Welcom to Silent Hill - the seventh layer of hell!

Rating: 8/10 (24 April 2006)

My biggest problem with "Silent Hill" is that I never played the Konami video game the film is based on. Perhaps if I had, then this review wouldn't sound so clueless, and I might have enjoyed myself much more. But to clear one thing up about the above sentences, I did play the very first "Silent Hill" game when it came out in 1999 on the Sony Playstation, but for only about 10 minutes before I took the disc out because I was so terrified of it... and nothing had happened yet!
Flipping through the pages of my March '99 issue of Official Playstation Magazine, I'm reminded of my first frightful moments playing that game, even though nothing had happened. There's a wonderful interview with the game's Japanese developers, and the review's author Joe Rybicki obviously seems pleased with the game - its twisted story, atmosphere, scary touches, and disturbing music and sound effects.
But I have to look at the movie a little bit different. It's directed by a capable Frenchman, Christophe Gans (of 2001's "Brotherhood of the Wolf"), who keeps a strong bit of tension in the opening 45 minutes but lets it go when more characters pop out of nowhere and the story could have used some more polishing. Dread, fear, and paranoia grip Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) when her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) mysteriously disappears in the ash-tainted, fog-drenched ghost town of Silent Hill, West Virginia.
Hot on her trail is cop Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden), and so is husband Christopher (Sean Bean), who seeks to stop Rose by any means possible. See, daughter Sharon has a problem with sleepwalking at night, and is always whispering into her mother's ear the eerie name "Silent Hill," the haunted West Virginia town abandoned 30 years earlier where the fires in the underground mines still burn. So Rose searches, but even as the sirens blare, the town goes dark, and she quickly learns that this town may not be abandoned.
For a movie based on a video game, this is good despite my objections to the story and pacing. I think Roger Ebert has a bit of a problem with movies based on video games, since he rated "Doom" (2005) and "Resident Evil" (2002) both with one star. I do tend to equate "Silent Hill" with those two films, in addition to "Mortal Kombat" (1995), the best video game adaptation, since they are all decent efforts.
But with "Silent Hill," if you could stand those aforementioned efforts without gagging too much, then "Silent Hill" should grow on you, terrify you (somewhat), and make you edge and squirm in your seat. There's a strong visual sense going about and in remaining faithful to the overall tone of the games, there are some genuinely shocking and gruesome sights and very few cheap scares. And it might just become the second best video game adaptation that this viewer has seen. Having to go on Rybicki's review, I'd say that "Silent Hill" is probably the most faithful game-to-film adaptation ever made.
That's the "Silent Hill" treatment; just don't let the "darkness" get you.
8/10