Silent Hill: Turn Back Now

Imagine the runniest, most foul-smelling and gut-wrenching bout of diarrhea you have ever had in your life.

Now imagine it in celluloid form and projected onto a movie screen, and you will have Silent Hill, a movie on which I wasted two hours of my life and $13 yesterday afternoon.

I'm not going to bother with a full review because the film just isn't worth the effort or the bandwidth.  But let's suffice it to say – as many critics have already done – that the dialog was leaden, the performances were almost universally laughable, and the plot isn't a plot so much as a cruel apparatus designed to torture anyone who is foolish enough to stay until the end credits.

With a running time of 127 minutes, that's a lot of pain to endure.  My husband has no training whatsoever in film or television, and even he had several good ideas where to make major edits.  My own suggestion would have been to cut everything after the words "Silent Hill" came onscreen.

Oddly, for a horror movie, Silent Hill isn't all that scary, although many of the CGI ghoulies and ghosties were at least visually striking. But it is quite gory. Appallingly, pornographically, disturbingly gory.

Specifically, the climactic scene of revenge near the end has enough gore by itself for at least three or four Wes Craven franchises.  Bodies are ripped in two, chopped, diced and julienned by razor-wire.  Women are vaginally, bloodily raped by the wire.  Skin is flayed, clothes are stripped, extremities are severed.  Blood flies, gushes and spatters.  And all this in a church, no less.

It wasn't unlike the prom scene from Carrie, except that Carrie in this case was not a tormented high schooler whose dousing with pig's blood was a cruel prank, but rather a 9-year-old girl dancing merrily as the blood rained down upon her as if she were Gene Kelly.

Even with the normal suspension of disbelief one carries into a theater, the characters were almost completely unbelievable.  They made choices that even the dullards who get offed in the first minutes of any Friday the 13th sequel would know to avoid.

If wooden acting, an unintentionally hilarious script, idiotic characters and plots with more dead-ends than the hunt for Osama bin Laden are your thing, then by all means, go see Silent Hill.

But for the rest of you, a word of advice, and that word is: Don't.

Comments

[North Dallas Thirty]

How do you watch these things without having nightmares for months?

[Malcontent]

The only nightmare it might give me would be about the studio execs who actually gave this thing a green light.

[Queer Conservative]

I've never understood the popularity of sick movies like this. They go far beyond Halloween or even Nightmare on Elm Street. What part of their mind thinks this up?

[anapestic]

Did you not check Rotten Tomatoes before you went, did someone tell you that it was really good, or did you just want to make out in the movie theatre? If it's that last one, I'm thinking there were more romantic choices to make out to, but whatever floats your boat, I reckon.

[Malcontent]

Well, normally I check RottenTomatoes before I see a movie, but I am often criticized for doing so, for being a slave to the critics. So as we were walking out, I gave him a bit of "I told you so" about my habit of consulting critics beforehand.

I do recall seeing a very short blurb somewhere about how it was the scariest thing someone had ever seen. Like I say, it wasn't really scary at all, just freaky, confusing, and absurd.

[anapestic]

A few years ago, I agreed to meet a friend at one of the local megaplexes on a weekend night, and when I got there, the only thing that was playing that was at the right time and wasn't sold out was Scary Movie 2. I hadn't seen the first one, and I hadn't read any reports about it, and none of my friends had seen it (for obvious reasons), and I thought, well, how bad could it be?

That was the last time I saw a movie without checking the reviews first.

[Jamie]

Ummm, I don't know what you expected, but every single movie ever based on a video game, such as this one, has generally sucked. Counting on an actual plot that wasn't in the game itself seems a bit naive.

[Craig Ranapia]

Mal:

It's based on a video game - and a particularly nasty one at that. You were expecting narrative coherence and character development? Silly boy... Even the "visually striking" stuff (from what I've seen of the trailer) makes me hope Clive Barker is getting royalties - it looks like 'Hellraiser' without the elegantly kinky intelligence. But I'll say one thing in Silent Hill's favour - it's a nasty, sadistic pile of shit and has no pretensions to be anything else.

What really creeps me out are people who dress up equally nasty turds like 'Saw II' and 'Hostel' as nuggets of profound social commentary. Yeah right...

[Malcontent]

I know it was based on a videogame, but it was a movie. I was judging it not as a videogame, but as a movie, the latter of which generally requires coherent plot, character development, and good dialog, none of which Silent Hill had.

The whole bit where Rose was studying the "map" to memorize her way to "Alessa" was such a blatant videogame riff that I half expected to see Frogger start hopping down the halls, dodging demons.

[Gunn]

Hmm. And yet Pajiba said it was alright. I had been considering going to see it.

[Tommy]

Oh, I Liked that one with Ms. Brad Pitt.

[Gunn]

I really liked her accent and she did say 'bugger' a lot, which is completely appropriate.

Bugger.

[Toto]

Lol I love how you make it sound like the most obscene pornographic film ever. Silly conservative drama queen the scenes you described were soo quick and subtle it was ridiculous. Hostel was much more offensive. You have a pretty narrow sense of whats extreme. Especially considering this film does nothing to deny itself as fantasy.

[alexana]

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