The immediate reactionary part of me will claim that I liked Dead Silence. It had a good creepy atmosphere, some really cool sound effects, disturbing-looking evil dolls, and a gruesomely vengeful spirit. But the other part of me that has been staring for hours now at the empty screen where this review will eventually be typed up seems to disagree. Because not being able to come up with something to say about a movie? Never a good sign.

So this guy has a wife, and while he’s down to the chinese place for take-out, she is murdered by means of her tongue being ripped out and her jaw being nearly removed. Although he immediately associates this event with the mysterious appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy at his doorstep minutes before the murder and an old rhyme about an angry ghost from their hometown, detective Donnie Wahlberg is not convinced. And so the guy (whose name I’ve forgotten entirely) has to gradually unravel the mystery with the help of the local undertaker and his wife as well as the guy’s estranged father and his new stepmother, all while avoiding both the constant death being thrown at him by spirit and dolls and being taken into custody by detective Donnie, whose character I’m pretty sure has no relation to Bob Lee Swagger. Maybe if I remembered his name either (or really anyone’s besides the vengeful spirit chick, Mary Shaw), I could speak with more authority on this point.

But seriously, it was pretty cool, mostly due to the atmosphere, which was never chintzed upon. Why have a cemetary when you can have an overgrown cemetary that does not appear to have been cared for in decades? Why have a spooky abandoned theater when you can have a spooky abandoned theater that’s twice as large as it reasonably should be, and why build it on the ground when you can build it on a lake, and why have it be some generic lake when you can make sure to name it Lost Lake? And yet, none of this felt like a step too far (well, except for the name of the lake), because it looked so damn good. Plus, evil dolls? Completely terrifying as long as you don’t camp them up. Well, not completely terrifying, because that would be an evil doll made up to look like an evil clown.

See? Pretty cool.