Dear God, where will it end?

Rating: 1/10 (19 August 2006)

With a wealth of technology at their disposal, with the backing of major studios, with a sea of class 'A' horror/fantasy material written, ready and waiting to be developed for the screen, it challenges belief that filmmakers seem singularly unable to make decent horror/fantasy movies anymore. What really bugs me (just as a brief example) is that no one has yet produced a satisfactory movie of Richard Mathesons' seminal "I Am Legend" or even attempted William Hope Hodgesons' "The House on the Borderland" or Clive Barker's "Weaveworld" or Ramsey Campbell's "Ancient Images" (well, in Campbell's case, anything he's ever written). Written works of tremendous quality and potential exist out there, just begging to be developed.
The earlier, stark and visceral approaches of directors such as John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and others seems to have been diluted these days (even by themselves). They either produce nothing at all, or crank out sanitised re-imagined versions of past glories.Compare "Land of the Dead" with "Day of the Dead," or "Ghosts of Mars" with "The Thing" or "Red Eye" with "The Hills Have Eyes." What's going on? As Hitchcock aged he matured as a director, as a creator and purveyor of suspense on a visual-emotional level. Granted, his last movie "Family Plot" was tripe, but the penultimate "Frenzy" was a classic serial killer thriller with some wonderfully manipulative set pieces. He lost none of his creative powers right up until the near end of his life. So, what is going on?
Film makers (due to market forces, or youth culture, or whatever) appear bent on feeding us bloodless, disinfected remakes ("The Fog," "When a Stranger Calls") or glossy throwaway fodder based on video games. Seemingly, as the video game has evolved into a media "art form" of its own with a significant and growing penetration into the youth market, it has become, along with the comic book or graphic novel, the preferred source material over the written word. And so we are served up flashy, nonsensical garbage that eschews narrative drive and the creative development of suspense and shocks in favour of tenuously related CGI set-pieces strung together by inane dialogue telegraphed through wooden cipher-performances from actors who really should know better. Still, a buck's a buck.
The preceding paragraph sums up for me the movie version of "Silent Hill." To truly enjoy this film you'll need to be about ten years old, play video games in a darkened room, have never read a book in your life (apart from the one about Spot the dog), never seen a truly great horror/fantasy movie (or if you did, dismiss it because of a lack of CGI), get easily confused by an episode of "The Simpsons" to the point where following a plot line for anything becomes superfluous to your enjoyment and you must have no idea of what good film making is about.
This movie is just soso cynical. Sean Bean, for instance, autopilots through his role in such an uninvolved and uncaring fashion that you know he's just doing it for the money. The same as everyone else involved. The writers have made no attempt to structure the plot in any meaningful way  it's disjointed, fragmented and has no focus whatsoever. I agree that a film needs a beginning and a middle and an end, and not necessarily in that order, but there should be some attempt to instill a degree of depth and quality, some emotion into the process that engages with the audience. Nope, 'fraid not. It's loud, sterile, about as scare inducing as a buttercup with as much life in it as a quick-dissolving aspirin. You don't care about the characters  unless you have a particular emotional attachment for cardboard cut-outs  and ultimately watching is a tedious process that is much like chewing celery sandwiched between balsa wood, only using your eyes and ears instead of your mouth and tongue.
Hitchcock's "The Birds," Carpenter's "The Thing," Romero's original "Dead" trilogy, Hooper's "Chainsaw," Dario Argento's "Suspiria," - "Carrie," "Pet Semetary," "Halloween," "Psycho,"  anything that uses the language of cinema to communicate something of relevance and meaning and entertain by so doing. Watch anything but "Silent Hill." Dear God, where will it end?