I remember back in the day the only video game movies we got were shitty flicks that had nothing in common with their source material beyond the title. The majority of current video game based movies still suck the ol' golf ball through a garden hose, but at least they're coming out more faithful to what the target audience is expecting out of them. Again, this doesn't mean the current crop of flicks aren't shit, it just means that Hollywood is at least trying to get it right instead of just buying the rights to a franchise whose name they'd never heard before, then filling 90 minutes with whatever they pull out of their asses so they have something to sell to the kiddies. Fortunately I've yet to play any of the Silent Hill games (please, save your bottle hurling for after the review), so that saves me from having to complain about whatever director Christophe "Brotherhood of the Wolf" Gans and writer Roger "Pulp Fiction" Avery may get wrong in the translation so I can instead focus on whether or not they know how to make a good movie in general.
When seemingly normal little girl Sharon sleepwalks off in the middle of the night, nearly jumping off of a cliff, her adoptive mother and father stop her just in time. While writhing on the ground though, Sharon screams something about "SILENT HILL!". Rosa (Radha Mitchell) and Chris (Sean Bean) discuss how to fix what's wrong with their daughter with Chris wanting to get Sharon medical treatment, while Rosa thinks they should forego crazy concepts like pediatric science and instead pack up Sharon, drive out to Silent Hill in West Virginia, and, well, just see what happens I guess. Rosa ultimately wins the dispute, and by that I mean that she runs off with Sharon in the middle of the night, intent on returning their daughter to the place of her birth. I hope she remembered to bring her receipt, cuz those adoption agencies are real sticklers when it comes to policy.
When Rosa tries to pull a Smokey & the Bandit with a local motorcycle cop she gets into an accident and cracks her face on her steering wheel. When she comes to Sharon's gone, she's alone on the highway just outside of Silent Hill, and it's snowing... ash... so I guess you'd say it's ashing... I thought there was a joke to make in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it. Anyway, the streets of the small town are barren with the exception of a little girl who may or may not be Sharon that Rosa chases through the streets and into a really unsavory basement the likes of which only Freddy Krueger would sign a lease for. She's harassed by the screaming husks of burning children before she passes out, only to wake up later. Oh yeah, and for anyone rooting for Rosa to forget her daughter and just leave Silent Hill to go buy another one, the only bridge out of town's been mysteriously destroyed Evil Dead 2 style, so she's left to solve the jigsaw puzzle of creepy evil that is Silent Hill. Fortunately for her Cybil, the kinda-hot-in-a-dykey-way motorcycle cop, finds her (though the fog/smoke screen around the town seems to fuck up any and all radio signals in the area), so she's not alone for long. As for Chris, he's trying to find the town himself, which isn't easy since all the locals tell him that the former mining town's been closed down since the underground coal fires made it uninhabitable years ago...
From here on it's pretty much one living nightmare after another as the quagmire (and I don't mean Glen) of freaky deformed horrors that the game is most known for pop up every so often to attack our heroes (which they seem to take in stride considering most people would curl up into a ball and shit themselves for the rest of their lives after seeing these walking skull fucks in action) while the search for Sharon (or whatever creepy doppelganger it is that's running around the town) continues. What's the story behind the weird siren that signals the craziest craziness? Are the guys in gas masks carrying the canary in a cage the town's former miner residents? Speaking of which, are there any other townspeople still around? Will Chris figure out how to pass into the unreality and save his wife and daughter? Will Cybil ever run out of bullets? What the fuck is Pyramid Head and will we get to see him do something cool with that big sword of his? Is Sharon really the reincarnation of a witch or something? Why does it seem like everything goes back to normal just when somebody's about to be killed? Who's the real evil at work here? How many people will get out of this movie alive? Will anybody get out of this movie alive? Is this all the dream of some retarded kid staring into a snow globe!? Probably not, but you never know... unless you've already seen it, in which case I guess you would know.
The movie works on a "complete head fuck film" level... at least for the first half or so, when that's what it's actually doing. Visually it's a twisted and unsettling showcase and it all works best when we have no idea of what's going on. Unfortunately, it's not all one big endless hallucination and really turns down the random horror stuff in favor of becoming more action-adventure friendly half way through, with some gore thrown in to try and make up for it. I definitely like the movie better when it was on the "Japanese horror" route of keeping us in the dark and throwing random visual spookshows at us. If it had stuck with that, I think it would have worked much better as a whole than it did. Sadly though, we're dealing with an American movie here and it's not usually well received when your movie is too confusing and open-ended, especially if you want to get a studio to back you up and make a bunch of money on a theatrical release. If that were the case, David Cronenberg wouldn't be doing straight forward stuff like A History of Violence or Eastern Promises these days, and David Lynch would be using Stephen Spielberg as a footstool instead of funding his own films. As such, Silent Hill always falls back to an audience comfort zone just when you think it's about to go to new levels of batshit insanity. Then again, who's to say that the "normal" shit doesn't serve its own purpose to make the crazy shit seem all the more unsettling? Meh, that's a matter of opinion. All in all I think a little less action, polish and holding the audience's hand, and a little more horror, grime and solitude could have benefited the movie greatly, but it's still a bucket of guts better than the Resident Evil movies...
Oh yeah, and if you thought the tree rape scene in The Evil Dead was hard to watch, imagine it on a much grander scale, only with barbed wire instead of tree limbs and about ten times more violent. Now you’re talking “Ted Bundy wet dream” territory…
