Dead Silence (1998)

Let's see if we can get this straight guys

I know I'm just as guilty, and believe me I paid for it a long time ago; well 18 years ago is more like it. What I'm talking about is the fact that a poor girl was the victim of a creul joke. I know what all you guys are thinking: "It's only a joke; she should just get over it....WRONG!!!!" I know this one girl in school who was called every name in the book because she always had a boy's haircut, and she was tall and skinny, and was told she reeked. I saw her 8 years later at the age of 20, and she was good looking, but it was a couple of days before she was to marry. I know that I regret not having been more of a friend to her when I knew her. The first relevant scene is where the main character is 12, and she goes to her first dance, and is humilated by a drawing of her masturbating, and this was shown by a boy who she had a crush on, and 5 years later she's looking rather hot, and the boy starts to notice her, and wants her, so she takes him down to the boat dock, and tries to get him in a boat, so they could do some extremely heavy petting. She does a masturbating ritual to get him going before she dives off into the water, but the boy ends up falling in, and is drowned because he's obviously afraid of water, and can't swim. This is the actual meat of this slop, and I do mean slop. Two scenes, and that's all. The rest is all crap in which it has the girl trying to cover up, and make it sound like the boy ran away, and it just has all the makings of a Lifetime movie loser. It just has alot of stupid things in here that just drug the movie through the muddy water that the girl loved to swim in. This film however, did teach me one thing, and that's the importance of remembering the old song from that television show "The Electric Company" where it has the boy and girl doing the old ditty "That's what little girls are made of", and they start taking shots at each other, and finally cooler heads have to prevail, and the song becomes "What little boys and girls are made of". I feel that the latest commercial about teaching little boys not to begin hitting girls is very relevant, but I feel that it also needs to go even further to where we teach the little boys to treat little girls respectfully, and that way we can keep trashy movies like this from seeing the light of day. April 11, 2007

WACKY WILBUR FALLS

DEAD SILENCE (original title: Wilbur Falls) is one of those movies that doesn't seem to know if it's a comedy or a drama, but it's unique enough to entertain in an odd sort of way. Shanee Edwards plays Renata, a high school valedictorian who leads us back to four years earlier and a nasty stunt played on her by her high school comrades. Four years later it leads her to plot revenge against the jock (Charlie Newmark) which leads to his accidental death. She tries to cover it up, with the help of her best friend. Meanwhile the jock's girlfriend Jodie is pregnant and asks Renata to help her get an abortion, which leads them to Renata's older sister who is involved with a second rate gangster named Johnny Handsome. It all gets pretty strange with some bizarre twists. Danny Aiello plays her father, a former cop who is married to spiritually inclined Sally Kirkland. David Anthony Marshall plays Aiello's replacement, a redneck kind of sheriff who never buttons his shirt. They all do well with Edwards very effective in her complex role. Not a great film but enjoyable. July 5, 2006

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