Author: Chassity Merritt

Oh, the beauty of movies on the internet. While I’m definitely a film geek, I’d like to think that I’m an informed one—with a bounty of knowledge of many different movies and random trivia about them. However, with all the new technology and ways to watch movies, I realize that I don’t know as much as I thought I did about my favorite genre (horror). I also learned that there are a ton of great movies out there that I’ve not only never seen, but never even heard of.

My younger brother, who I’m very close to, got Netflix a few years before I did, and over the past couple of years there’s been many a night where we get together to watch a random horror flick he’s found on Netflix, or Redbox, or some similar option.  Through him, I’ve discovered some pretty great movies that are relatively unknown, or that I never would have heard of any other way. Thank goodness he has a spirit that is much more open to trying new things than mine is.

Before we began having our movie bonding nights, I never liked to go into a movie without knowing what I was getting into. I normally have to have seen at least two trailers for it, have read a plot synopsis on imdb and a few other sites, and so on and so forth. What can I say—I love movies, but since I watch so many of them already, I don’t like to have my time wasted with two hours of something I should have been able to guess was going to be a dud.

I like to think of these “finds” of his as Hidden Gems.

One of these recent Hidden Gems is the movie Nine Dead. As usual, I was skeptical about this movie at first. My brother refused to give me so much as a plot summary before we watched it; his only selling point was that it sort of reminded him of something out of a Saw movie, and of course that was more than enough for me.

While quite a few moments of the acting in this film were atrocious, it wasn’t so bad that it took me out of the movie or made it unenjoyable. And as someone who enjoys a good mystery, I found the plot of the film very intriguing. By the fifteen minute mark I was so captivated by the story that I forgot how reluctant I’d been to watch it in the first place.

So what is Nine Dead really about? Simply put, a group of people find themselves trapped, chained in a room together by a man who tells them that their task is to figure out the reason they’re all there. Until they do, their captor will return every ten minutes and kill one of them until they’re either all dead or they figure out why all of them are there. Not a very easy task.

Granted, the movie starts out quite slow. Right off the bat, the opening segment is poorly done, showing how each of them were kidnapped. Waste of screen time. We get it; they were taken out of the blue. Showing maybe one or two would have been okay, but it became monotonous. And then there was the dialogue. Awful. I don’t normally say this, but I could have done better. Some of the things the characters said, like Coogan’s convenient last words to the killer, most of the dialogue of the rebellious Leon character, and the things the characters yell at their captor when they realize where they are, and after he shoots a victim; it practically made me cringe, to say the least.

The other major problem with the film was how convenient it was that they each live long enough to give out their individual significant piece of information that solves the mystery in the end. I understand that it was necessary to make the film work, but it was just a little too sloppy. Each person’s information came out in a way that was clearly a plot contrivance and not at all natural and realistic.

So there’s all that. But the thing is that Nine Dead did what is was supposed to do as a film: it entertained me and thrilled me. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie for what it was, and found myself just as invested in what was at stake, as the characters. The movie had its intense moments. It’s a good watch because it has horror elements, thriller elements, and has enough suspense and mystery to keep you watching until the end. You’ll hate some characters with a passion, and care enough to feel that some of the characters are treated unfairly in being trapped in that room.

So, I’d recommend this one—as long as you go into it expecting nothing more than a fun, distracting, enjoyable film.

You know a filmmaker is good at what he or she does when, in ranking his or her films from favorite to least favorite, even the one that falls in the “least favorite” spot is still not only a great film on its own, but also better than the majority of everything in the genre. That’s saying a lot.

And that is exactly the case with James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s 2007 film Dead Silence. This film was the first post-Saw collaboration for Wan and Whannell, and as such had a lot to live up to, with the popularity and success of their debut film.

If someone were to go into viewing Dead Silence expecting another Saw-like film, they’d be very disappointed. Because that’s not what Dead Silence is at all. But going into it expecting to feel similar emotions to what they felt when they first viewed Saw (scared, intrigued, more than ready to know what’s going to happen next, highly entertained, and creeped out) then that’s an expectation that one might have met.

I have been asked multiple times by other horror nerds why I’m such a fan of Wan and Whannell, and why I like this movie. One of the things that I love so much about seeing movies by James Wan and Leigh Whannell is that they are really, really good at the hitting the ground running in their films. Not a moment is wasted; they jump right into the story. Dead Silence is no exception. We meet our main character Jamie Ashen, and the ventriloquist dummy, the center of our story, promptly appears. It takes less than 15 minutes to know that the dummy and the story that comes along with it really are something to worry about. It’s very easy to love this film from the beginning because it gives us and shows us what we need to know and see, and ONLY what we need to know and see.

The most common complaint I hear about this film is that the characters are boring; I couldn’t agree less. Every time I see the film, I’m impressed by how believably Ryan Kwanten, who plays Jamie, is at balance: he’s angry about his wife’s death without overacting, and he’s not stoic about it either (it’s always troubling how little concern people show for the death of loved ones in most horror movies); nor does he seem whiny as the neglected son. He strikes the perfect balance. Then there’s the hilariously irritating Donnie Wahlberg character. The way Wahlberg plays Detective Jim Lipton as someone who thinks he’s trying to find the truth, but really just wants to prove what he already believes to be true, and how irritating and cocky he is in every interaction he has with Jamie; it not only provides a sort of almost comic relief, but it just makes you more able to relate to Jamie because, as a viewer one, will feel just as burdened and annoyed by Lipton as Jamie is.

Non-fans of this film also review it by saying that it has very little action. Not only do I disagree with this, making the argument that it moves at a speed that is “just right” for the tone it’s going for; but I’d go so far as to say that even if I did agree, the movie wouldn’t be as good as it is if it moved any faster. This isn’t a Child’s Play, a killer doll movie, it’s almost a haunting film, a ghost story. It’s supposed to have slow-building tension. To the point where it’s almost agonizing. These kinds of tales aren’t supposed to be sped through. Every scene starts with a feeling of “what’s going to happen next?” and ends with a vibe of “ok, now what’s he going to do?” And anyone who’s seen a Wan and Whannell film knows that no matter the speed, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride because it’s all leading to something, and something big.

Which brings me to my final point. The twist ending. As is the case in most films with twists endings that get discussed, there will always be those who say “that was so stupid” or “I knew that was going to happen.” My response is always the same “Yeah, it’s easy to claim that after the fact, just like it’s easy to do some good old Monday morning quarterbacking.” I don’t buy that the twist was predictable. I know I didn’t see it coming. It actually made a lot of sense, when you go back and think about how twisted the entire story is. It tied the movie together nicely, and was a very solid way to wrap things up. Given that this was, again, the duo’s sophomore film after Saw, it’s natural that some might not appreciate the twist for what it is, because it wasn’t on the grand scale of the twist in their first film.  But it didn’t need to be. I doubt they had any intention of topping that twist, anyway. Dead Silence just has a different kind of twist. At least for me, it left me with the same kind of reaction that I had when I watched Saw for the first time: it left me sitting on the floor, in front of my DVD player, with my mouth hanging open and my eyes wide with fear. At the very least, to the twist’s detractors, I say this: wasn’t it at least better than the played out, more-than-stereotypical horror movie endings of 1) the hero or heroine killing the villain, breathing heavy, and then walking out into the sunlight, or 2) the hero finally managing victory, after which the police show up, and we close on the hero wrapped in a blanket in the back of an ambulance, staring into the abyss?

So there’s all that. At the end of the day, Dead Silence is an enjoyable, even great, film that, for all it’s being the least popular film of the duo (at least among those I know), still manages to beone that scares me enough to make me watch it at least once a year. And for as much as I loved Wan and Whannell’s debut, this was the film that solidified me as a hardcore fangirl of theirs and made me determined to see everything that they would ever make.