I'll bet just about anything that director James Wan, who created the "Saw" series, hasn't seen "Magic," the 1978 ventriloquist film with Anthony Hopkins. If he has, well, than I'm making a poor point. I haven't seen it either. It's just that I'm figuring that there hasn't been a ventriloquist horror film made in the last 29 years for a reason.

Basically, this is a dull film that's not even remotely close to the entertainment value of "Saw," which itself is crap, but I figure I'd just compare the two. If I'm going to be tortured by one of these two films, I'm definitely going to pick "Saw," and clearly "Dead Silence" doing its best to milk its "from the makers of SAW" promotion line as much as possible.

When Jamie Ashen's (Ryan Kwanten) wife winds up murdered and looking like a dummy herself, Jamie goes on a hunt to find out why she died. See, Jamie was sent a ventriloquist's dummy right before the murder, so he's a little freaked. He heads back to his hometown and discovers some crap about a ventriloquist named Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts). You could probably guess what that's about. She was murdered and seemingly inhabits the body of this dummy. He goes to talk to his father, who has a nubile young wife (Amber Valletta), and it seems dad may have had something to do with Mary Shaw's murder.

Jamie is followed to town by Det. Jim Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), who's suspicious of Jamie since Jamie is the prime suspect in his wife's murder. Why he's the prime suspect, we don't really know since there really isn't any evidence to support Lipton's theory. Thus, we're treated to one stupid piece of dialogue after another between the two while waiting for something scary to happen. I mean some seriously inane conversations, which is exactly what one would expect when you have a cop who doesn't know how to do his job and a guy whose wife has apparently been killed by a doll.

Dead silence was pretty much what I heard in the theater throughout the entire film.