User Reviews

OK, I have just returned from seeing silent hill. Did I like it? Yes! Did I love it? HELL YES!

The movie pretty much has a solid pace. The cinematography is beautiful and the special effects are great. So what about the story? It does get a bit convoluted, especially when we have scenes solely there to explain WTF is going on.....Sean Bean is a terrible actor, he was bad in LOTR, he was bad in that crappy ITV show he was on and he is pretty crappy in this.....I wish they had cut him from the film entirely..his scenes added nothing, except some explanation on silent hill and to remind us that Rose is in another reality to them...also I was a bit annoyed that PH was really only in two scenes...HOPEFULLY he will get used more in later instalments. The ending was a bit upsetting, I get why it happened...I just got a little chocked up (yes I am a wimp, so sue me). The score is wonderful, I really could listen to it all day....I don't know the names of the songs but I would definitely buy the soundtrack. Rhada is a amazing actress, she has a face which can tell a billion tales with just a slight twitch and she is very believable as a mother looking for her child. Cybil actually was my favourite character, in the beginning she is pretty much a tough ass bitch, but she does become more human towards the end.....what happens to her is pretty graphic,which leads me to another point.....this movie actually is pretty gruesome in parts, a little to gruesome for a silent hill movie. The tension in the film is nail bite ting, the nurse scene actually made most of the audience jump and someone screamed LOL! Thats what is so amazing about this film, you get the same feeling you got when you were playing the game by yourself, complete stillness and fear.

Overall this was a great movie, the visual and grand scale of the movie is so astonishing to watch. It really has some striking visuals...i.e grey children first attack, the first change to alternate silent hill and the final battle which holds much of the gore.

A almost perfect horror movie.

I've got mixed feelings towards this film. I've eagerly awaited it's release ever since it was first announced.

The Silent Hill fan in me wanted me to love this movie, and the cinema fan in me told me otherwise, so I was quite torn while viewing the film.

Cinematically, it was a beautiful film. The sets were astonishing, the creatures were horrifically gorgeous, and the music was haunting (however, misused in some places, more on that later).

The films main problem is the script.

Oh, Avary. What happened? How the mighty have fallen.

The dialogue was horrendous. There were only a few lines that I really liked, and most of them were spoken by Dahlia. There were a few other lines scattered here and there that I liked ('mother is god in the eyes of a child' was one I really liked). The acting was also quite stiff and over the top, but that's mostly due to the poor dialogue that the actresses and actors were given. However, I was quite impressed with Jodelle Ferland's work. Quite impressed, indeed.

Now, from the perspective of a Silent Hill fan, this film was lacking. The story only took some ideas from the games, and then seemed to bastardize them. The whole cult thing didn't work well in the movie, and whenever they chanted "BURN THE WITCH," I could only think of a certain Crusades movie.

The film wasn't really boring, though. The moment we first see the Grey Children, my heart sank. I never feel anything physical during movies, but here, I did. The Patient Demon was also quite neat, as were the nurses.

But the best things about the film were the Janitor and Pyramid Head. Wow. That's all I have to say about them.

Now, let's discuss the music. While I LOVE Akira Yamaoka's works (listening to them right now), I felt some of it was misplaced during the film. They used the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack way too much, especially Promise and True. Music was just weird in certain parts, but in others, it was completely fitting (like Prayer as Pyramid Head approaches the church).

Well, in a nutshell, this film was somewhat of a disappointment. It may have looked great, but the plot was jumbled and the dialogue was weak.

Overall rating: 6/10

Silent Hill is a seemingly fog-bound and deserted town to which mother Rose travels in search of her missing daughter. And, when she gets there, she finds it is not as deserted as she thought.

Based on a video game (of which I have no experience), Silent Hill has rather more going for it than the straightforward linear series of obstacles to be overcome which is the usual format of such adaptations. There is some quite strong story material here, an atmosphere of creepiness throughout (there is something very wrong in Silent Hill, that is clear from the start), some genuinely scary moments, decent effects, and performances of commitment from an excellent cast, with Radha Mitchell's Rose particularly effective as the protagonist.

Silent Hill turns out to be a good horror film.

If there was any video game-based movie I feel I had a stake in, it was Silent Hill. I'm a devoted fan of the games, having played all four multiple times each. I don't think I've ever had as spine-chillingly memorable a time doing anything related to the horror genre as I've had playing those games. After the crushing disappointment of the Resident Evil movies, I had cautious optimism about Silent Hill. Early interviews with director Christophe Gans seemed to point to a guy passionate about the material and determined to do right by it.

Sadly, this movie goes down as Just Another Failed Game Adaptation. If the best video game franchise can't even get a good movie made from it, I think Hollywood and video games should be kept away from each other for good, preferably by restraining order.

Gans may be passionate, but here he's done the impossible. He's taken Silent Hill — which is not only the most frightening horror video game ever made but quite possibly one of the most frightening horror entertainment experiences in any medium, games, books, or movies included — and made it BORING. The video game is scary as hell. The movie has — I cannot stress this enough — not ONE single solitary scare, and indeed, a few of the intended scares come off as silly.

The movie has the look of the game down just fine. The production designers have replicated the game's foggy, deserted streets and dingy derelict buildings perfectly. But Roger Avery's script (and here was a guy who took great pains to warn fans he was NOT a huge devotee of the games) suddenly feels the urge to EXPLAIN everything in exhaustive detail. So, instead of piling on suspense and scares, it piles on exposition. And I mean, PILES it on. We get endless talky scenes of back-story and history, and yet the more the movie attempts to clarify the whole back-story of Alessa and the cult that victimized her and turned her into an evil malevolent force, the less coherent it all seems.

Gans's devotion to reproducing the game's visuals makes him forget that there will be a sizable audience who see this without ever having played the game. And to them, no concessions are made. Non-fans of the Silent Hill games are given no clue as to why the town changes appearance, or why it's inhabited by poison-spitting faceless monsters and other weird beasties. To non-gamers this will be the most nonsensical movie ever, despite Avery's endless info-dumping dialogue.

But worse than info-dumping dialogue is Obvious Dialogue, where the writer assumes his audience is suffering from Downs Syndrome and must have everything spelled out no matter how obvious it is. In one scene, Cybill (the cop from game one, who has a much different fate here) has just found a drawing by Rose's missing daughter in a slot at the hotel desk.

Rose: "Where did you find this?" Cybill: "Room 111." Rose: "We have to go to Room 111!"

Well, duh.

All of the exposition simply stretches the running time out to over two hours, while spending as little time as possible in the Otherworld for which the games are famous. Here's another failing I cannot stress enough; **where the hell WAS Silent Hill in Silent Hill?** Why are we listening to Alice Krige doing her endless Cruella DeVille routine when we should be trapped in terrifying dark corridors or fleeing monsters down misty back alleys? This stuff gets started just fine in act one, then stops when the script settles into a talk-fest.

So much from the video games appears in the movie to please fans, but only at the most superficial level. It's as if Gans pored over each game, saying, "Okay we'll use that, gotta have that creature, okay, and how about a Lisa Garland cameo!" But that's where the homage stops. The school? The hospital? Yeah, they're there, but wasted. Radha Mitchell literally RUNS through the hospital (which, for some reason, is about 200 stories underground) in the third act, until she encounters the nurses...who look great, in their prosthetic makeup, but move in such an absurd way I kept expecting them to break into a dance routine like some Janet Jackson video. And Pyramid Head? Cripes, how do you waste Pyramid Head!?! He has two scenes, does one cool thing where he grabs a woman and tears her skin off like a candy wrapper — then it's bye bye. He's gone from the movie after that!

By the time we're well into the protracted act three, in which a mob of mad cultists is threatening to burn Rose's daughter alive, any resemblance between the game Silent Hill and this movie is purely coincidental. I saw a post from one guy on Rotten Tomatoes suggesting the filmmakers must have come down with ADHD and thought they were making a Hellraiser movie instead. Couldn't have put it better myself. The movie is just one cheesy line of bad dialogue after another at this point. I just cannot listen to a mob of people (and where did this mob come from, anyway?) shouting "Burn the witch! Burn the witch!" without thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

I'm hurting. I'm angry. I'm bitter. The video game movie that should have been a masterpiece is just another disasterpiece. I don't know how everything that was so awesome in the game got so badly lost in translation. Is it too much to hope someone, someday, will do another Silent Hill movie that will nail the whole thing, not just the perfect set design? Maybe. I'm going to play the game again, to remind myself why I love Silent Hill in the first place.

Silent Hill is far from a perfect movie. But, Silent Hill is also one of the best video game to movie adaptations out there. That's really not saying much. If you were to watch this movie without playing the games, you might as well bring your pillow. Fortunately for me, I've played all 4 games in the series multiple times, and it was for people like me that the movie was made in the first place. The plot of the movie steals familiar elements from the games. But, it doesn't tie into the games. They combined the plots of the first two games, changed the focus around, and ultimately steered away from the MUCH darker and much more confusing plot of the games. The fans will either be smiling with glee or reliving their darkest nightmares as the movie tosses fans a lot of bones. There are EXACT shots recreated on the silver screen that were used in the games. Multiple times I THOUGHT I knew the direction in which the movie was going, because it was so familiar, and then they'd go in a completely different direction. It was actually irritating at first, but once I got over that, I just enjoyed it for what it was. Do NOT expect to watch "Resident Evil" with this movie. While they may share similar genres, that's where the comparisons end. MUCH like the game, the movie is slow, and it's scares rely on a creepy, skin-crawling feeling rather than "jump" scares. But, the acting is actually what impressed me. Some may see it as annoying, but those that played the game, will actually feel like they pulled dialogue directly out of it. And, Radha Mitchell does a good job acting like a frantic mother searching for her child. I will admit though, at times I wanted to pull my hair out in frustration because her character actually hardly does anything. She just runs around, chasing after a little girl that she thinks is her daughter. Did no one learn anything from Event Horizon? If they run AWAY from you, they are playing a game with you. Apart from minor annoyances with her character, the other characters were bland and flat, but hey, you can't have an "R" rated horror movie without a high corpse count. Although they did take the "survival horror" to the extreme with the survival part. It would've been nice to see some of the violence directed at the creatures. C'mon, you beat them senseless with lead pipes in the game, but that was lacking. Sean Bean could've helped make the movie all that more stellar, but he's kind of a side-plot. Without giving too much away, there's some closure to the movie, but it would be naive to say they wouldn't make a sequel starring Sean Bean, unless, of course, he was only a "draw" to bring more to the movie. The cinematography and camera angles steal from the game, but they are effective and well done. The sound was superb, with many sound bytes from the games, and a lot of eerie effects for the creatures. The gore was a little over the top, and like mentioned earlier, needed to be directed more at the creatures. All in all, the movie felt like a throwback to the games, putting in as many elements that made "sense" with the movies plot, to make the fans happy. Those unfamiliar with the series, MAY appreciate it for what it is. Basically this- it's a creepy and gory distraction, that's pretty boring as is, but given that it's based off of a video game that's just a creepy and gory distraction, that's pretty boring as well, they're a perfect match. Just remember that it's probably the best video game-to-movie adaptation out there (need I bring up Uwe Boll?), but leaves it's fans wanting more. Thankfully, the movie industry milks licenses for all they're worth, and we'll probably see a sequel sometime in the future.

The title says it all : - the "spooky" moments (when darkness falls) are sort of cool visually but not creepy (to my mind). I never played the game but I suppose some of the gory stuff shows in the game (like bloody characters - or parts of them - hanging from barbwire and stuff, the big demon itself with its funny box hiding its head, and its huge sword are typical of a video game). The small distorted creatures are quite nightmarish. The change of reality is also successful I think. Also, when Rose is going down the pit to face the source of evil, I could definitely feel video gaming there. The screwed up nurses were a bit funny (but not spooky) ...

BUT ...

I completely lost interest when the church business started. Again, we have the same old (and annoyingly flat) ingredients : - religious fanatics, - f...ed-up kid that develops hatred - and worst of all : explanations!!! why on earth is the dark side of the girl explaining the whole root cause ???

Another source of annoyance : acting. Pretty bad I think. The dialogs were a bit lame at times. Ex :

• Cybil, after her first darkness : "what the f... was that ?"

• Rose, replying : "It's gonna be fine, don't worry".

How lame can that be!!!

The character Chris is just optional, or not very useful at the least ...

I grade it 4/10 for the visuals, real effort here to a create nightmarish and disturbing atmosphere.

I knew literally nothing of Silent Hill before I walked into the cinema, as I have never played the game or read anything of it. So I was almost free from bias or prejudice. However, video games have had a terrible history when made into movies (Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Tomb Raiders, Doom, Resident Evil), especially in recent years with hacks such Paul Anderson and Doctor Boll laying waste to the genre. So no matter how good I thought Silent Hill was, it still suffers with the stigma of being a video-game movie. I fear a lot of people might unfairly judge film in association with all these terrible movies even though it is millions of miles ahead of them.

Since the plot of the film has been recited a zillion times before I will only give a brief outline. A narcoleptic girl has visions of a ghost town named Silent Hill. Her mother drives to this town to figure out the connection but the girl goes missing. Suddenly three separate timelines begin to exist at once and things become very confusing. But not to the point of incoherence.

Christoph Gans takes the material very seriously and never once sells himself out or disrespects the story by making it simple. The amount of atmosphere he forges is incredible, but I only expected this from the director of Brotherhood of the Wolf. The cinematography is often perfect and world of Silent Hill is so vividly realised that you might get a shock when you walk back out into the sunny real world. It is, at once, both beautiful and horrifying. Gans' original cut is rumored to have been over 200 minutes long. If so, that is one Director's Cut DVD I would love to own.

Mystery and horror go hand-in-hand and in Silent Hill we get ample amounts of both. Most of it is kept in the dark and never fully explained to the audience, which keeps us on our toes and just as perplexed as the characters living in the movie. The complex storytelling is involving but never so sophisticated that it will alienate an unthinking audience. But I didn't like the 'big explanation' at the end. While it certainly doesn't explain everything, I felt that the images used in this brilliantly conceived scene were enough without the narration.

But like all good mystery movies, Silent Hill continues it's fantastical darkness after the credits role by ending on a very curious and intriguing note.

Go see and judge for yourself. You'll be surprised at how much this movie is by far the best mystery AND horror film of 2006 so far.

Video game adaptations never really work well when transferred to film, with the RESIDENT EVIL films being distinctly average. Happily, SILENT HILL has a great director in Christophe Gans – who wowed us with his excellent BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF back in 2001. Gans brings his trademark atmosphere and suspense to a movie which marks a milestone in terms of set design – there's never been a creepier ghost town than the one seen here, complete with ash raining down and nasty beasties lurking underneath the streets. Sadly, the power of Gans' directing is countered by an appalling script from Roger Avary (whose directorial debut, KILLING ZOE, wasn't much cop either, come to think of it). Cheesy dialogue and endless exposition combine to ultimately ruin this movie effectiveness and make things pretty dreary as the story progresses.

Another major issue the film has is the heroine: she's totally unlikable and unsympathetic, right from the moment we see her fleeing from a good-natured cop, putting her kid in danger by speeding, and then crashing her car into the bargain. It doesn't help that the actress playing her is Radha Mitchell, whom I've never liked much; she convinces us that she's powerful and resourceful, and terrified in places, but she never engages for one moment with the audience. Sean Bean is also lurking about, playing Mitchell's husband, and he's fantastic, except he doesn't actually interact with any other cast members, and his scenes don't gel with the rest of the story at all.

The first half of the movie is genuinely creepy, excellent in fact. The brooding atmosphere is powerfully built and punctuated by some fine scare sequences which manage to be both terrifying and disturbing – I'm thinking of the burning babies and the weird mutant think that spits acid from a festering chest wound. Also on hand is a brilliant movie villain, called Pyramid Head, who wields an absolutely massive machete and who features in two of the film's best shock sequences. Unfortunately, the film's second half, which attempts to explain the garbled back story, is much less impressive. Things slow down to snail-like speed as we get endless "flashback" sequences which are uniformly dull, and you'll cry in frustration as Gans fades out once more, bringing things to a halt with a black (or white) screen.

The introduction of a bunch of fanatical Christians, who turn out to be the bad guys, is a mistake, and detracts from the demonic horror so carefully portrayed in the film's earlier scenes; we're back to the clichéd "burn the witch" mob mentality here, seen on films a million times before, and it's just boring. Things liven up for a last-reel massacre, in which Alice Krige, playing a typically creepy villain here - she's a great actress - has an unpleasant run in with some sentient barbed wire, and various others are burned alive, have their skin stripped off, or are just torn to pieces. Special effects are excellent, by the way, but it takes more than that to make a movie.

In the end, the film suffers from the lack of likable people. Sean Bean is fine, but he's nothing to do with the film, really, and he feels like a tacked-on afterthought. Laurie Holden, whose heroic cop plays second-fiddle to Mitchell's tough mum, is boring and weirdly masculine, reminding me of Brigitte Nielsen. The only 'nice' character is Deborah Kara Unger, hidden under a load of old-age makeup, who plays the town's misunderstood psycho, and even she's not that nice. The only other surprise in the cast is an excellent Kim Coates, who has gone from B-movie fare (I'm thinking DIE HARD rip-off LETHAL TENDER) to Hollywood blockbusters.

Takes ages to get going. Quite gory and un-necessary. Tries to be clever but this results in cheese-ball cliché lines. My take: at the point that the mother wakes following the crash both her, the cop and her daughter are dead. The whole film is set in effectively "purgatory" where the townspeople wait to be judged for their actions as witch-hunters.

The mother and cop follow all sorts of clues and for some reason "the darkness" wants to kill them despite the fact that they are ultimately useful to the "demon". The demon (a young girl possessed to carry out the revenge of Alicia, a young girl in the town accused of being a witch who was to be burnt to death. She survived and ultimately sought revenge with the assistance of the demon) could have explained the situation initially and offered an ultimatum from the word go and reduced the film's length by an hour. There was no need to follow clues.

At the end of the film the cop is burnt alive and the mother and daughter return home, still both dead, and haunt the father/husband.

Absolute garbage. Some of the filming and effects were impressive. The storyline is really really bad!