How could they do this!?

Rating: 2/10 (14 June 2006)

So when I first heard this movie was being made, I thought: "wow, this is the first game-to- film conversion that stands any chance of turning out nice." By the time it came to Sweden, which was today, I had already read some American reviews of it. In other words, when I came to the theater tonight, I was *expecting* that the movie would suck horribly.
And yet when I left the theater again, it had placed itself so far below my worst expectations that I was infuriated by how miserably deplorable it was. A pox upon the director.
I should declare that I am an avid fan of the three Silent Hill video games. (I pretend that the fourth one does not exist, just like I will banish the knowledge of the existence of this movie to the cobwebbiest corner of the most inactive compartment of my memory immediately after having written this review.) The Silent Hill games absolutely rule. I liked the second one the best. One thing that makes them good is that they manage to deliver that eerie Silent Hill atmosphere which most "horror" games and movies can only dream about. Another thing is that the game designers had found the *exact* point where the balance is optimal between how much is shown and how much is left to the imagination. A third thing is that the plot always was (although never quite as deep as I would have liked them) always deep *enough* so as not to be dull and boring.
The Silent Hill movie is a shallow, uninteresting, and *incredibly* annoying excuse for a pathetic, brainless gore flick that could have come out of that miserable genre's most disgusting peak in the 1990's, if it hadn't been for the special effects.
The first half of the movie was actually slightly better than I expected. So I kind of regained some hope there. The classic Silent Hill imagery was brought to the screen pretty nicely, the music was great - although that might have been due to the fact that they simply took the entire soundtrack straight out of the games - and all I really had to complain about was that they had decided to scrap the Mark of Samael/Seal of the Metatron/whatever and that the volume was way too loud way too often, to the point where it became ridiculous. And then, the middle of the film appeared. Hello and welcome to The Middle of the Film, the moment where we take a never-ending break from *not* completely screwing up this game- to-film conversion. Cue a very long hour of extremely graphic close-ups of people being burned to death, penetrated by and torn in half by rusty barbed wire, superfluously stripped naked and then skinned alive and so forth. Reveal the plot in its "dramatic" and "shocking" entirety - and the plot is basically a mix of the first and third games, except stripped of everything interesting and dumbed down to fit the lowest common denominator.
By the time the miserable movie finally ended, I was just p'ed off.
I hope the design team behind the games had as little as possible to do with this production, because if not, the next game is likely going to be as much of a waste of time and money as this movie was.