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the years there have been many movies adapted from
other media such as cartoons, comic books and TV
shows. The latest alternative media format to get
the
Hollywood
treatment is the video game. Popular games like
Super Mario Bros., Mortal
Kombat, House
of the Dead, Resident
Evil and Doom
have all been given a shot at the silver screen
and all have failed miserably. The latest attempt
at this appalling yet financially lucrative genre
is "Silent Hill." Based on the video
game of the same name and helmed by Froggy
director Christophe Gans (who gave us the vapid,
but highly entertaining "Brotherhood
Of The Wolf"), "Silent Hill" is
a bit of a departure from what we've become used
to from video game to big screen ports.
The movie introduces us to
Rose (Radha Mitchell, "Pitch
Black"), the adoptive mother of Sharon
(Jodelle Ferland), a disturbed little girl with a
penchant for sleepwalking across busy highways and
standing at the edge of cliffs screaming the words
"Silent Hill!" Rather than seek
psychiatric help for Sharon and much to the dismay
of her husband Chris ("The
Island's" Sean Bean in a thankless role),
Rose decides to sort things out by taking
Sharon
to the town of
Silent
Hill. The town is shrouded in mystery and
intrigue, having been abandoned after much of it
was destroyed by coal fires that still burn to
this day, and is blanketed by a steady rain of
grey ash. As is de rigueur for movies of this
type, Rose crashes her car and loses
Sharon
in short order. Assisted by a bull-dyke motorcycle
cop who wears her uniform like fetish gear (but
doesn't do us the courtesy of getting naked), Rose
scours Silent Hill looking for Sharon and enters a
nightmare far beyond her wildest expectations.
The major problem with all
the other video game-based films we've seen in
recent years, aside from their half-baked scripts,
is that they either look too much like a video
game (ala the efforts of the infamous Uwe Boll) or
they look like cheap rip-offs of normal horror
movies. "Silent Hill" bucks this trend
in spectacular fashion. With the minor concession
to the 'Dungeon Crawl' gaming format, there's
nothing about the look or structure of the film
that belies its console roots. Instead,
"Silent Hill" suffers from the usual
shortcomings of your average horror film: a weak
script, uneven pacing and marginal acting.
I haven't played any of the
"Silent Hill" video games, so I can't
comment on how faithful the movie is to the source
material. However, what I can say is that the
movie takes way too long to trudge through the
story it does have. If you are adapting 'The Lord
of the Rings' or 'Dune,' then it is acceptable for
your film to be over two hours long. But if you
are adapting a video game, you don't have that
excuse. The worst part is that "Silent
Hill" tries to be a serious horror film
despite knowing full well that it doesn't have the
required thematic weight to throw around. Sure,
there's plenty of heavy brooding about
self-righteous religious sects and the folly of
Puritanical societies, but unless your script was
written by Arthur Miller it's pretty tough for the
result to be anything more than hokey, and
"Silent Hill" is more than half a
hundredweight of hokum.
But none of this would have
been a big issue if the script was efficient and
fast-paced. Instead, there is enough obvious
stuffing to make wonder bras obsolete. Most movies
will typically have a scene in the middle were the
plot exposition is given to bring the mystified
audience up to speed. "Silent Hill" has
several. The padding is most obvious in the side
plot involving Rose's husband and the local
police. The industry buzz is that the original
script only contained the female leads and was
rewritten to include the husband at the studio's
request. The result is leaden pacing that feels
interminable by the time the climax comes around.
Hollywood
corporate bean counting ruins yet another movie.
On the bright side,
"Silent Hill" is one of the better
looking horror films in recent memory. The first
step in creating a straight-ahead horror film is
making the location scary, and "Silent
Hill" succeeds mightily. The dense, ominous
fog and dilapidated buildings give the town of
Silent
Hill a decidedly creepy feel. For once, fog
effects have been used to enhance the mood rather
than to obscure the scope of the SFX (now isn't
that ironic for a video game-based film?). The set
design is reminiscent of "The Cell",
with strange negative lighting, muted pastels and
dark browns giving the film a deranged,
otherworldly look.
The second step in creating a
straight-ahead horror film is making the
characters that inhabit the film scary. Chalk up
one more point for "Silent Hill." Many
of the horror trappings on display harkens back to
the original "Hellraiser"
and several 'Tool' music videos, with plenty of
blood, sickeningly grotesque characters and lots
of rusted barbed wire. There are a few really good
scares thrown in and the movie thankfully doesn't
have a single 'Boo!' moment in it. There's one
scene in particular, where one of the characters
meets their demise at the hands of the Pyramid
Head monster that is startlingly gruesome.
Thanks to the great look of
the film, "Silent Hill" is quite
watchable despite the languid pacing. Right up to
the gory climax, that is, where things fall apart
rather quickly. Thus far, the film had been a
tightly controlled exercise in atmosphere and
creepiness, but the climactic battle is reduced to
a great deal of talking and ends with a conclusion
that doesn't quite jive with much of what had come
before. I suspect playing the video game would
help greatly here.
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