Silent Hill: moody horror loses focus and becomes anti-Christian propaghanda

Rating: 3/10 (7 May 2006)

I find it so weird that even die-hard fans of the Silent Hill video game series for the Playstations are so hardcore proud of the mess that is the Silent Hill movie.
Despite a few obvious differences between the games and this film that are obvious right from the get-go, Silent Hill starts off just right for the first 30 minutes. Like the game, there is barely any soundtrack, the amount of fog is ridiculous, and our view is restriced to what Rose's flashlight can expose through the darkness. These tools are crucial to capture the SH feel, and are used well for the first little while...
What happens next is a retelling of the director's (Christophe Gans) previous work, The Brotherhood Of The Wolf. In essence, it is almost the very same movie: lots of gore, very moody, a pack of crazy God-fearing Christians acting as the enemy, and lots of boring, useless, obvious jibber-jabber. While SH isn't THAT bad in terms of story and plot, the over-acting and the constant and aimless walking and talking slow the movie down so much so, that characters are constantly reading off some of the most obvious dialogue, just in case we get totally lost in the utter boredom of it all. Basically, both films could have been cut down to an hour each, and the overall main point and most essential developments would have come across just as accurately.
Also, like BOTW, not once is the SH movie ever really scary. It deals with scary things (BOTW had blood thirsty werewolves, SH has monsters from hell), but never are there any scary happenings. It has some shocking scenes, but thats all they are, cheap eye-candy that is all too unrealistic (see Pyrimid Head vs. young woman outside of the church) to keep us up at night. All the baddies are there, but only for minutes at a time, and not once is it ever explained who they are and why they are after our heroine.
About half way through the movie, SH loses grip on the lonely and paranoid feelings that the games were so famous for, and becomes Christophe Gans' and Roger Avery's angry rant about Christian history and ethics, and a cloning of Gans' previous big-budgeted semi-horror. Those, game fans or not, who love this movie obviously cant see through the cheap bullshit that is Gans' film career, and his attempt at voicing his strong religious opinion over trying remotely hard enough to pay homage to a major horror franchise that never needed a movie in the first place.
Like every other video game-to-movie cross-over, in the end its just another get rich quick scheme pulled by some Hollywood hopefuls that had other means than pleasing the fans.
3 out of 10 stars, 1 star for every 10 minutes it was good.