Dead Silence (R, 2007)

A young wife is murdered, with her tongue torn out. Police detective Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) immediately suspects the husband, Jamie (Ryan Kwanten), of the crime, mocking the young man's story that back in the town of Raven's Fair, where the couple grew up, there was a legend of a twisted lady ventriloquist named Mary Shaw. Her ghost supposedly pulls your tongue out if you scream when you see her in a nightmare. And Jamie and his wife had just received a mysterious package from Raven's Fair containing an antique dummy. To prove his innocence and bury his late spouse, Jamie goes back to Raven's Fair. Jamie tries to break the curse by burying the dummy in the cemetery with Mary Shaw, but it's not that simple.

The filmmakers behind the grisly hit Saw and its sequels also made DEAD SILENCE. Even with intense scenes of hideous corpses, the violence isn't as nasty as Saw's sadistic torture. Expect gruesome makeup effects and digital hauntings in an otherwise old-school chiller, complete with smoke-machine fog and cobwebs that look like they came straight from a magic shop. Even the Universal Pictures logo at the beginning of this is the black-and-white antique one, not the modern version.

If your teens are already watching and loving horror movies, Dead Silence is probably OK for them. The big question is whether horror-hardened youth will forgive a fairly predictable "trick" ending. Not to mention a ghost who's an obvious takeoff on the more interesting dream-haunting demon Freddy Krueger. Some of the scary stuff is just fleeting glimpses of Mary's ghost, reflected in a mirror or in deep shadow. Dead Silence actually gets less frightening when the filmmakers apply the fancy CGI special-effects or reveal Mary Shaw in full. It's far more ominous just to show the dummy's staring eyes or grinning face suddenly turned in a different position than the last shot.