I threw this on to have some background noise while working—any horror movie about a ventriloqist dummy is almost certainly going to be a dud, it’s too easy a macguffin—but I was quickly surprised to see the magic words in the credits: “Directed by James Wan”. Wan has a real talent for horror direction. I’m not actually a big fan of “Saw”, the movie that made him, and it wasn’t until the one after this one, “Insidious”, that he really won me over, but still, like all his movies, this one has its isolated moments, including an appropriately gory and basically totally unexpected denouement. Probably Wan’s worst movie, not even really worth a re-watch except for the occasional odd Wan touches, which this movie probably has fewer of than any of his others, but, nonetheless, at this point I’m resigned to likely watch every one of his movies at some point, and this is another one, so I don’t regret having seen it.
