If a demonic puppet murdered your wife
and came after you, what would you do?
I’m going to break down the mistakes made by
our idiot widower, try to make better decisions, and ultimately attempt to beat the
DEMON PUPPETEER in DEAD SILENCE.
Everyone knows you go to the movies to read,
so a title card tells us the word ventriloquist came from the belief that the dead could talk
through the stomachs of the living.
Jamie Ashen and his wife Lisa are flirt-repairing
the sink in their janky apartment when there’s a knock at the door. There’s no return address, only
Jamie’s name scrawled across the parchment.
They tear the wrapping away to finfd Slappy the
Dummy from Goosebumps laid out in red velvet. Jamie has no idea who could have sent this thing
– but clearly, it’s someone who hates him.
Lisa tells Jamie it reminds her of a terrifying
poem she learned as a kid about Mary Shaw who “could have no children, only dolls.”
It’s lucky there wasn’t a return address on it. Now we can toss this creepy monstrosity into the
garbage, right? Right?! Oh, we’re keeping this? And we’re propping it up in our bed
under a sheet for sheets and giggles? Cool-cool-cool. Maybe Lisa’s one of
those wives who wants to collect on our insurance policy when we shit ourselves and fall
backward, cracking our head on the floor.
I mean, this LOOKS like the sort of trademark a
serial killer would send to their victim. In a few minutes, Jamie will also tell us that in the
town he’s from puppets like this are a bad omen, so why would you keep this? Jamie should prop this
thing up in the apartment lobby with a “FREE” sign on it on his way out the door to fetch takeout.
Or, ya know, send it through a wood chipper.
Look, I’m not going to tell you what to do you
with creepy gifts that land on YOUR doorstep. All I’m saying is this thing came gift wrapped
with Jamie’s name on it. This means the gifter has our name and knows where we live. How about
we write out a quick list of everyone we know? Jamie’s in his 30s. He has like five friends
max to put on that list. Then his dad…who he had a strange falling out with years ago.
While Jamie’s out grabbing Chinese, it starts moving on its own, messing with the power and
the kettle on the stove. Lisa’s mind immediately jumps to her new houseguest instead of checking
the hallway to see if the power’s still on in the rest of the building. Sure we could just
wait outside the door until Jamie gets home, or knock on a neighbor’s door,
but where’s the fun in that? I know MY first instinct is to go pull the sheet
off that creepy doll laying in our bed.
Lisa reaches for the sheet when it suddenly
envelops her and hurls her into the hallway with internal injuries. An invisible force reels
Lisa in across the floor. She screams but no one hears her. After all, she lives all alone
out here in the middle of the…oh right. She lives in an apartment building where half a dozen
people should have heard her screaming. Hmmm.
Jamie comes home to a near house fire and Lisa’s
calm voice beckoning him deeper into the house. In the hallway, he slips in blood. He follows
Lisa’s voice to the bedroom and tears off a sheet to find Lisa’s brutally mutilated body, mouth
unnaturally wide, arms and eyes frozen in fear, laying where the puppet once did on the bed.
Jamie’s left in a police interrogation room. Detective Lipton, obviously recently transferred
from the Amityville police department, effortlessly accuses Jamie of killing his wife and
trying to use the rose he brought her as a fake alibi. Really Lipton, a rose? I’m insulted. If I
wanted to murder my wife and get away with it I’d have an elaborate, bulletproof alibi and you’re
beat-cop a-hole wouldn’t be on the case.
Jamie asks him to look into the puppet, you
know, the strange delivery that appeared on their doorstep right before, but Lipton
doesn’t believe in bad omens. He DOES believe in murderous husbands though.
Yeah, this is about the time I remind you that cops aren’t your friends and no
conversation with them – especially in a room for questioning – is casual. The moment Lipton
mentions us as a suspect to our wife’s murder, the first thing out of our mouths is, “I
invoke my right to remain silent and I invoke the right the speak to my lawyer.” Then, we shut
the fuck up no matter what the cop says next.
Jamie returns to his apartment where we see
that the crack team at Amityville’s worst police department cataloged SOME evidence,
but not all of it…like the ventriloquist dummy laying by the bed where Lisa died
or the massive trunk it came in.
At this point, I’d be thinking slasher more than
specter. I’d search for a local lab or drug addled forensics tech who I could pay to collect and
test any evidence from the trunk and doll.
Jamie tears away the velvet trunk lining
to expose a poster for The Amazing Mary Shaw & Billy show at Ravens Fair. Hmmm, that
Mary Shaw sounds mighty familiar. I’m glad our dead wife remembered that obscure poem from her
childhood just before the puppet killed her.
Puppet strapped in like a toddler in the back
seat, Jamie same-days it to Silent Hill – I mean, Ravens Fair, a one-horse town that butchered its
horse. Jamie arrives to his childhood mansion where his hot new stepmom Ella greets him at the
door. He learns his father Edward had a stroke recently and is now wheelchair bound.
Jamie asks his dad about the Mary Shaw poem, “Beware the stare of Mary Shaw, she had no
children only dolls.” Ella finishes it for him, “If you see her in your dreams, be
sure you never ever scream.”
Hmmmmmmmmm…is something being foreshadowed here?
Could this nursery rhyme that everyone from this town already knows supply everything we need to
defeat the evil in this place? Stay tuned.
Jamie crashes at The Last Night in Soho
motel where he decides to prop Billy up at the table like a wooden boy instead of, ya know,
stashing his creepy freak in the case he came in, in the trunk of our car. Billy plays peekaboo
with him by the bedside before Mary Shaw unfurls in the corner and Jamie wakes himself from
the nightmare by turning on the light.
Ummm, can we put Billy in the trunk NOW,
Jamie? Or drop kick him into a campfire?
At the funeral home, the mortician
begins his examination of Lisa’s body, recognizing the gruesome handiwork instantly.
He hears the childlike voice of his wife, Marion, who’s hiding in the crawlspace claiming
“she’s” back but can’t get to her down here.
That’s reassuring. Any other tips,
Marion? Do we need to go stuff our own emotional support ravens?
Even though his wife was full of life and laughter, Jamie does the sensible thing of
burying her in the family’s gothic graveyard, with the weeping angels from Dr. Who to keep her
ghost company. He notices a woman wandering in the woods. It’s Marion. She warns him Mary Shaw is
back. Before her husband drags her away, she tells him to bury the doll. Jamie uncovers a gravestone
and learns that Mary Shaw was a real person.
I don’t know about you, but if a cryptic woman
comes out of nowhere to warn me about the exact person haunting my life like a desperate ex, I’m
chasing after her for all the dirty details to this burying ceremony I need to do. I’d ask where
it needs to be done, if I have to say any spells or bible verses over it, and what’ll happen if I
scream when Mary Shaw appears in my dreams.
Yeah, yeah, Jamie hasn’t reached the “evil doll
did it” realization yet, but HE HIMSELF said these puppets were bad omens. At the very least
I’m burying Billy in a shallow grave behind the motel during broad fucking daylight. I’m not going
anywhere with him after the lights go down.
And I am DEFINITELY hitting up town hall or the
local library for information about Mary’s death when I finally believe she killed my wife.
I’d want to figure out why she targeted me specifically. And once the lab I paid came back
with fingerprints from Billy’s trunk, I’d want to confront the very alive human person shipping
puppets for Mary to victims out of town.
Jamie brings the puppet to Mary Shaw’s graveyard
and searches the headstones until he finds one for Billy and digs up the empty casket. Billy’s
mouth clicks open and the sound in the forest dies. Jamie tosses Billy into the casket. Billy
jumpscares him before Jamie seals him inside.
Back on the road, figures dart around Jamie’s car
before Billy pops up by his window. Naturally, Jamie immediately leaves the safety of
his automobile too look for him.
You dumb son of a bitch - do you want to die?!
This is as bad as stepping out of your cabin in pitch darkness when something’s
throwing rocks at your window.
You see this? This is Jamie’s “evil doll
did it” moment. If burying Chucky’s pervier cousin isn’t going to cut it, it’s time to try
everything. Salt it, burn it, wrap it in iron, stab it in the heart with silver, drench
it in holy water. Everything.
My first stop is Home Depot to grab a
fire extinguisher, a schrader valve, a hose clamp, a one quarter inch brass hose
adapter, a wind resistant barbecue lighter, fuel, a hammer, 3/4 inch lamp wicks, a bike
pump and a faucet supply tube. I’m building myself a compact flamethrower to keep in the
car and carry with me anywhere I go.
Jamie returns to his dumpy motel. He
steps out of the bathroom to Billy’s frozen face and Detective Lipton sitting
in Billy’s seat by the window.
Lipton tells Jamie he’s been following him.
He talks through Billy to suggest that Jamie buried the doll because it was evidence
that would prove he murdered Lisa.
This guy’s short memory is infuriating. We
literally told you to investigate the puppet back when you first questioned us, Captain Dipshit.
At least he’s done us a solid by breaking into our hotel room so we can lodge a formal complaint
against him that we can use in court later. Plus, he’s broken the chain of command by not
taking the so called evidence back to his station for immediate processing. And by
not wearing gloves when he touches it.
Jamie tells him the story of Mary Shaw,
but he should be thinking through the steps Detective Idiot would have to take
to get to his room tonight. Following us, I could almost understand… but Lipton would
have had to follow us out to the graveyard, watch us bury Billy, then dig it up, contaminating
a whole slew of forensic evidence in the process, just to come jumpscare us with it.
I mean there’s dedicated…and then there’s suspicious as fuck.
At least Lipton takes the creepy thing with him for the night.
The next morning, Jamie waits until Lipton leaves the motel before breaking into
his room and stealing the puppet back. He takes it to the mortician. In a Great Gatsby
flashback, we learn the fate of Mary Shaw. A little boy heckled Billy during a stage
performance and disappeared. Shortly after, Mary was murdered. Her will stated that all
101 of her dummies were to be buried with her after she herself was turned into a doll.
In the years following her death, dozens of townsfolk died and had their tongues
ripped out. Apparently in all that time, no one thought to go out and start a big
bonfire in her grave. Isn’t that how all the cool kids get rid of spirits?
Also, is anyone else getting Nightmare on Elm Street vibes here? Mary and Freddy were
both murdered for suspected child killings, and they seek revenge by going after
the families of those that killed them. They’ve also got their fanfic poems going
for them long after they’ve died.
Jamie enters Mary’s theater. He ventures
backstage, and up onto a rickety catwalk for the thrill of it until he comes to Mary’s rooms.
A weathered trunk holds Mary’s ancient scrapbook containing the ikea manual for building the
perfect doll. It’s like a reverse Pinocchio – to make a wooden puppet, you need a living boy. Turns
out, the little kid who went missing after her big performance was related to Jamie.
Surely, we’ll take this book of incredible importance with us back to town so we can read
over at length and discover all of demonic Mary’s weaknesses. Surely this is the key to ending the
nightmares and the creepy doll stalking…oh, no, no we’ll just leave it here I guess.
Good call as usual, Jamie.
Back at the funeral home, Henry hears his wife
rambling to Billy. She claims he spoke to her, but Henry refuses to believe her. He decides to
put Billy back in the box when he hears his wife’s voice coming from the crawlspace. Billy watches
as Henry crawls inside. Mary locks him in. He screams and she uses her Resident Evil tongue to
feast down on his while he’s still alive.
Fucking puppet demons, man,
how do they work?
Henry’s lived in this Silent Hill town his whole
life, why is Mary killing him? Was it because he talked to Jamie and gave some advice? Or was it
just because he was going to re-bury Billy? In either case, why does she take so long to attack?
Why hasn’t she killed Jamie already either?
I hate to speak ill of the dead – what am I
saying, I love doing that – but Henry knows better than to shoot his mouth off in front of
this thing. He knows it’s haunted. He knows it doesn’t want to be re-buried. AND he knows better
than to keep leaving this crawlspace open for his dementia-stricken wife to crawl into. Especially
with a demonic ventriloquist on the loose.
If only Henry didn’t have the attention span
of a sky high stoner. He could have just left Marion under the house to sulk while he
stayed focused on burying the doll – you know, the thing that’s causing her erratic
behavior in the first place.
He also forgets his own survival mechanisms
– back when he was a kid, he clapped a hand across his mouth to keep from screaming when
he saw her BEFORE the rhyme about her was even written. Why doesn’t he do that again?!
Actually, let’s talk about Mary’s M.O. here for a second. She won’t attack unless you
scream. Sounds to me like every single one of these townies should have ball gags in
their mouths the second they know Jamie’s come back with the demonic doll. Shove a sock
in there, wear a gimp mask – whatever it takes to prevent yourself from screaming entirely.
Not only that, but Jamie heard the rest of Mary’s poem, which tells us this very obvious handicap,
within the FIRST HOUR of returning to town. Jamie could beat this thing with a
four inch piece of duct tape.
Did I just beat this fucking puppet? I
think I just beat this fucking puppet.
Jamie confronts his father about the little
boy from the scrapbook, Michael Ashen. Edward tells him Michael was his uncle. When he
went missing the Ashens and men from town laid the blame on Mary and made her scream when
they cut out her tongue and killed her. She came back for revenge, targeting the men responsible
and every person in their families.
He should have fucking known that
kicking his son to the curb, AKA metaphorically kicking the can down the
road, wasn’t a solution and should have gone on the offensive from the very beginning.
No shit. You didn’t realize this when their wives, children, and children’s children had
their tongues ripped out? Just now, when my pregnant wife was murdered?
I’d have it in me to Spartan kick ole ’Ed into the fireplace, which.. Would
happen to expose Ella’s whole charade..
At the front door, Jamie runs
into Detective Lipton, who shoves inside like a slippery eel and tells him
that someone dug up all 101 of Mary’s dolls.
Haha, I love the idea that Detective
Halfbrain spent the entire day digging up doll graves. That’s pretty funny, actually.
Jamie gets a garbled phone call from Henry telling him he can prove he didn’t murder Lisa if Jamie
meets him at the old theater. Before the Dec can arrest Jamie, he bolts in his car and hauls
butt for the theater. Cool bro. Why don’t we stop by Home Depot first and get our
flamethrower assembled…no? Just checking.
Jamie takes the Nope Ship to Fuck That
Theater and follows Henry’s definitely dead voice across the skywalk to Mary’s room.
Lipton catches up to him with a 12-gauge.
Henry’s dead voice calls out to both men. A
woman begins to hum. Jamie tells him not to scream no matter what happens. Lipton takes
the lead and I count this as an absolute win - he makes a great human shield.
Lipton finds Billy’s checkered cousin and tosses it behind him, pulling down a curtain
that reveals 100 dolls in glass crypts lined up along the walls. Billy #57 is missing.
A red curtain catches their attention. They whip it aside to find the rotting body of Michael
Ashen, halfway through his dollification process. Suddenly, all the puppets begin to turn.
Turns out this was a secret prequel to IT all along!
Pennywise tells Jamie that she won’t stop until she has silenced everyone who silenced her. He
asks why she targeted Lisa. She offers to tell him if he comes closer. Since Jamie has the death wish
of a squirrel crossing a busy road, he does. Mary tells him Lisa was pregnant and she wanted to kill
the last Ashen. She licks Jamie and materializes. Lipton blows her away with his shotgun.
Mary takes her doll fetish to the next level as one by one she begins to possess her puppets.
Lipton shoots a few down before Jamie sets fire to the rest. They break for the rickety skywalk, but
Mary’s rigged it. Lipton plummets off the edge. When he screams, Mary rips his tongue out.
She comes for Jamie, but he covers his scream and falls into a pit of liquid luck
that leads out to the lake.
He remembers the Billy doll is still very much
unburned. He rushes to Henry and Marion’s house and discovers Marion cradling Henry’s dead body.
Marion tells him Ella took Billy’s doll.
You know what, after all the shit I’ve learned
in the last 48 hours, I say let them keep the damned doll for a few more hours while I go fetch
a young priest, an old priest, and a flamethrower to deal with it in the middle of the day.
At the manor, Jamie finds Billy’s doll. Mary leaps at him from the shadows and he tosses
the doll onto the fire. Mary writhes in agony, like he just finished off her last horcrux.
He spots his father in his wheelchair nearby.
When Edward’s body falls forward, Jamie
discovers Ella had been puppeting him like a ventriloquist’s dummy all along.
I’m gonna give props where props are due – I did NOT see that one coming.
Jamie realizes Mary is possessing Ella. He finally loses his mind and screams. Mary
scores one more in the revenge column.
Errrr…why the hell did it take this long,
Ella? If Edward was already puppified, you could’ve just made Jamie scream by
stabbing him and twisting the knife back when he first walked in the door. Seems like she
was more interested in him knowing why she was targeting him than actually killing him.
Wait. Is this entire movie just a long, drawn out villain’s monologue?!
Every clue surrounding this doll, every step Jamie took sucked him back into his
hometown drama more and more until it eventually consumed him. He would’ve been better off
tossing Billy into the goodwill pile and burying Lisa in the nicer cemetery she deserved.
He should have realized very early on that the puppet was sent to him to draw him back to Ravens
Fair, where Mary could finish her dark quest for post mortem revenge. I’m not saying she still
wouldn’t have come after him if he had stayed away, but everything after his initial arrival
to his childhood home is a lot of effort to put in when she could just possess Ella’s body
and stab him when he walked in the door.
As for Detective Lipton, if he had done his job
and investigated the puppet when Jamie told him to, he would have likely learned about the murders
in Rivers Fair, and started a larger investigation into the region than he does here, digging up
doll graves and breaking into motel rooms.
If Jamie had gone for a flamethrower when he
had the chance, he could have burned the theater to the ground long before he even realized the
connection to his family. And he would have been armed when he discovered who Ella really was.
Who am I kidding? This dude willingly hauled around a demonic dummy and propped
him up like a real boy in motel rooms and mortuaries. He’s toast.
Honestly it seems like putting duct tape over your mouth and burning everything is sight
could’ve beat this bish in like two seconds.
I think the DEMON PUPPETEER
from DEAD SILENCE was BEATEN.
