Silent Hill (Widescreen)

I have watched it several times, catch it on the dish. Very interesting movie, yet....

I don't play video games so had no idea it was based on that before I watched, so my impressions are on the movie alone. Well, acted, premise that is very complicated. A woman adopts a daughter. Later, the child is given to running away while sleepwalking. Becoming concerned when nothing helps, she is determined to unriddle what is haunting her daughter. So she journey's to Silent Hill to find the answers.

A female cop stops her. She's slightly too gung ho about people abusing kids, so jumps to the error that Rose is stealing her daughter, and chases them. They both crash. Rose awakens on the edge of Silent Hill, a bizarre town that is in perpetual winterscape (ash really) from fires burning underground. Cop chases her, she chases daughter. Slowly you see there is more wrong with this town and underground fires.

Highly imaginative, repugnant, yet, strangely compelling. Maybe someday I will figure out if I like it or not.

Not recommended for the weak stomach. It's was rough at time for me.

I will be the first to admit that Silent Hill is a gloriously haunting feast for the eyes in itself. But its charm and redemption all end there. The video game, turned horror-flick succeeds in its ability to immerse you in this horrific and terrifying world where all you can do is run, hide and pray for sunrise. So this is a great movie to have on with a lot of friends around, talking loudly and you can have your music cranked at the same time and it's actually a much better experience! Great for Halloween parties, especially! The characters suck, the performances suck and the writing REALLY sucks! Anybody ever seen The Room? (<----- Good luck selling this, by the way) Tom Wiseau - who looks like some kind of federally registered sex-offender - wrote, produced, directed and starred in this 2003 masterpiece of hot, salty garbage. I'm actually working on my BFA in Theatre, and if I ever feel like I'm having a bad-acting day, I just look at one of the many scenes available on youtube, and simply remember that I could be worse. At the same time I try to ignore the fact that on its IMDB page it says that Wiseau was given an estimated $6,000,000 for the project.

Silent Hill's acting efforts are perhaps a few cuts above that of The Room, but like all video game flicks it still falls short to have decent performances from its actors, but it's not entirely their fault. The script follows the very same video game flick formula of impossible people getting into (and sometimes out of) impossible situations with lots of people dying and buildings exploding or whatever their lack of plot calls for. I actually think that Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean are decent actors, but the work they're given here gives them nothing to do but react.

But when it's on MUTE and you catch it at one of its many scary sequences, the aesthetics of the world are genuinely horrifying.

Entertainment Value: D+

Every time I watch this movie I am just as freaked out as the last time I saw it! The music, ambience of the town, some of the monsters, and of course, Pyramid Head. These images will stay with me forever!