Looks Great, but Less Filling!!!

Rating: 4/10 (22 April 2006)

"Silent Hill" reminds me an awful lot of "Underworld," but with much less fun, and much more blood and gore. Strange that, even when compared to a film which chronicles the BLOOD feud between Lycantropes and Vampires, this atmospheric shocker should still manage to saturate its audience in buckets of gore.
The story, at its base, is about an adopted girl with a troubled past whose Mother decides, over her husband's objections, to take her back to Silent Hill, West Virginia. Along the way, her trip is interrupted by, amongst other things, her husbands phone calls, his decision to freeze her credit cards, and a police officer who is strangely tipped on to the idea that something isn't right when she sees the little girl ask her mother in an upset voice who drew the pictures that are in her sketch book.
Rose decides to bolt it when she is stopped by the officer, and would have kept on going had it not been for what appeared to be another little girl who looked exactly the same who she thinks she may have pasted all over the road. Apparently in the spirit of helping your child, it may be necessary to sacrifice another.
Once in Silent Hill Rose, her daughter Sharon, and the police officer all become stuck in what is allegedly another dimension, filled with giant and ravenous cockroaches, strange creatures of other shapes and abilities, and a group of old Silent Hill residents who apparently are trapped and damned in the dimension.
Some critics have noted that, in spite of the very impressive visuals, Silent Hill does play out like a video game- and they are precisely right. Rose, the officer, and a myriad of others who occasionally tag along are led from room to room, as though they are collecting keys, clues or whatever one might collect when playing the Silent Hill video game- at one point, you half expect to see a couple of icons on the screen indicating how many lives each character has left before they die.
Of course, all of it is a moot point. Silent Hill's trailer, which was played ad nausea in practically every movie I've seen for the past five months, happily doesn't give so much away in terms of the surprises of the characters that are about to come, however the shock factor tends to diminish when it becomes clearer that with each character and each killing the director is merely trying to push the envelope further.
As for the ending, and the ultimate assignment of "right" and "wrong" which should accompany any self-redeeming horror film, it is so badly handled and so unclear to the viewer (save perhaps for those who have played the game and live for it) that one hardly knows if Rose and Sharon were lucky victims who escaped the horror, or a villainous pair who aided in the murder of the remaining citizens of Silent Hill. After all, they did take the word and opinion of the little girl who was behind all of these creatures. And yeah, she seemed nice enough when she was talking to Rose.
Then again, she does seem to enjoy ripping apart person after person in the gory finale with barbed wire, and she hardly rewards Rose for her love for Sharon...if indeed you can consider Sharon anything but a ghost herself! So to sum it all up, if you see the movie, you'll see a lot of very disturbing and haunting images, and some rather unique characters- however limit your interest to just these areas. Looking for anything beyond these is a fruitless effort!