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First off, I'm a big fan of the first SAW, so when I heard the same writer/director was trying something new-- this new thing involving ventriloquist dummies (which will always be rooted deep inside my "that's so awesome" sense of horror, thanks to R L Stine's "Night of the Living Dummy") I was enthusiastic about the movie. However, it just doesn't live up to the director's previous film.Among the bad aspects of the movie are the amount of clichés instilled within. Sure, it's nice to see a nod to older films by having a scene where a character visits a cemetery to dig up coffins, but the set designer went a little overboard with the fog machine. Curtains ghosting from windows, that breezy sound effect that seems to never ever occur in real life, enough cobwebs to make you think that spider Shelob from "Return of the King" is somewhere about, an innocent old woman who lost her marbles and is more attached to the supernatural realm than our own, half a dozen doors that need to be oiled, this movie has all those dead horses and then beats them unmercifully. That alone is enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth, but coupled with eloquently melodramatic dialog such as "whatever happens... don't scream", horrific corpses a-la Gore Verbinski's "The Ring", and characters so 2-dimensional you'd swear George Lucas was involved with this project, you're left with just a generally bad film. I figure I might as well also mention the special effects are horrible, and in many cases unnecessary, especially in this day and age.But, don't give up hope just yet. The scenes where the movie gets its namesake "Dead Silence" where all the white noise in the film is sucked out of the air and the audience is only left with the character's breathing mark the best scenes in the film, especially the first time. Even in a theater with a bunch of pre-teen idiots, those scenes managed to make everyone shut up for a few moments, because they all knew something ominous was about to happen. The cinematography, especially in the flashbacks and the old theater's set design also mark the high points of this film. Sometimes there's a lot of eye candy, and it's pretty cool to watch it unfold. The music is also pretty damn good: the music box melody is somewhat similar to the "Halloween" theme song, fused with some of Danny Elfman's overbearing brass instruments from "Sleepy Hollow." The biggest mistake was the half baked plot: a good concept at heart but overall ineffective as a captivating and believable story (see: "Darkness Falls"). And even though I'm normally dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to finding the twist ending, I figured this one out pretty easily, and I wasn't even really looking that hard. At other times, like when the main character visits the abandoned theater for the first time, a single shot of the backstage and the dangerously rickety scaffolding screams "I'M FORESHADOWING THE CLIMAX OF THE MOVIE, LOL!" What really made me disappointed was how much the puppets were cheated out of the film. In a flashback scene we see Billy (the puppet in all the movie posters) during a performance on stage, probably one of the most entertaining scenes in the movie. But aside from that, and the numerous times he ominously shifts his eyes without anyone controlling him, Billy doesn't do anything. Really. He just doesn't. There are other puppets too (a ridiculous sum of 101, five puppets would've done just fine), but they get even less screen time, most of them all look exactly the same, and none of them seem to have a personality. Correct me if I'm wrong: we went to this movie to see some ventriloquist dummies do some badass creepy puppet stuff, right? You may find a disturbingly repetitive series of events (yes, the puppets move their eyes and turn their heads on their own, but it becomes predictable the sixth or seventh time).Disappointing, I guess, sums up this movie pretty well. As much as I would like to see the "killer puppet genre" revived, this film just doesn't do much for it. But that's not to say that it wasn't somewhat entertaining.
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