| Product: |
Silent Hill (DVD) |
| Date: |
17.10.06 (197 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Laurie Holden, puzzling storyline
Disadvantages: Over the top effects, too muddled a story.
Rose (Rahda Mitchell, Pitch Black, Phonebooth)& Christopher Da Silva(Sean Bean, Lord of The Rings, Sharpe) have a young daughter, Sharon, who sleepwalks, talking about wanting to go back to Silent Hill, a place neither parent has ever heard of. A quick search on the internet reveals that Silent Hill is a ghost town, evacuated when the coal below the town caught fire a number of years ago, a fire that is still burning even now.
Rose decides, against her husband’s better judgement, to take her daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland, who was outstanding as Jeliza rose in Terry Gilliam’s Tideland), adopted after being left on the doorstep of an orphanage, there. She hopes that by going there whatever is haunting her can be uncovered and her memory of it all restored.
But Silent Hill is more than just a normal ghost town, there is something going on there beyond what the records and websites suggest. Something that is soon discovered when she is chased into the town outskirts by a female motorcycle cop (Laurie Holden, regular appearances in X-files and Magnificent Seven TV series) acting on a report from Christopher about his missing daughter and crashes her car.
Waking up, with snow falling all around her, she sees that her daughter is no longer at her side. She runs from her wrecked car calling out for her daughter. She soon realises that what she thought was snow is actually ash; the fires below Silent Hill have created a permanent semi darkness of floating ash. Strange as this is things get weirder as when the female cop reappears and tries to escort Rose back to civilisation, only to find out that the road is cut off and there is no way back!
In the distance they spot a strange humanoid figure coming their way……
And so the mysteries of Silent Hill begin to be unravelled, mysteries that grow as Rose & Cybil (the cop) explore the supposedly deserted town looking for her daughter and a way out.
Silent Hill is based on the video game of the same name, is directed by Christopher Gans (Brotherhood of The Wolf) and scripted by Roger Avery (Pulp Fiction, Rules of Attraction). An excellent start… a very good director and a talented writer, add a good cast, Mitchell, Bean and Kim Coates and things sound promising.
I find it quite hard to decide exactly how good Silent Hill is, while I didn’t really enjoy the film at all I did find myself sitting there pondering what on earth was going on, and I mean that in a good way! I often find films, especially American one, are far too predictable and very easy to guess what is going on or going to happen. With Silent Hill I didn’t have a clue, it kept me puzzled, and wondering, more or less right up to the ultimate revelation. I liked this about the film, hence my dilemma about how to rate it because other than that fact nothing else about the movie grabbed me in the slightest. Maybe I was too busy contemplating the overall plot to actually enjoy anything else about it, apart from the extremely good-looking female cop, but I ultimately felt that Silent Hill wasn’t as good as it could have been.
The look of the film was superb, the CGI wasn’t too far over the top that it was noticeably out of place, a very big plus point, and the acting, while not superb, was very good but I couldn’t get involved in the characters or the situations they found themselves in. I also felt that if you had played the game and knew the plot that you would find very little of interest in Silent Hill, seeing as The only thing I really liked would have been negated by having played the game, of course having never played the game I cannot be completely sure of this, but I get the feeling that this is the case, that knowing the plot would make the film a complete shambolic mess.
The direction is pretty good, but then I would expect nothing less from Gans. The journey to Silent Hill is tense and gives you that feeling of nervousness as you wonder with apprehension what they are going to find when they arrive. I loved the overhead view of the motorcycle cop chasing the car through the forest, it was something that stood out and has stayed in my mind ever since, as did the first view of the falling ash covering the town.
There is also a terrifically eerie scene where Christopher and the nearby towns detective (Kim Coates) are also in Silent Hill searching for the missing trio, it is very spooky indeed.
Writing this down is making me wonder all the more why I didn’t really like the movie, there are so many good points to it that I am wondering if I am being a little harsh, but no, I know that the film itself didn’t engage me at all, that the puzzlement of the overall plot isn’t enough to make me really think that the movie itself is a good one.
So from my own personal point of view, even with the good points I’ve mentioned (and that doesn’t include all the little touches hidden in the background like the game of hopscotch), I really did not like the film at all. It ends up with a low rating because it just did nothing for me in any way at all really.
With Halloween coming up it may be worth a rent for the night, it is a reasonably good horror, has some very blood spattering scenes and some horrific deaths so might just be a perfect scary night in movie, just not for me!
Summary: Fun for a Halloween night in but not a great film at all despite its pedigree.
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