Silent Hill (**1/2)

For those who liked The Ring and The Grudge but felt their back stories weren’t weird enough, this video-game adaptation offers religious fanaticism, underground mine fires, killer cockroaches, and so much more.

Most American horror films seem to come in two flavors. The more common type is where a bunch of stupid young people get together and get picked off by a crazy person. This, based on a series of Sony Playstation games, is the other kind, where some horrible event in the past haunts the present. (Some movies, like the lousy Stay Alive, combine these two scenarios). Besides fans of the games, Silent Hill may appeal to people who liked The Grudge and The Ring, both Japanese imports that centered around the death of a child. The Silent Hill game was also a Japanese creation. The movie, though, isn’t a remake; it utilizes some of the scenarios of the games but introduces a different lead character, played by Radha Mitchell (Melinda and Melinda). My feeling is that screenwriters like to use women central characters in horror movies when they want the character to be able to show fear; male leads are expected to stoically kick ass.

The Silent Hill in this movie is in West Virginia, but screenwriter Roger Avary was also inspired by the abandoned town of Centralia, PA, where a decades-old coal fire continues to burn underground. Avary’s scenario is that Mitchell’s character has an adopted daughter whose night terrors suggest a connection to the eerie ghost town. When there, she finds herself moving back and forth in time, experiencing the nightmare that overtook the town in the 1970s. This back story kind of explains what’s going on, but only to a point. The plot represents a kitchen sink of creepiness, from giant cockroaches to mysterious women spouting archaic language to old-fashioned witch-burnings. I can’t say this is my favorite kind of movie. My eyes start to glaze over when characters start chanting about demons and curses and so on. If you need to understand, for example, what caused there to be deadly bugs, you’ll probably have to listen to the DVD commentary track or something. (The short version is, the bugs are in the game.) However, it’s clear enough that the movie was not a cheap cash-in like, for example, House of the Dead. Director Christophe Gans’s previous movie was the successful French import Brotherhood of the Wolf, and here he fills the screen with a number of memorable and disturbing images, including the town itself. The ending is also intriguing (or confusing), so if this sounds like your kind of movie, you’ll probably like it. If not…

IMDb link

posted 8/23/13