10/27/15 – day twenty-seven of thirty-one days of horror!
Today I am honoring the greatest of all horror conventions, the evil (is
there really any other kind?) ventriloquist dummy, so by default I have
to give it to the “best” feature in this pantheon, 1978’s Magic.
There’s a lot to love here aside from “Fats” the dummy; Ann Margaret,
Burgess Meredith and a wonderfully unraveling and youthful Anthony
Hopkins in the ventriloquist role. But I do feel that perhaps the
greatest ventriloquist dummy film of all time is still ahead of us. If, like me, you have a hankerin’ for more dummies, check out Dead of Night from 1945, the two episodes from the original The Twilight Zone
“The Dummy” and “Caesar and Me”, and heck, throw in James Wan’s
enjoyably schlocky Dead Silence while you’re at it. Only a real dummy
lets Halloween pass without reveling in the inherent creepiness of this
transcendent and nearly forgotten art form.
