Too long and uninteresting

Rating: 3/10 (23 April 2006)

Question: When should a horror movie be 2+ hours? Answer: Never With all apologies to the Fangoria readers and McFarlane figurine collectors, scary films should not be pushing the envelope with our patience and extending past the magical two hour timeline.
The reason why should be as clear as the nose about to be hacked off the front of your face. It is too hard to keep things hopping, keep thing haunting and keep things gruesome for that extended length of time. That, and keep any of the audience's interest. Hell, even a dreaded visit to the in-laws loses its shock value after two hours. So how long can you sit through stabbings, decapitations and the usual bloodletting before you just feel exhausted or start to edit the movie in your own head thinking of scenes that could have been left of the editing room floor allowing you the extra time to make Smores before settling in for a night of an Extreme Makeover : Home Edition marathon.
This theory seems to have been lost on the producers of the new video game turned movie, Silent Hill. Instead of thinking about maintaining suspense and producing thrills within the control of a good paced film, they instead have put together a mess of film that stretches 127 minutes from curtain up to lights on.
Since it would seem that the screenwriter didn't spend much time on the script, I won't spend much time on its description. In short, a young girl has nightmares about a place called Silent Hill, a town ravaged by fire many years ago. The mother then takes said child to Silent Hill (who wouldn't?). The child goes missing. The mother must enter into the bowls of hell to retrieve her daughter while up against a coven of Silent Hill refugees.
At least that is what I think what happens. As these movies go, this one is a little confusing. That, or I lost interest in trying to figure it all out between highlighting my watch to see how much of my evening was consumed.
For you horror fans, there is some bloodshed to keep you entertained, and for those of you that like weird creatures a la the video game world, there is plenty of that too. What there isn't is interest. I didn't care about the young girl and I sure as hell didn't care about the fate of her mother Rose (whose name if uttered repeatedly as if the writer had a word count commitment on the script and used it as filler). By the time the movie begins to reveal a few things and we find that we are watching less the outtakes from Constantine, but more a cross between The Crucible and The Village, I didn't have feeling in my neck that was struggling not to find a nice shoulder to nap on.
Silent Hill was directed by Christope Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) who looks to have plenty of ideas, but no idea of how to put it all together. His use of color was interesting having the town all covered in a grey soot and the townspeople in fabrics that that shied away from anything that might be found on a rainbow. But this might be more of an adaptation of the game which I have never seen rather than from Gans frontal lobe.
What he isn't able to do is develop any kind of character (his use of Sean Bean is still puzzling), pull off anything remotely terrifying and most importantly, keep a pace that will want us to sit through the scenes between skin pullings and burning at the stakes.
That makes Silent Hill a typical early spring horror flick. It will open big, lose 70% of its audience in week two once word gets out and finally end up on DVD shelves where the young teenagers will eat it up.
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