Reviews

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.

This is the story of a young woman seduced and then dumped by her older, married lover after she gets pregnant; she avenges herself against him, and his entire family, through black magic — which, disappointingly, she doesn't do herself but has someone else do for her. Good production values for a Thai horror flick. But the bland script never generates suspense, the director approaches the material entirely conventionally, and the final act loses viewer sympathy for the victims by throwing logic to the winds. At one point, a character has a prime opportunity to simply shoot the villainess dead, and instead she gets up and runs away without picking up the gun. Bad writing — you're soaking in it!

Some icky gore effects, including a really tasteless late-term-fetus corpse and one guy dying from having hundreds of live eels burst out of his stomach. Only recommended for genre completists who simply have to see every horror film produced in Asia in the last 15 years.

Many viewers look at Bright Future and throw up their hands in confusion, even those who admire Kurosawa's style. I've thought a lot about this movie and I don't think its intentions are that obscure, though I confess it can be inaccessible. It's just that Kurosawa's approach is VERY contrary to how Westerners understand film.

Bright Future examines the disillusionment of Japanese youth towards their parents' generation, and, in turn, their parents' feelings of failure towards their children. Throughout, a poisonous red jellyfish symbolizes disaffected youth, drifting along silently, not threatening unless you cross their path.

Namura and Arita are two 20-somethings working at an industrial laundry. Namura is apathy itself. He cherishes his dreams of a "bright future," but in his daily life, he barely registers much more than a blank stare. He's such a loser he even sucks at his few hobbies; the one time he goes out to an arcade with his upwardly-mobile sister and her yuppie boyfriend, the boyfriend casually kicks Namura's ass at games Namura plays constantly. On his lone trips to a nearby bowling alley, Namura rolls mostly gutters.

Arita, Namura's only friend, is more mysterious, with a placid surface underneath which lurks hints of menace. Arita's sole hobby is the care of his pet jellyfish, which he is trying to acclimate to fresh water.

Arita gives the clueless Namura hand signals (thumb inward means "wait," finger pointing means "go ahead") so he'll avoid doing anything "crazy." Namura isn't sure what to make of this, but we get hints Arita is more in tune with prevailing moods. "There's a storm coming," he says ominously.

The boys' boss at the laundry lamely attempts to court their friendship, borrowing a CD from Namura and popping up uninvited at Arita's apartment. There he goes into a pathetic speech about "When I was your age...", but loses his train of thought and gets caught up watching cable. Namura and Arita view this middle-aged boy-man with barely concealed contempt; you can tell they're thinking, "God, is this what I have to look forward to when I'm 55?" When the boss sticks his fingers in the jellyfish tank, Arita stops Namura from warning him about the poison.

The boss, when he learns what could have happened, confronts Arita, who quits his job the next day. The boss remains friendly to Namura, throwing the socially inept young man into further confusion. That night, Namura angrily goes to the boss's house to get his CD, only to find Arita has been there earlier and murdered the man and his wife.

Arita is arrested but makes no particular attempt at a defense. In jail, he cordially (but not warmly) greets his estranged father, and only wants to talk about his jellyfish to Namura, in whom he has entrusted its care. But when Namura, in a rare emotional outburst, declares he will "wait 20 years" for Arita's release, Arita coldly snubs him. Now even more bereft and confused, Namura angrily smashes the jellyfish tank, inadvertently releasing it into the city canals.

Not long after, Arita hangs himself in his cell, his hand wired into the "go ahead" signal. Namura regrets his rashness, and is overjoyed to find the jellyfish still alive. He also strikes up a bond with Arita's father, who makes a meager living salvaging discarded appliances (a metaphor for pointlessly hanging onto the past). The father, who hadn't seen Arita for 5 years before the murders, and who is held in such disdain by his one other son that the boy has taken his mother's last name, sees in Namura the chance for a real father-son relationship.

I've concluded that we're supposed to see Arita and Namura as two different incarnations of the same person. This interpretation would be consistent with Kurosawa's follow-up, Doppelgänger, whose hero confronts an arrogant and violent duplicate of himself. Bright Future's script hints that Kurosawa may have intended this:

At one point Namura says he thinks Arita killed the boss "before I could do it"; indeed, right before Namura goes to the house, we see him grab a metal pipe off the street and swing it in wild unfocused rage. In another scene, we see Arita's ghost(?) watching his father and Namura. Also, the way Arita's father cherishes his bond with Namura; a reconciliation after an argument they have plays like the father is really forgiving Arita and his other son for abandoning him (especially the father's line "I forgive all of you for everything"). Finally, Arita's rejection of Namura when Namura declares he'll wait for him in prison; if Arita is really Namura's "evil doppelgänger," then the rejection makes good thematic sense. It's Arita's way of saying, "You idiot, don't you know that as long as you hang onto me, you'll always be a loser?"

So is Arita the violent, acting-out side of Namura's personality made flesh, who, once he commits the crime Namura fantasizes about, feels it's time to give Namura the "go ahead" signal and bow out? An intriguing possibility, and one certainly in keeping with Kurosawa's magical realist approach.

The final scenes, in which Namura — saying "I got my go-ahead signal long ago" — finally decides to stop drifting aimlessly (like the jellyfish in the tank) and set himself towards the "bright future" he used to dream of (like the loose jellyfish, now "escaping" from Tokyo and drifting toward the sea), brings the movie's theme full circle. The climactic shot of hordes of glowing jellyfish floating down a canal is a truly stunning image. (And one thematically underscored by its juxtaposition with the very last shot, of a gang of kids Namura briefly falls in with, drifting aimlessly down the sidewalk to nowhere in particular.) The title turns out to be not ironic at all. The young can have a bright future, but sometimes, you have to know when to wait, and when to go ahead.

Warning: The first 30 minutes of this second entry in the Ju-on series (the first two of which were released direct-to-video) repeats the last 30 minutes of the first movie. Trying to puzzle out why they did this, I can only think it must have been a (rather sleazy) decision on the producers' part to maximize profits from the video release, but putting out two movies instead of one. After all, if you merged the two films with the overlapping footage, you'd still have a feature in the 110 minute range. Jeez.

(Mild spoilers follow.)

Having said that, this movie continues the creepfest begun in the first to solid effect. What is so cool about the curse concept that Takashi Shimizu has come up with is that EVERY character in this story who encounters Toshio, Kayako, or the dreaded house is affected. Unlike an American horror film, where you'd get a brave hero or heroine figuring out a way at the end to save the day and lift the curse, in this movie, once you're cursed, you're cursed. Screwed. Doomed. It's cool.

This is a good series, though I think its low-budget, atmosphere-based approach to frightening audiences won't probably play well to American audiences programmed to expect horror movies to be bombastic, loud, and all about special effects.

My rating: 6/10

Though it's a return to form for Danny Boyle after such post-Trainspotting disasters as A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, 28 Days Later could have risen to a higher potential. The opening scenes of a deserted London are tremendously effective, but some other scenes lose their full horror value because Boyle rushes through them, such as a scene involving a hurried tire-change before the onrushing hordes of the "infected" arrive. It flies by so fast we never get that "Oh Dear God hurry up!" sense of panic a horror film ought to build in the viewer.

Basically, what you have here is the same premise as The Omega Man or, amusingly, Demons. People are infected with "rage," which causes them to become mindless murdering beasts with fierce red eyes. It's stylishly shot, but the script unfortunately glosses over characterization: we barely know our hero, Jim, or his traveling companions Selena and Hannah. So our ability to fully feel what they have lost is muted.

The gore quotient is pretty good, though again the most violent scenes are shot in super-shaky-cam mode which makes things a bit too frantic to be effective. Boyle also knows when to use silence to generate suspense.

But near the end (I'll refrain from spoilers), the script becomes a bit too reminiscent of--of all things--Day of the Dead (the weakest of Romero's trilogy), when our heroes hole up with some military types who are a bit too macho for comfort.

Also, in an odd technical choice, most of the movie appears to have been shot on digital video--but not 24P High-Def, merely plain ol' DV or DigiBeta, then transferred to 35MM. The image is cruddy looking on the big screen (though it might look fine on DVD), and whether this is an artistic choice or a budgetary one is unclear. Oddly, the very last scene is crystal clear and seems to have been shot on 35. Go figure.

In all, it has its good points, but isn't the horror masterwork advance hype would have you believe. For really excellent British horror, check out Dog Soldiers instead.

[Mild spoilers included] This won't win any Animal Planet awards, nor is it exactly good sci-fi. It's basically a 1950's B-movie updated to the 90's. A puppy dog is left behind when a nuclear power plant suffers a "low-level radiation leak," and, instead of dying horribly, is transformed into a Superdog with human intelligence and the ability to leap 9-ft. fences at a single bound. He impregnates the dog of a family who's just moved into town (who apparently don't care their house is down the block from an evacuated nuclear plant) then terrorizes them trying to reclaim his puppies, one of whom is tame and the other vicious. When that doesn't work he tries to "adopt" the family's little girl, who doesn't fear him. Fairly pedestrian all the way around, with not much tension (though the atomic dog is well trained). And I'm particularly bewildered by the poster who said this is a good children's movie; there are 4 dogs in this movie and three of them end up dead.