Synopsis
Jamie returns to his hometown in search of answers to his wife's murder, which occurred after receiving a weird package containing a ventriloquist dummy named Billy, which may be linked to the legend of ventriloquist Mary Shaw. Destined to find out the truth, Jamie goes to the town of Raven's Fair, where Shaw used to perform and is buried. But Jamie is in for more than he expected.
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Cast
- Ryan KwantenJamie Ashen
- Amber VallettaElla Ashen
- Donnie WahlbergDet. Lipton
- Bob GuntonEdward Ashen
- Laura ReganLisa Ashen
- Michael FairmanHenry Walker
- Joan HeneyMarion Walker
- Dmitry ChepovetskyRichard Walker
- Judith RobertsMary Shaw
- Steve AdamsPolice officer
Recommendations
- 63
New York Post
The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department." - 50
The Hollywood Reporter
Boasts nothing new under the sun, but it does provide a few decent scares. - 50
Boston Globe
This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll. - 38
TV Guide Magazine
There are no two ways about it: A chubby-cheeked dummy doing stuff it shouldn't be doing is spooky stuff. But Wan isn't on such sure footing with his actors -- Wahlberg is stilted as the tough-guy cop, and Kwanten is blandly uninteresting. - 38
Premiere
Too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares. - 38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design. - 30
Variety
Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics. - 30
The New York Times
The director, James Wan, and the writer, Leigh Whannell (the team behind the controversially brutal "Saw" series), deliver the mandatory shocks and gross-outs, backed by dissonant bursts of music and made almost elegant by the cinematographer John R. Leonetti's desaturated images.
