A "review" of Silent Hill

Finally, America gets a movie based on a video game that isn't associated with Uwe Boll in any way. Considering this fact, the Silent Hill movie plays out like Citizen fucking Kane. To wit: in the video game, you go to the town of Silent Hill and your daughter disappears. In the movie, these events faithfully transpire with minor variation.

If Uwe Boll had made it, Silent Hill would probably be about people who go to a dance party on a remote island and get attacked by zombie dogs or something. Don't believe me? There are no raves in The House of the Dead video game.

There isn't much more to say about the Silent Hill movie if you've played the game: parent takes adoptive daughter to sleepy town of Silent Hill > car accident > daughter disappears > fog > snow > grey children bite at you. Silent Hill is a sleepy resort town that co-exists with its dark twin nether-realm of nightmares and barbed wire. (In the movie, Silent Hill is a tiny coal town in West Virginia. This doesn't explain why they have an enormous hotel in the middle of downtown.) I'm just happy that the director actually played the game before he made the movie. Silent Hill legitimately bears more than a passing resemblance to the video game series from which it hails. Thus, if you know one, you know the other. In fact, there's about ten contiguous minutes of full-on exposition that will ruin the video game's horrifying twist ending. The only difference is that in order to discover Alessa's dark secret in the game, it takes seventeen hours of getting your ass chomped on by inside-out dogs and hunchback nurses, plus solving lots of ridiculous, contrived puzzles. In order to fight the sideways-mouthed lizard in the school basement, you'll have to find the beaker of acid in the closet, pour it on a statue's hand, take the gold medallion from it, grab that rubber ball, use it to plug up the hole in the gutter on the roof, and then turn some knobs to open up the water tower. And that's just to get the key you need.

Damn dude. Bullshit like that makes sitting through this movie for two hours practically like being on vacation.

The good news is that the movie version of Silent Hill can, more or less, stand on its own. Not that I'd recommend watching it if you aren't familiar with the games. It doesn't stand that well. Like a newborn baby giraffe shakily hobbling across the African savannah, Silent Hill plants its paws on the survival horror landscape and attempts to make headway on a heavily overtrafficked path already stamped flat by the likes of Resident Evil and a dozen five-figure budget movies that wound up on MST3K and everyone who ever made a movie with the deliberate intent of outdoing George Romero. If you aren't walking into the theatre with a clear idea of what Silent Hill really is, the movie isn't going to make it a whole lot clearer. What's with the rusted metal cages and the barbed wire? There's this dude there with, like, a pyramid for a head. What's his deal? This movie is assuredly not Penitence Through Puncture Wounds for Dummies, though I'm happy that they actually explore this angle, albeit for only a line or two: "There are many kinds of justice. Man's. God's. The Devil's."

The whole concept of Silent Hill is that it's a place where, beyond heaven and God and all the angels, someone is still pushing you to confront your past and atone for your sins. Except of course that these folks who put Silent Hill together are rooting for you to fail. Remember that whole Job part of the Bible? Silent Hill is like that: boils and pestilence and the whole nine yards. The only real difference was that Job didn't deserve what he got in the bible. Had Job ended up in Silent Hill he'd be personally OK; he'd just be fighting pus monsters because he'd murdered his wife or something.

There are some nice parts to Silent Hill. The movie looks amazingly accurate: fog, snowfall, crucified men bound to chain-link fences and disemboweled gutted by lumpy child-beasts or flensed by beetles with tiny, Zanti-misfitted faces. It's all in there. In the game, if you turn off your flashlight the monsters can't find you as easily, but then you can't see a damned thing. In the movie, someone hands the mom a flashlight and says the exact same thing, practically word for word. If you have a hard-on for Lisa the Red Nurse, you'll be happy to know that she shows up, too. The music is great; the visual effects are compelling. Just about every scene was CGI'd by a different company, but you wouldn't know that from watching them. The final result is, in light of this fact, remarkably consistent. The little touches that matter are all there, right down to accurate reproductions of some of the camera angles used by the original game. I suspect that one of the reasons why Silent Hill works as a scary movie is because it so closely follows the pattern of Silent Hill: downright bizarre camera placement, overturned baby strollers, "I feel like I need a tetanus shot just looking at it" decor. The producers of this film actually gave a damn about how their film was going to work. Take that, Uwe Boll!

There's also another benefit to Silent Hill: Anna, the religious fanatic that brings momma and Cybil the Motorcycle Cop to the church was also in Regeneration, a fantastic movie about soldiers in a Scottish mental hospital in World War I. (Basically, all this means is that I've seen her naked and I have a hankering for seeing Jonathan Pryce wring his hands again. It is imperative for me to locate this film, preferably on DVD. Little help?)

(Furthermore, for those of you who care, Dahlia Gillespie, outcast extraordinaire, was also the hooker from David Cronenberg's Crash. For a film that has exactly two male characters in it, I'm not surprised that just about every actress save for the little girl has had a nude scene.)