Silent Hill
![]() Rating: ****.5 ( 4 and a half out of 5) Plot: A little girl’s somnambulistic adventures make mom (Radha Mitchell) fearful and frantic. She decides to take her daughter to the town she mentions while in her trances: Silent Hill. They do so against the advice of the locals, the commands of the police, and without the husband’s knowledge. Mom and daughter are separated upon arrival, and the rest of the movie is about her search to find her child. Is Rose (the mother) experiencing some sort of psychotic episode, or does the town of Silent Hill possess a demonic power to twists the nature of reality which it uses to force new-comers to hear it’s terrible tale? Here’s a hint, it’s the latter. Review: Probably the best movie to come from a video game. The set design, color schemes, monster effects, pacing, sound design, and religious overtones combine for a permeating sense of creepy apprehension. The movie itself develops in much the same way that a video game would, with tasks that enable the pursuit of more advanced goals, the progressive release of background exposition, and even a cut sequence towards the end that feels very much like an end-of-the-game reward video. The movie makes use of a clever mechanism that allows the town to transition every 15 minutes or so between a simply creepy, off-putting ghost town and an out-and-out hell dimension. The protagonist’s journeys into the depths of that hell build to a panting crescendo that release the viewer at just the right moment. This is a movie I watch year after year. |
Notable scene: Have you ever seen a man who wears a giant, metal, pyramidical helmet rip the skin from a human being as if it were a Little Debbie snack wrapper? Pretty wicked. |
Gore : ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Sex/Nudity: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Scariness: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
One Response to “Silent Hill”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
October 10th, 2009 at
Great review! I’m glad someone else gets this movie too. It’s such a visually appealing horror movie. So many of the scenes (and monster designs) are artistic as well as scary, and even though the dialogue can be pretty bad (it’s too much like the dialogue from a video game), it doesn’t get in the way of the great visuals. And how can you not love the portrayal of a Hell dimension, I mean really? I think it got bad press because the average person was turned off by the video game structure of the story and the gamers were disappointed because it wasn’t as gripping as the Silent Hill games (but come on, they were masterpieces and movies are a passive medium). I guess that’ll always be a problem with movies based on games.