Silent Hill (2006)

Movie Info

Next vacation: Disney World

Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) and her husband Christopher (Sean Bean) find their adoptive daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is suffering from recurring nightmares of a place called Silent Hill, West Virginia which was destroyed in a fire years ago.  In a desperate move, Rose takes Sharon to the closed city of Silent Hill against Christopher’s wishes and is pursued into the city by Officer Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden).  Finding Sharon missing and themselves lost in an alternate reality version of the abandoned city, Rose must uncover the truth about her daughter and what happened in town years ago if she hopes to escape.

Pyramid Head might be cool…If I could see him

Directed by Christophe Gans, Silent Hill is a video game horror movie.  The film is an adaptation of the Konami video game series which premiered in 1999 and borrows aspects of the series to combines them with an original story.  The film was not well received by critics, but moderate budgeted film ended up making a strong box office return.

Playing games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil are fun.  By sucking you into the game, you are genuinely surprised when nightmarish creatures pop-up behind you.  It is terrifying because you are in control (but out of control).  Here, you have nightmarish creatures but you can almost always see them coming.

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The story in the film is pretty nonsensical.  The movie demanded a male presence and Sean Bean’s character was added.  The Sean Bean storyline in the “real world” doesn’t add much to the story and just adds to the overly long script which is shamefully over two hours.  The plot of Rose running around the town isn’t bad, but it still could use some paring down and more fine tuning…the storyline with the cult lead by Alice Krige and Alessa Gillespie (Lorry Ayers) is unnecessarily complicated.

I didn’t really have any problem with the acting because the actors did a decent job with the troubled script.  Radha Mitchell has proved herself in films like Pitch Black and is a solid lead.  If the script had been better, perhaps the acting would have also been better.  It is difficult to bring nice developed characters from a video game if the writers never went past the flat characters.

Meet my barbed wire of fury!!!

Silent Hill does excel in its imagery.  From the moment that Rose enters Silent Hill and you see the falling ash snow, the movie starts to look a lot better.  The creatures and the visuals are better designed than Silent Hill’s contemporaries like Resident Evil…I just wish the movie lived up to its look because if it had, it could have been terrifying (plus, the scenes were often too dark).

Silent Hill doesn’t have enough scares or thrills.  You would think a movie about a haunted town with twisted nurses and monster around every turn would be scarier, but Silent Hill just doesn’t reach any scary level.  The terror is there, but the movie does not live up to it.  Silent Hill’s success did lead to a sequel Silent Hill:  Revelations 3D was released in 2012.

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Silent Hill:  Revelations 3D (2012)