Crikey, it's creaky

They will, however, be disappointed. Dead Silence, in which a ghostly old lady rips the tongues out of the descendants of those who did the same to her generations ago, has an entirely different tone to Saw. It looks at times like an ineffective imitation of a Hammer horror and one longs for an actor as reliable as Peter Cushing to give us some feel of reality. This is so much of a plodding fantasy that it's impossible to care what happens to anybody.

The ghost is Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist from the Forties who went mad after being accused of the kidnapping and murder of a young boy. The townspeople hunted her down and buried her with her handmade collection of vaudeville dolls. These are now appearing all over the place and exacting tongue out-of-cheek revenge.

Newlyweds Ryan Kwanten and Laura Regan are the first to suffer. She has her tongue dispensed with and he, pursued by Donnie Walhberg's dogged detective who thinks he did it, goes back to Mary Shaw's derelict town to dig into its doubtful past.

The problem with the film, apart from its absurdity and not very credible acting, is that it has no real Turn of the Screw-type mystery at all. It's woefully flat and not nearly as scary as it thinks it is. It almost makes one yearn for Saw. But not quite.

Dead Silence
Cert: 15