Film: Silent Hill

Horror films are all about the irrational. Weepy victims struggle upstairs to escape cutlery-armed maniacs, or decide to take relaxing showers as the mentally-unbalanced hunt them down...
It isn’t long before panicky mum Rose falls into the laws of horror-land, arrested for speeding by a policewoman, and then cornered by a lumpy torso that pleasantly spits acid at the pair.
The cop fires off several shots as the acid burns through her helmet and jacket. Rose, hand-cuffed at the time, judges the situation completely wrong and decides to leg it into the greyish distance.
She’s running into Silent Hill, a miserable town that occasionally morphs from foggy Nowheresville into a rusty, bodily-fluid-drenched hell-hole. As walls and floors flake away around the poor woman, she runs and screams around the town looking for her daughter. It’s only going to get worse, mind, as mutant torsos, barbequed kids, and zombie nurses with pneumatic cleavages all have it in for her. Everything sounds angry, everything feels claustrophobic. But when anyone opens their mouths, they ruin everything.
Screenscribe Roger Avary, has the credentials. A co-writer of Pulp Fiction, gasp, but it seems he didn’t bother to try. Dialogue is hackneyed, and spoils any of the isolation and panic the film attempts building up. As everything draws to a conclusion, speeches turn into sanctimonious bollocks.
Radha Mitchell, the film’s lead, does concerned-mum-in-danger adequately, but it’s not the role of anyone’s career, and there isn’t much here to push any of the actors, as the film seems intent on communicating most of the fear through lavish sets and computer-generated threats. Everything does look beautiful, in a rotting flesh, sado-masochistic way and faithful to its computer game roots.
Unfortunately, as with many games to film adaptations, what typically suffers is the story. The games are famed for their knowing twists and shocks, but these fail to appear in the cinema. With whatever residual story left, it soon gets bogged down in its own mythology, focusing on witch-burning and blind faith, and it’s all been done before, and done better. It misses out on the more interesting characters, such as the policewoman and seems more concerned with forcing deep and meaningfuls into what soon becomes a predictable but ridiculous plot.
If the first half of the film is terse, quiet and isolating, the second is flabby, overindulgent tripe. The violence is cranked up to eleven, and enough barbed-wire to make B&Q blush is abused for several creative/excessive deaths.
Struggling to include parts of several games into one film, different ideas rattle around, and it all gets too messy and confusing. Scenes of the husband’s search for his missing wife and daughter have been included only to prop up an ending that doesn’t make sense. Nearing the end, mystified audiences are helped with a tenuously linked plot summary, but even that struggles to explain what just happened in this horror guff.