Lost in the fog

Rating: 5/10 (24 April 2006)

I wanted to like "Silent Hill." I love horror movies and the games -- well. You don't so much play them as you endure them. They're more horrifying than some of my favorite horror flicks. While the movie did, at times, capture the feel of playing the game (not a difficult thing to do, really), it never inspired me with the same feeling of imminent dread about what might be around the next corner. The first 30 minutes or so were solid, but before you know it, people are re-creating the worst parts of the game -- searching moldy rooms for yellowed files and getting lost in these interminable sub-plots. Then they made the mistake of centering the evil of the titular town into a single character, which was a mistake, I feel. Silent Hill should be more of a haunted locale story than a ghost story. Right when I was pondering this, though, came the religious nuts spouting dialogue ripped from Monty Python's "Quest for the Holy Grail." I half-expected one of them to point and say, "She turned me into a newt!" This isn't to say the movie wasn't admirable in some ways. I liked that it was a "hard-R" and the monsters were everything I thought they could and should be. The music and the sound effects were used to great effect -- as they were in the games. While we're on the subject, the games were scary because of the feeling of loneliness and claustrophobia. Too many characters in the movie on screen for too long took the legs right out from under that concept. This could've been a better movie with a cast of five -- and kept under 90 minutes. Since this was an adaptation, I have to say there was better source material to work with. The storyline and characters of "Silent Hill 2" would have made a richer, more personally disturbing story. It was rife with symbolism and complexity, but the filmmakers here opted for a sort of recycled hodge-podge of elements from most of the other games. As a movie, though, "Silent Hill" just didn't work. In the end, I felt disappointed and lost in the fog like some wayward traveler on the banks of Toluca Lake.