Review of the Movie Silent Hill

I arrived at our local cinema to watch Silent Hill, a movie that is based on a popular video game series that spans several years and numerous versions, with no preconceived ideas on whether or not the show should play out in any particular fashion. A fan of somewhat offbeat horror flicks and video games of various genres, this movie started out a bit on the tame side when I look back on it, several days after having viewed it. Starring Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Tanya Allen, Alice Krige, and Jodelle Ferland, the show portrays how a mother who is bereft at her daughter’s bizarre sleepwalking and other ailments, goes against all advice, including her husband’s, to take the child to a town that she has only heard of via the same daughter.

Adopted, the child came to them as an infant, but somehow has dreams of this town, vivid dreams that come out in the form of drawings that the little girl has no recollection of creating. So of course, the mother takes the child in search of the town. Strike one! Could they have not had the mother driving the daughter to an appointment several towns away, (or some other more believable scenario) when they have car trouble and end up making an unscheduled turn into a town that in the end is Silent Hill? While this style of show is a far reach from reality, it is when they surround such a movie with simple realities such as this, which makes a movie work. Having her take off with the daughter and running down a steel security fence to enter a town stretches that realm of reality just too far. To have the characters stumble into an ethereal world of it could have been invoked in a much better way than they did.

The redeeming and very interesting part about the premise of the town itself though, was that it was inspired by a real life town. The ground beneath the Midwest town of Centralia Pennsylvania has been burning for more than forty years due to an underground coal fire.

That was where my hopes for the movie began to be lost, as there was no real build to the horror, and that in part, could be that the riveting scare I was waiting for, never really arrived. There was nothing to build up to. An observation for the fans of the game, as I was, and that is what works in a game, may not work so well in a movie.

From this point on, the movie took a fast spiral down. Strike 2 was that the monsters were not scary they were laughable. The disembodied nurses wielding scalpels looked more like something out of a bad Michael Jackson video than something that would make me want to buy the video when it were to be released.

I held hope until the end, hoping that it would suddenly clarify that what I felt was lacking, was simply more along the lines that I just did not get it. No such luck though, as the ending was as disembodied as the scalpel wielding nurse brigade was. From witch hunting townsfolk burning innocents over bonfires, to exploding acid filled headless bodies, the premise of the movie was too erratic to build terror, and terror is what makes a good horror flick. However, if you want to know how it all wraps up, check it out yourself. If you are a fan of such movies as I am, you will not take my review of it at face value, and will want to see it yourself anyways.