Silent Hill : A Loud Slap in the Face to Horrow Movies

Silent Hill not so quietly kills a horror movie lover’s dreams of ever seeing a truly great scary movie ever again. April 21, 2006 may go down as the day that horror movies died. Silent Hill is 120 minutes of a rambling and confusing plot intermixed with special effects that wouldn’t have qualified as good twenty years ago. It stars Radha Mitchel, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Unger, and a few other people equally as unknown. Truly, it is hard to believe that a movie like Silent Hill can be made, paid for, and released without someone going bankrupt or at least becoming a laughing stock in the movie business.

The plot of Silent hill is hard to determine while you are watching the movie. It is supposed to begin by a mother and father being informed that their adoptive daughter needs to be institutionalized dues to psychiatric problems. Either the movie theater I went to cut that out or the director Christopher Gans did not feel that it was necessary for the audience to understand that. It opens with a very thin and very blond mother chasing her daughter in the night through forests and to an amazing cliff within walking distance of their house. Not sure where they live, but the appearance of the cliff let me know this movie was not too concerned with presenting reality.

Before you can blink, literally blink, mother and daughter have hopped in the mandatory SUV and are racing off to West Virginia and a town named Silent Hill. There is a husband in the scene, but he is apparently unable to stop theses events. He could truly have been left out of the movie to save Sony a little money. Silent Hill, West Virginia is a town that supposedly burned due to coal fires, so the world is led to believe. Along the way mother an daughter run into a very sexy female cop that looks like Angelina Jolie until she takes her helmet off. Than she looks like Angelina Jolie with a little boy’s haircut and a cheap dye job. Naturally blonde actresses or good dye jobs were apparently a little too costly for the budget of Silent Hill. Oddly enough the mother and the cop look very similar.

The rest of the movie involves these two ladies running, literally running, through a ghost town where it rains ashes and night can fall at any time. A bizarre plot arises when they learn the fire actually started by a bizarre cult that burned the bastard offspring of a town member about a decade ago. As far as I can remember, a decade ago there were plenty of bastard children and no towns burning because of this. I also found it hard to believe that this little girl was the only child with out a baby Daddy. Why weren’t the other illegitimate offspring subjected to the same fate? This is all hard to truly believe in the year 2006. After all the late nineties were not the dark ages.

In the end our heroin mother saves the daughter, or so we think. I have to say the ending was the best part of Silent Hill. Not as good as the popcorn though. It leaves you guessing and actually pondering what really happened. The rest of Silent Hill is force fed to you whether you want it or not. All in all though, if you love a horror movie and need your fix, it may tied you over until something better comes along.