Silent Hill

Directed by Christophe Gans.
2006. Rated R, 125 minutes.
Cast:
Radha Mitchell
Laurie Holden
Sean Bean
Deborah Kara Unger
Kim Coates
Tanya Allen
Alice Krige
Jodelle Ferland

Little Sharon (Ferland) often has nightmares and sleepwalks. One night, she’s just about to jump off a cliff when mommy Rose (Mitchell) grabs her in a nick of time. All the while, she keeps screaming “Silent Hill!” over and over. Rose does a little research and finds out that Silent Hill is a town not too far from them right there in West Virginia. Forget about all that therapy crap. This mom is a bit more proactive. She quickly deduces that the only way to solve her daughter’s problems is by taking a drive to this place of which the little girl unconsciously howls at the moon. You see that? I wrote howl to suggest this is a werewolf movie when it’s not. My sleight of hand is spectacularly lame. I’m like a magician that says “Look over there” and then tries to peek at the card you picked. Let’s move on. With Sharon in tow, Rose gets in her SUV and heads for the apparently deserted town. On the way, she avoids a ticket by speeding away from a motorcycle cop, nearly runs over an ominous pedestrian, crashes and gets knocked out. When she comes to, she discovers she’s reached her destination, which is definitely the strangest place she’s ever been. More importantly, Sharon is missing. Rose and eventually Officer Bennett (Holden), the cop that chased her donw, running all over Silent Hill trying not to be killed by the town’s very weird creatures while looking for Sharon ensues. Based on a true…oh, wait…it’s based on a video game.

Like any movie based on a video game probably should be, Silent Hill relies heavily on its visuals. Once in this God forsaken place, we get scene after scene of amazing imagery. All sorts of creatures of the damned parade themselves across the screen. Those are just the ones that are moving. There are also a number of gross looking corpses lying or hanging around. Not to be deterred, our heroine’s press on through all the ghosts and goblins in their path facing death at every turn. Periodically, the screen goes completely black. Things get really hairy whenever we’re able to see again. As interesting as it is to look at, SH never really frightens us. The tension simply isn’t there. We’re fascinated by what we see, but not afraid of other. What we have is a movie that’s not scary, but grotesque enough for us to be unable to avert our eyes. This is its sleight of hand. Like mine, it is far too obvious. It screams “Look over there!” at the top of its lungs.

For a long stretch, the movie seems to meander along a general path without developing its tale. When it finally decides to saw the woman in half, so to speak, we can see through the box and see her feet tucked safely beneath her. In other words, instead of a revelation, we get an explanation. In what amounts to a cut scene from the game, one of the characters simply tells us everything we need to know. It feels like its source material was merely regurgitated rather than built upon. For fans of the franchise and of horror it’s an entertaining watch filled with visual treats. It’s in the argument for best movie ever made based on a video game. I know that’s not saying much, but it is what it is. That said, it still feels like not only could it be better, it should be.

MY SCORE: 5.5/10

The Mist

Directed by Frank Darabont.
2007. Rated R, 125 minutes.
Cast:
Thomas Jane
Marcia Gay Harden
Laurie Holden
Andre Braugher

A thick, ominous mist rolls into a small-town carrying with it some strange and vicious creatures. We, the viewers, get to hang out with some of the local yokels who are trapped in the supermarket. Based on a Stephen King novella.

It’s well-written horror as it pertains to the humans. When the cast inevitably starts dying off it is with believable, though not always good, reasoning they venture out into the forbidding mist. The opposition between religious resignation to one’s fate and survivalist pragmatism is well done. As the suddenly crowned prophetess, Marcia Gay Harden does a fabulous job in a thankless role. It’s thankless because the movie itself is definitely not on her character’s side. Finally, even though I correctly predicted the ending well before it happened it still manages to work.

It’s poorly written crap with regards to the mist and its inhabitants. In Cloverfield it was okay to not find out anything about the giant creature destroying Manhattan because no one in the movie knew anything to tell. Here, there are clearly people who know what caused the problem. Before they can tell us anything we get the long ago played out tactic of them inexplicably dying or being found dead just as they were either about to tell us what’s going on or when it becomes apparent they know what’s going on. These people are military personnel and in fairness to them, and maybe an indictment of the screenwriters, it’s hardly likely that soldiers of their rank (mostly privates) would really know anything anyway. The creatures themselves are numerous. The smaller ones are fine and do some dastardly things. The larger ones do as well but they’re poorly rendered. They either move mechanically or are made up of easy to spot cartoonish looking CGI. The latter is true for the first monster we “see”. It appears to be a giant land-walking octopus but all we see are its enormous but very fake tentacles causing all sorts of mayhem. This happens very early in the movie but we never again hear a peep out of this particular menace. None of these monsters seem to have any rhyme or reason for their actions and are all powerful and deadly. Our heroes are trapped in a store that we’re explicitly told has a front made up of 100% plate glass. Yet somehow, this movie runs longer than two hours and covers several days. Um…yeah.

This is a frustrating movie to watch. During all the human to human tension-building scenes, the writing is exceptional for horror movies. However, when the focus is on the things that make it a horror movie we get nothing even remotely original and our big bad monsters look like crap. On top of that, if these monsters were as bad as they’re supposed to be then these people have been allowed to live for far too long. If you’re a horror fan or a Stephen King fan give it a shot and you might like it more than I. If creature-features aren’t your thing, skip it and rest easy with the knowledge you’re only missing okayness, not greatness.

MY SCORE: 5/10