Coal Miner's Fodder

So, last weekend, myself and my fellow primate took a trip down to one of the local film houses to take in a moving picture show. Our choice? Why, it was Silent Hill. Based on the horror-survival videogame series of the same name, the film tells the story of Rose, a woman whose adopted daughter, Sharon, is constantly sleep-walking and having nightmares about a town called Silent Hill. So, to get some answers, the pair go trucking down to West Virgina, where the town of Silent Hill has been abandoned since a fire started in the coal mines under the town. Upon arriving in the town, Sharon disappears. Rose and random highway cop Bennett must search through the creepy town to find her.

Also, there are monsters. Lots of them.

Anyway, reviews of the movie have been mixed. Some love it. Some hate it. Most fall in that middle road. So, we assembled a crack team of reviewers, using a strict list of criteria. 1) They had to see the movie. 2) They had to have an hour to write up what they thought about it. 3)They had to be a writer for this blog. Or, at least related to one.

So, without further ado, we'll start this off with our special guest reviewer, Morgan:

"The good:
I was terrified. I was horrified. I was disturbed. I was shaking and clutching at shirt-sleeves.
Highlights:

• How LONG it took for anything to happen once she was actually in Silent Hill. It's nice that the director took his time with it.

• The eyes of the dude on the chain-link fence. Oh. My. God.

• The darkness made me want to hide. Like, inside my purse.

• THE MONSTERS! Oh Heavenly God! Oh Mother of the Baby Jesus!

The bad:
One thing I like about the horror genre is that it's a type of action film where a female protagonist is not only acceptable, but almost expected. But why--with the exception of a few notables (Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Naomi Watts in The Ring etc.)--why do they always seem to cast these blank-slate pretty girls who make me want to scream when they, I dunno, talk? Now, I'm not saying the actress can't be pretty (Naomi Watts anyone?) but can she at act too? (Though to be fair, the actress playing Rose sure could scream and cry well!)

In any case, casting a bad but good looking actress does NOT help your movie--especially if the dialogue is badly written and the leaps in logic aren't exactly that logical.

Okay, you're saying--"Logic? Morgan, it's Silent Hill."

I dunno...it just makes me laugh when a character is shocked for being put under arrest for speeding away from a cop after being pulled over. I mean, sure, get angry at being arrested--your kid's missing in Scaryhelltown, you've got more important things on your mind--but I don't think you’d be confused as to WHY said cop would be putting you in cuffs. It just made her look...really dumb.

And I'm sorry. "We're going to get through this" and "It's going to be alright"? Really? Phew! I was worried for a second there--Oh look! A thousand flesh-eating cockroaches with human faces!

These kinds of movies always work better when you don't know what the fuck is going on, and true to form, once the mystery is gone the movie goes downhill really, really fast. There's no more tension and no more suspense. Is she gonna die? Do I really care? Can the director get the extras to stop writhing for five seconds???

Anyhow. Yeah, the climax kinda degenerates into a gore-fest with shitty dialogue.

"You burn anything you don't understand!" Bleah! Now imagine it said with the petulance of a ten-year-old."

Parsopolian treats the film a little more kindly, reminding us just how bad video-game movies can really be:

Going into Silent Hill, I told Scotty Bomb and Lilwall that I didn't expect it to be amazing, or for it to bomb. Rather, I expected it to be a step in the right direction for game-to-movie adaptations--and that's exactly what I got.

Director Christopher Gans captures the style, visuals, and sounds of the game with almost too-perfect accuracy, without every making it feel like you would have needed to play the games in order to appreciate just how creepy and distorted this town is. The movie is paced very well, and though my fellow monkeys might tell you that there's too much exposition in certain scenes, I would have to disagree. The story works well, and the ending leaves the audience with a little to think about.

It definitely has a few flaws though. The protagonist is completely unbalanced--half the time she's a scared bimbo, and the other half she's Jill Valentine--and there is some dialogue that doesn't need to be there--including the last ten minutes of the movie. Despite all of that though, Silent Hill is definitely a step in the right direction, and gives me hope that the days of Uwe Boll cluster-fucks are at an end.

Speaking of cluster-fucks, Scotty-Bomb felt the ending could use a bit of work:

Now, I'm a big fan of Silent Hill, and a big not-fan of video game based movies. Frankly, my heart has been broken one too many times. So, understandably, I went in expecting disappointment, and hoping for anything other than disappointment. Happily, I wasn't disappointed. The movie delivered in almost every respect.

First and foremost, it was true to the source material. Almost reverential, in fact. I'd go so far as to say that non-fans of the games might be a little lost -- the way Serenity may have lost non-fans of Firefly. For fans like me, though, it was refreshing to see.

Secondly, it was deeply atmospheric. Admittedly, this is an aspect of the game and they wanted to remain true to the games --see above--but frankly, rich atmosphere is a MUST for a good horror story. And Silent Hill really delivers this with a punch. Long portions of the movie were devoted to Rose just running around the town, and I loved these parts. The town was wonderfully imagined, and the parts where it descends into the "Darkness" were both terrifying and disturbing.

Thirdly, the monsters were great. Again, right out of the game, but with good reason. The game monsters were all terrifying because they were so perfectly designed. They really are the disturbing constructs of an enraged child's psyche, like the broken toys that protect it. Some Silent Hill 2 monsters slipped in, but I didn't find that bad as many of them had disturbing medical undertones, and it was appropriate to the plot.

Now, I still thought there was some bad to go along with all this not-disappointment. Frankly, the ending was weak. I won't spoil anything, but for those who've seen the movie, we'll call it the Church Scene. Not the first one, I mean THE Church Scene. That's when the movie really turned for me, and the rest of it seemed both rushed and… well a little out of character from the previously established Rose. I was even willing to forgive the scene prior where the back-story was basically spelt out for those who decided not to follow the plot, but the Church Scene...well it really pulled me out of the story. I was also very under whelmed by Sean Bean's part in the plot. I felt he could have been tied into the ending much more meaningfully, and that he was ultimately wasted by the writers -- especially because it was a good performance from Sean Bean!

In the end, the movie came together a little too hastily, and a little too neatly, in an unsatisfying way. The Silent Hill games always left a little ambiguity at the end, never really explaining everything. This way, the gamer would have something to mull over when it was all over...I guess that movie-goers would much rather have everything spelt out for them, than be left with something to talk about.

MikeTheGreat thought the movie was great, and the rest of you can go to hell:

Say what you will of the stigma surrounding video game movies. Silent Hill combines realistic horror with a chilling script to violently eviscerate all cliches of the genre and produce a disturbingly satisfying transfer.

The film tells a complex tale of purgatory and redemption with an ever-present fear of authority. The characters are real. The best moments of the film come from the torturously terrified performance of Rose; as a viewer, you truly feel as if she is about to become the next victim of the film's own sadistic bloodthirst. Late in the movie, there are points where the drama feels slightly forced, but the action is never too much that it interferes with the plot.

Visually, Silent Hill is perhaps the most disturbing and spectacular film of its genre yet. Creatures of hellish nightmare are faithfully reproduced from the game, and they all feel unsettlingly real. The film only uses CG effects when necessary, opting for the more traditional latex makeup, and none of the effects ever intrude. They're seamless and beautiful enough to quench the thirsts of the most critical of gore fans, and the visuals never feel like a crutch to simply support weak parts of the script.

Perhaps its most impressive feat is avoiding the banality of traditional video game movies. While Silent Hill is not entirely cinema, it distances itself enough from gaming cliche to deliver two hours of sick and joyful entertainment. Though it isn't the first film to attempt this, it's the first to do it right. A new prescedent has been set, and we can only hope that future efforts will base their gaming films on the Silent Hill model.

Masamax wants you to know that not only did he enjoy it, but he ain't afraid of no ghosts:

As far as video game adaptations go, this one is way above average. Then again, the bar has been set fairly low with epics like House of the Dead, but none-the-less it is a relaitvely good movie. Although I never really felt scared in the movie, that's mostly because I'm manly. The movie is extremely stylish, and looks great, with quite a few very disturbing scenes, However, it has some real weak moments, mostly when it strays too far from the "Let's make the auidence wonder what the fuck is going on in this town!" to "Let's explain it to them in the most blatant terms we can!". I also felt it might have followed the games a little too closely for the movie format, perhaps losing some narrative focus, but still, after some of the crappy 'scary' movies I've had to sit through recentlly, this one is actually near the top of the list of recent films in that catagory. I think it would have been better without those explinations though, as one of my favourite movies of the past year, Hostel, was extremely effective at making you feel some dread (even me) due to the way it ended. I'll leave it to you to decide.

3/5

Finally, Lilwall could not come up with a clever comment for his own review:

For myself, Silent Hill was pretty much like waking up as a kid on Easter morning. The eggs have been gathered and your heathen family has continued their tradition of skipping church. And now you're sitting in the living room with mountains and mountains of candy before you. And you pledge "I'm going to eat ALLLLL this candy!"

And you do. The first hour is pretty good. You're eating chocolate bunnies and they're delicious. For the first hour of Silent Hill, it held on to me pretty interested. Save for a bit of a slow beginning, the visuals and the disturbing atmosphere created in the movie had me right in in that horror-movie sweet spot. I was scared, and I was loving it. It truly did capture the main thing that made the Silent Hill games scary -- you had no idea why all this scary shit was happening, so you couldn't even begin to anticipate what was around the next corner.

After the first hour of the candy binge, of course, you get start to hit that wall. The candy you are eating is the same, but it doesn't taste as good - it's starting to get to be old hat. A little too much of a good thing, and you start to lose interest. Of course, every once and a while your spirits are lifted when you find one of those wonderful cream-filled eggs. Pyramid Head was that cream egg. Creepy as all hell, the sword-wielding sadist helped the last half of the movie from slipping completely in to Been-There, Done-That territory. Other than that, you're thinking, "Sure, it still tastes good...but do I really NEED all this candy?"

And then, comes the end. All you have left are the shitty little ducks made of low-grade sugar. They'd make you sick on a good day, but after eating all the GOOD candy, they taste especially horrible. This is the Church Scene - overly dramatic, overly gory. Too much rushed exposition, and, going against the tradition of the video game series, far too much closure. One doesn't fully appreciate the first half of the movie, in which the narrative was presented primarily by visuals, until one realizes just how bad the dialogue is, and how bad the actors are at giving it.

Just like those little sugar ducks, the last ten minutes of Silent Hill makes you want to throw up when you're done. But, if you can stomach the absolutely horrible final binge, Silent Hill isn't a bad way to get your sugar high.

Long update, huh? Well, now it's over. Go away.

String,
Lilwall