Silent Hill (2006)

(Note: This movie review was originally posted at what used to be my main blog at Clyde's Place. I say used to because this one is rapidly taking precedence. I thought about redoing the pictures and stuff but don't really think it's necessary. I did add a video preview and another extra video though. I also added a couple of paragraph changes. Everything else is much the same. I guess you can see I improved on my marquee since this movie which I reviewed when it was released two years ago.)

Silent Hill

Directed by Christophe Gans

Radha Mitchell

Sean Bean

Laurie Holden

Jodelle Ferland

I used to play video games like Silent Hill. There once was a time that I had the time to play those types of video games. I even managed to make it to the end of a handful of them if I had a really good cheat sheet by my side. Usually though, I would get bored by the time I hit level 1,150 and end up putting the game on the shelf to collect dust. On the rare occasions when I did make it to the end, I was usually treated to some CGI cinematic telling me why I had spent a few hundred hours working on that particular quest. Sometimes the explanation was a bit murky, didn’t explain much of anything, and was just setting me up for the inevitable sequel in the hopes that I’d run down to the video game store and part with my hard earned dollars.

Trailer for the movie version of Silent Hill.

It wasn’t much of a reward for having put so much time into that particular form of entertainment, but that pretty much sums up how I feel about the film version of the popular Silent Hill series. It’s one long video game except that you don’t play you only watch, there’s a big video flash back at the end to explain everything, and then there’s an afterthought tacked on just in case the producers get around to making Silent Hill The Movie Part II.

History of the Silent Hill Video Game Series.

The film opens quickly and wastes no time in getting to the point. Sharon, (Jodelle Ferland) the adopted daughter of Rose and Christopher Da Silva, (Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean) has been having nightmares, sleepwalks, and the only thing she has to say about it is “Silent Hill.” Rose, being ever so clever, discovers that Silent Hill is a ghost town in West Virginia. (As often as West Virginia seems to pop up in these movies one would think they should start collecting royalties.) After medications and psychiatry offer no relief and worried that her daughter may take a Tarzan type dive off of a cliff in her sleep, Rose decides to take Sharon to the real Silent Hill just to see if she can find the answers that will help cure her somnambulism.

Hubby Chris doesn’t go along for the ride because the movie needs him to stay behind in order that we can have a few useless cutaway scenes that come later in the film. But we do eventually find out that the reason Silent Hill is a ghost town is because there have been coal fires burning underneath for about thirty years. Just outside of Silent Hill Rose gases up her car and meets police officer Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden), who is also wearing the funkiest uniform since Ilsa She Wolf of the SS. I thought for a moment she was just moonlighting from her job at the local strip show but no, she is just a cop. Anyway, I digress.

Rose heads up the road with her daughter, is stopped by Officer Bennett because inquiring policewomen want to know why a mother is out hauling her daughter into a ghost town in the middle of the night, especially when the roads leading into the town have been blocked off for ages. Undeterred, Rose hops into her car then rams the gate blocking the road and Officer Bennett gives chase, It is then that a shadowy figure of a young girl darts across the road causing Rose to spin out, wreck, hit her head, and lose consciousness.

When she awakens her daughter is missing and thus begins our long seemingly never ending journey. Of course Rose immediately knows she’s not in Kansas anymore and so do we. The town is covered in a dense smoky fog (Surprise! Just like the video game!) with falling ash that looks more like snow. She eventually hooks back up with Officer Bennett who for some inexplicable reason (meaning this is one of those mysterious things that happen where you supply your own explanation) doesn’t show up until about fifteen or twenty minutes later and promptly handcuffs Rose to haul her back to the county jail.

Of course it goes without saying that these two aren’t headed anywhere out of town for a while. I have to admit that at first I found the film somewhat creepy. Director Christophe Gans does a good job of setting the atmosphere with some great help by cinematographer Dan Laustsen, some good special effects, not to mention some nifty sound effects and editing. Creepy creatures appear and disappear, an air raid siren blasts away making things a bit tenser, Rose walks around with nothing but a cigarette lighter to light her way and for a while each corner she turns fills you with a sense of dread until suddenly you realize that not unlike a video game where you have to sacrifice your life a few gazillion times to find the right clues and the perfect tool to help you with a narrow escape to make it to the end, Rose will somehow manage to find all that stuff and not sacrifice her life once.

Yeah, I know; you can’t have the main character getting killed in a movie because there’s no save button. Once it becomes apparent that we are here only to watch Rose find the light at the end of the video game tunnel, it won’t be long before you’ll be looking at your watch and wanting to yell at her to get on with it. By the time she does, you’ll have sworn you were in the theater longer than it would take you to actually play the game even though the movie runs just a bit over two hours.

It's a shame too because both Mitchell and Holden give it their all and you keep wishing the movie itself was better than it is and that the story actually deserved the good effort the two ladies put into it.

Eventually you’ll sort of find out what’s going on but even then I’m not sure you’ll understand it. Those who have played the game might just get it, but I’m not about to start playing Silent Hill when Eternal Darkness has been sitting on my shelf for two years or more now. Then again, I wouldn’t count on fans of the game to be able to give you an in depth analysis either.

On one message board there were about seven or eight die hard Silent Hill fans dissecting the movie as if they were in film surgery class. And lo and behold, there were also seven or eight different explanations which tells me they are just as clueless as the rest of us. And you know what that means. If I’m not only bored but clueless as well I have no choice but to bestow upon you my grade which for Silent Hill is a C-.