Surprisingly Good, Imaginative Horror Movie

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2016)

Wow. I've been saying for a while that most horror movies made after around 2000 are bad. But this one was actually pretty good. I have never played the video game, so this is a review of the movie on its own.
A spooky little girl sleepwalks out to a quarry in the middle of the night. Her hot mother chases her and saves her from plunging to her death into some hellish hallucination of what looks like a bunch of rusty catwalks above molten steel.
The plot is pretty complicated, but basically the girl was adopted from this mysterious town called "Silent Hill." The mother, for some reason, wants to take her daughter there as a way to help her psychosis. When she does get there, she and this woman cop who followed her somehow slip into a parallel reality where this ghost town is always foggy and is constantly raining ashes. The place, it turns out, is infested with deadly and Lovecraftian things that attack them. And every few hours, everything turns dark and there are even more monsters around.
The movie really succeeds in creating a creepy atmosphere. That's what I really appreciated about it. Unfortunately, the way they tied up the reasons behind this hell on earth were a bit lame.
Like, it turns out that this literal Hell on Earth is some kind of fallout created by the town's former occupants. Okay, I totally buy that. But then, what exactly did they do to create a freaking tear in the very fabric of reality? An unholy combination of abominably black magic over hundreds of years, millions of incredibly horrific human sacrifices, and an already unclean location that God himself had forsaken?
... No... It's the vengeful rage of a little girl who had a crappy life and then was burned as a witch. Now this WAS creepy in a way, because yes, severe trauma DOES invite evil into the human heart. Totally buy that. Anyone is capable of turning into a monster after they've been tortured enough.
But... ONE LITTLE GIRL'S SUFFERING and ONE DEMON just isn't enough energy to create a damned interdimensional glitch in the matrix. Not on this massive scale.
Kill a few people? Sure. Drive quite a few people mad? Absolutely. Put together a small, messed-up death cult? Sure, I'd buy that. Haunt an isolated location? yeah totally. But they couldn't turn an entire town into a Cannibal Corpse music video populated with lethal demonic creatures. That's just absurd.
That's my only gripe. But I can easily forgive that because it was an otherwise smart movie (yes I said smart -- the bar is pretty low right now), and the monsters and locations were genuinely scary.