goes missing and the townsfolk blame Mary.  They kill her and cut out her tongue.  In her will she asks to be turned into a puppet and buried with all of her puppets.

So more people start dying as Jaime works to unravel the mystery of Mary Shaw.  There's some neat twists and turns in the movie, but is generally pretty straightforward.  Spoiler: the really fun twist is that the father was dead the whole time and being manipulated as a puppet by his young wife.

Rating on the Spook-o-meter: 4 out of 10 boos