The initials VD are infamous for a condition injurious to personal health…but here the VD in question - a ventriloquist dummy who tears your tongue out - is a lot more deadly.

The malevolent mannequin belongs to long-dead (or is she?) Mary Shaw, a pre-war theatre ventriloquist whose act was labelled a fraud by a cocky kid in the audience.

When the young accuser disappeared the good folk of Ravens Fair took the law into their own hands, accused Mary of abduction, cut out her tongue and killed her.

The creepy old bat was then buried alongside her "children", a hand-hewn collection of eerie vaudeville dolls…but she didn't stay dead for long.

Fast forward sixty-odd years and young buck Jamie (Kwanten) has the shock of his life when he returns home with a Chinese takeaway and finds his new wife dead and her tongue ripped out at the seam.

It's no coincidence that he's just taken delivery of a ventriloquist dummy that just turned up on his doorstep…but he's got to convince careworn detective Donnie Wahlberg of his innocence.

Devil dolls from the vicious Fats in Magic to Chucky in Child's Play have always had the inherent ability - courtesy of their swivelling eyes and miniature corpse-like demeanour - to chill the blood.

Unfortunately, director James Wan doesn't just leave it there, overloading an already overstuffed storyline with gothic imagery in the style of Carry on Hammer.

As well as diabolic dolls (100 odd, count 'em), we get mist-wreathed graveyards, a cadaverous wheelchair-bound dad with an unfeasibly fit young wife, an old crone muttering to a stuffed crow and even a decrepit old theatre decaying on a remote lakeshore. It's all a bit much.

Chuck in an ageing mortician with a nice line in vintage hearses and Wahlberg's stubbly tec - think a young Columbo complete with mac but a thinning scalp - and there's not a lot of room left for anything else. Like a plot.

On the upside, the scares are still there...but by the end you'll die laughing as opposed to expiring with shock.

This is one case of VD crying out for a shot of penicillin.

Tim Evans