Ultra-Cool One Minute, Ultra-Cheesy the Next

Rating: 6/10 (22 April 2006)

This movie should have been great, but suffers from inadequate execution. This is not to say that there aren't bright spots. The monsters and beasts in the film are very well done, and there are a handful of "classic" horror sequences in the movie that include demonic children, faceless nurses, and the now infamous Pyramid Head. The score of the movie was also well done and the atmosphere of Silent Hill was sufficiently creepy, complete with snowing ash and fog.
The problem with the movie is that all of the aforementioned coolness was mitigated by horrendously cheesy moments throughout ("cheesy" defined as moments that are meant to be serious but instead come off as comical). One contribution to the cheesiness of this film is a slew of unnecessary dialogue. For example, our two heroines are at a hotel and find a clue in the mailbox of room 111. Instead of cutting to the next scene, showing the ladies attempting to find room 111, the following useless dialogue is given: "What mailbox did you find this in?" "Room 111." "Well then, we should go to room 111." Are American audiences really that stupid that they need these types of explanations in films?
Another grossly cheesy contribution was the introduction of religious fanatics, a concept that is already beaten to death by Hollywood. Not surprisingly, the religious fanatics in this movie are Christians, so we have endless minutes of the antagonists hypocritically judging the protagonists, which occurs in just about every other movie that's released in the U.S. With a concept as innovative as Silent Hill, one would think that the characters would not descend into cliché-ridden diatribes  but they most certainly do. The movie would have been better served if it focused on the Occult and other New Age concepts that were so prevalent in the video games.
Yet another grossly cheesy contribution is the 5-minute "Idiot's Guide to the Plot of Silent Hill", which was introduced near the end of the film. Again, are Americans too stupid to figure things out on their own? On a positive note, the explanation of how Silent Hill became what it is was quite good, but the failure to properly execute the communication of this explanation to the audience just added more cheesiness.
It is rumored that the original script was rejected by the movie studio because it didn't have a lead male character, so he was written into the storyline on a purely ad hoc (after-the-fact) basis  and it shows. The "real world" scenes were almost completely useless, and should have been scrapped completely. They added nothing more than cheesy dialogue.
All in all, it is my opinion that American studios are incapable of producing high-quality horror films. The decent ones that are released (i.e., The Ring, The Grudge, etc.) are ripoffs of movies already made in foreign countries, and it should come to no one's surprise that two of the most acclaimed horror movies made in the past half decade (i.e., Japan's "Pulse" and Korea's "A Tale of Two Sisters") are already scheduled to be shredded and remade for idiotic consumption in America. It's as if the concept of "original screenplay" is nonexistent in the Hollywood horror genre.
In conclusion, Silent Hill is an average to above-average horror movie solely for its cinematography and special effects, but the cheesiness that oozes from every other scene prevents it from being a great movie.