I want to make this very clear, because I’m only going to say this once: Silent Hill is my favorite gaming franchise, but even I’ve had enough of it and wish it would just go away. Every iteration of the games takes it further down the path of inanity and my heart can’t bloody well take another one. With that in mind, I want you to remember that I subjected myself to not only the first film adaptation, but the SEQUEL. Why, you ask? For you. I did this all for you, loyal readers. I expect something shiny in my Christmas stocking this year, and if it’s the blu-ray of this aneurism-turned-film, you’d better believe I’ll find you and the things I will do to you will make even Leatherface blush coquettishly.
You might have guessed it, and you’d be right to surmise that my opinion of this film is quite low, and that’s putting it mildly. As a fan of the games I couldn’t rightly give the first a pass without at least giving it a shot, and for all it’s failings, the first film was at least passable as a movie. Maybe not as a Silent Hill movie, but as some other movie it was all right, I suppose.
When Michael J. Basset was pegged to take over as both director and writer of the sequel, I was uneven in how I felt. I, frankly, knew little of his work, but my fears were assuaged somewhat when I saw that he’d written Solomon Kane. That movie was awesome. My spirit was even more uplifted when I saw the cast list. It was a good sign that he’d made a point to find actors who not only looked like their intended roles, but were also no slouches in the talent department. Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Sean Bean, Malcolm McDowell… When you tick off the names it sounds like a winner just waiting to happen.
This is why I don’t gamble.
The plot is fairly straightforward: Heather, played by Clemens, and her father Harry, invoked by Sean Bean channeling the ghost of Boromir, have just moved to a new town, on the run from a creepy cult from Silent Hill. Already alarm bells were ringing, because I’d thought the cult was butchered at the end of the last film. Anyway, Heather heads off to her first day of school after trading some foreshadowing with Harry, where she meets another new kid, Vincent, played by Harington. After being briefly harassed by a P.I. named Douglas, played by Martin Donovan, Heather heads off to the mall to meet up with Harry (presumably so the cult doesn’t find out where they live). Harry doesn’t even make it out the door before being caught. The kidnapping of her father puts Heather on the warpath, and after enlisting Vincent’s help, she flies off to Silent Hill to rescue him and defeat the goth version of herself.
I’ll be honest, here. I’m not sure who this movie is for. Fans of the games will largely be turned off the by the staggering lack of subtlety and nuance in both the writing and the visuals, not to mention the ankle-snappingly uneven pacing. Characters appear and vanish with such regularity that it’s often questionable whether they needed to be in at all, appearing on screen for only a moment to spit heavy-handed exposition at the audience. Clearly this is necessary to make up for all the time spent looking at Heather looking at things off screen. They’d hardly be able to hammer home the important point that she’s seeing stuff if they’d have taken more time developing a story.
Fans of horror in general can’t be thrilled with this offering, either. I found myself literally laughing out loud at the monster effects, and actually had to take a break at one point to get a glass of what I will say was water so I’m not misconstrued as supporting heavy drinking. In one scene the movie implies heavily that children in Kiss style grease makeup are terrifying, and I can only guess that I was supposed to be shocked by the burger joint from hell. Literally, there’s a fry cook with a goofy little fast food hat and everything. I’m left to assume that the appearance of Beelzeburger was meant as a flailing attempt at surrealism, but calling the Burger King of the Damned surreal is a bit like calling a margarita drunkenly spilled in your lap ‘performance art.
It didn’t help my mood to see key characters from the games introduced and then immediately killed, either. Knowing the story that could have happened soured my mood considerably, but it would be unfair to judge the movie beside a far better game. How does the film stack up as a film? Well, it stacks about as well a drunken toddler who’s wooden blocks have secretly been replaced with atomic super balls. Most of the characters in the film are simply meant to up the body count, with one character in particular introduced only so she can be killed in the very same scene. I can only assume they had a checklist of things to add and [woman dragged off screen] hadn’t been crossed off it, yet.
The CGI effects are comedy gold, which is made all the worse as monsters leap into bright light right in front of the camera to show off the ‘totally awesome’ 3D effects. In fact, more than a few shots in the film are awkward for this reason, as the camera zooms and flits about at strange angles because a particular rusty chain would look simply amazing in 3D. I can only wonder what would have happened if the budget used on 3D filming would have gone into hiring a writer instead of having the director pull double duty.
The music, too, was terribly uneven. Though it was done by Jeff Dana, the same man responsible for the first film’s soundtrack, it featured far more original pieces. The problem with this is that Dana’s work sharply pales in comparison to the music produced by Akira Yamoaka, the original composer for the games. In the first film, the soundtrack was largely comprised of Yamoaka’s game soundtracks. Revelation, however, opts for more original music, and suffers considerably because of it.
The storytelling folds under the lightest of scrutiny like a beach umbrella in a hurricane. Heather frequently forgets she’s carrying a gun just long enough for monsters to claim another victim, and those few she does shoot are popped off with one or two rounds, which begs the question why these monsters are even a threat. The cultists are just as goofy and nonthreatening as they were in the first film, and apparently manage to die doing the most menial of tasks, which had me wondering how they’d managed to survive at all. At one point one is killed simply by breathing air. I’m not kidding. Heather is just standing there looking at this guy as he chokes and dies because it’s dark out.
There is actually a villain in the film, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, but the movie takes so long to introduce her that she doesn’t seem like much of a character at all. I mean, sure, she’s pale, and thus evil, but beyond that we find out very little about her before Heather magically transforms her into a demonic bondage fetish dominatrix with saw blades in her head and knives for hands. Y’know, like ya do. To compound the frustrations, Pyramid Head shows up to battle the newly minted demon woman and thus save the day. I’m honestly at a loss describing a Silent Hill movie ending with a climactic monster battle inside a ring of flames. Godzilla movies end this way.
Ultimately, looking at Silent Hill Revelation 3D, I can only reach the logical conclusion that Basset and company simply don’t get it. They played the games and somehow managed to miss every single point like they were road cones during a driving test. In fact, I can’t even say they missed the point of the games, but rather the point of horror as a genre entirely. Horror is not the phrase ‘booga booga.’ Horror is having ‘booga booga’ yelled from the ceiling by a nine foot tall skinless ape with syringes for hands and chattering teeth instead of eyeballs. Horror is about establishing rules and then breaking them; about subtlety and pacing. Silent Hill Revelations doesn’t break any rules, it follows them painstakingly, all the while hoping fan service will carry the film for the people who do get it. For all the references to the games, including shoehorned references to Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Downpour at the end, what we’re left with is a sad pretender to the name with more concept than style and more style than substance. Revelations has a vague idea of what Silent Hill is, but only in the form of a bullet list. The trick is in the execution, and if you can’t figure out how to put the pieces together, checking all the boxes in the world won’t make for a good film. Revelations is a perfect encapsulation of what’s wrong with American horror in general: Stagnant, dogmatic adherence to formulaic storytelling and a terrified, panicky refusal to admit that the audience might just have a brain.
