Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20.45%
Worth A Look: 24.43%
Average: 23.3%
Pretty Bad: 25%
Total Crap: 6.82%
11 reviews, 110 user ratings
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| Silent Hill |
by Peter Sobczynski
"It could be this month's 'Ultraviolet'"
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By any rational critical standard, “Silent Hill” is one of the silliest and most incoherent films ever made by presumably human hands–two solid hours of actors in strange costumes speaking ridiculous dialogue in the service of a screenplay so incoherent that it sounds as if it was translated from English to French to Polish and back to English by people without a firm working grasp of any of those languages. And yet, as faithful readers have come to learn, I am not the most rational of critics and I have a soft spot in my heart (and possibly the head) for such goofball films, provided that they are made with loads of energy, visual style and a heedless, go-for-broke attitude that races right up to the line of decorum, sanity and good taste and then cheerfully plunges past it at 90 m.p.h. Luckily, “Silent Hill” is the kind of screwy epic that has those particular qualities in abundance and the result is perhaps the most perversely entertaining bad movie I’ve seen since “Constantine.”Based on a videogame that remains unplayed by me, the film stars Radha Mitchell as Rose , the adoptive mother of Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), a young girl plagued with sleepwalking nightmares about Silent Hill, a mysterious West Virginia burg that became a ghost town as the result of an underground coal mine fire three decades earlier. Leaving her husband (Sean Bean) behind, Rose packs Sharon in the minivan and drives off to Silent Hill in an effort to get to the bottom of what is causing Sharon’s nightmares. After being spooked by a strange apparition, Rose crashes and is knocked unconscious and when she wakes up, Sharon has disappeared.<
Like most abandoned towns in West Virginia, it appears that Silent Hill is, if not right on the mouth of Hell, at least Hell-adjacent and Rose, now searching frantically for Sharon, is soon beset by an array of strange demonic apparitions that appear when darkness falls–they include jumbo-sized cockroaches, an triangle-headed beast who likes performing one-handed eviscerations and a group of creatures that can only be described as Edvard Munch’s “Scream” Babies. As she proceeds further in her pursuit, Rose eventually stumbles across a cult of apocalyptic religious fanatics led by a wacko (Alice Krige) whose two-part solution to every problem appears to consist of a.) branding the troublemaker as a heretic or witch and b.) burning them at the stake. Unfortunately for them, they burned the wrong little girl many years ago and this particular victim has made an especially unholy alliance in order to gain revenge and both Rose and Sharon are vital parts to pulling this off.<
As strange as the above may sound, I must confess that I am actually making Roger Avary’s screenplay sound far more lucid and coherent than it actually is. Although the film runs 127 minutes, it never bothers to sit down for a moment to explain to the viewers what in the hell is going on at any given point. Perhaps the story makes more sense to those who have played the game but if that is the case, Avary doesn’t even make a token effort to reach out to those who might have had better things to do (or who spent their time trying in vain to keep Lara Croft from impaling herself on jagged rocks.) By the time it actually gets around to explaining the sordid backstory, the explanation itself is so bewildering that anyone watching is likely to be more confused than they would have been if no such scene had been included.<
However, while the narrative is an ungodly mishmash of “The Devils,” “The Village” and the overrated J-horror exercise of your choice laced together with unintentionally hilarious dialogue (the funniest being the bit where someone looks at a dilapidated building and remarks “It looks there was a fire,” apparently having failed to notice that everything in town looks as if it has gone through a fire or twelve), the visual style of “Silent Hill” is so extraordinary that it is almost better for the film that the screenplay is so meaningless, lest it divert attention away from the eye-popping sights. Nearly every scene contains an image or two to marvel at that range from the quietly lyrical (a constant “snowfall” that turns out to be ashes) to the utterly grotesque (the most bizarre of which may be the gaggle of rubbery zombie nurses that are tricked into slashing each other to ribbons) that keep your eyes glued to the screen while your mind attempts to flee the scene.
The film was directed by Christophe Gans, a Frenchman best known for helming “Brotherhood of the Wolf”–a work that I guarantee is, without question, the finest kung-fu/werewolf/French Revolution epic that you will ever see. In that film, Gans demonstrated his gleeful love for audacious spectacle in a scene that saw Monica Bellucci’s naked breasts transmogrify before our eyes into a pair of snow-capped mountains–a bit that Russ Meyer himself would have applauded. That swing-for-the-fences attitude continues in full force here as he pulls off one jaw-dropping spectacle after another until you begin to wonder how in the hell he can possibly continue to top himself. Amazingly enough, he does just that in a demented, Grand Guignol finale that is so chock-full of purple prose, grotesque tortures, shocking twists, brutal vengeance and spraying blood that it feels like the endings of every single Hammer horror extravaganza jammed into a highlight reel that even Ken Russell might find excessive.While I admire “Silent Hill” despite its flaws–it may be a mess but it is certainly never a boring one–I am fully aware that many of you out there will probably not respond to its cheerful excesses as I did. In fact, I would guess that about 95% of those of you still reading this are likely to regard it as one of the worst movies ever made. However, that other 5%, the 5% who, God bless them, revel at the sight of a film that revels in gleefully pushing the boundaries of sanity and good taste, are going to have a blast watching it.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14326&reviewer=389
originally posted: 04/21/06 18:06:17
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USA
21-Apr-2006 (R)
DVD: 22-Aug-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
31-Aug-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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