PLOT: As a woman searches for her missing daughter in the abandoned, monster-infested town of Silent Hill, she unravels the mystery behind the town's decades-old curse.
During the first half of the video-game-turned-movie Silent Hill, I kept wishing I had a PlayStation controller in my hands so I could guide the film's hapless heroine away from the lurking horrors shambling after her.
During the second half, I would have killed to have a remote control instead. With a fast forward key. Or maybe just a stop button.
Silent Hill starts out promisingly -- atmospheric and creepy -- but degenerates into a muddle of nonsensical plotting, dull characters and unintentional hilarity. You know you're in trouble when the film projector stops for a few minutes during the final reel of a preview screening, and the audience cheers as the house lights come on.
Loosely based on the first in a series of video games by Japanese publisher Konami, Silent Hill casts Man On Fire's Radha Mitchell as a mom who takes her troubled daughter to a ghost town the girl has seen in her dreams. She then promptly loses the kid after a car accident. Well played.
This understandably irritates her husband (Sean Bean), who sets off in pursuit of wife and child. Meanwhile, mom teams up with a local highway patrol cop (Laurie Holden) to search for the missing girl while fending off the town's host of creepy hellspawn, including a muscular man with a pointy metal canoe on his head and a really, really big knife.
Silent Hill's saving graces are its eye-popping digital effects, elaborate monster costumes and creeptacular set design. Some of the creatures are truly horrifying, and the hellacious transformation between the real world and the town's dark parallel universe is cool to behold.
Too bad the same can't be said for much else in the movie. Mitchell's got the mom-in-peril thing down pat, but the closer she gets to unraveling the mystery behind the town's curse, the sillier the whole thing becomes.
The film also takes itself so very, very seriously that unintentional humour keeps popping up. Toward the end, when a crowd of leering townsfolk are chanting, "Burn the witch!" you can't help but imagine the gang fromMonty Python And The Holy Grail chiming in: "She turned me into a newt!"
Fans of the Silent Hill video games might appreciate the movie's faithful recreation of the fog-shrouded ghost town, the horrifying monsters and other little tips o' the joystick, such as radios that squeal with white noise when critters draw near.
But it's likely that only diehard horror buffs will be able to sit through Silent Hill's two-plus hours without their thumbs unconsciously twitching for that phantom remote.
BOTTOM LINE: The flick's creepy visuals and foreboding atmosphere aren't enough to salvage an incomprehensible storyline and laughable dialogue. Silent Hill might be a movie best watched on mute.
(This film is rated PG)
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