Again, apologies for the lack of updates as of late. Hope y’all are finding other reading material and stuff to keep you entertained. No Street Fightery goodness yet for you (patience, grasshoppers), but here’s a new Hot Flash based upon — holy fuck a cat just ran past my second-floor window. That’s crazy! — the Silent Hill film currently in theaters.
My SPOILER ALERT review: I kinda liked it, but this is not a good film. In fact, parts of it — including the beginning and the conclusion — are downright stupid. Now, I’m not familiar with the games, so I’ll grant that there may be additional backstory and such required to actually make sense of the story, but as a standalone film the critics are right to pan this movie. Mind you, it’s certainly not without its cool and freaky points. In fact, they make the film somewhat frustrating in that one can view them and imagine how they might have been utilized in a better film — a film that lacked the pointless and even more confusing subplot with Sean Bean or a scene that included a better rationale for a woman dragging her daughter to a haunted town that’s been closed off because of poisonous fumes rising from underneath it (DUMB). I mean, just a simple scene with a psychiatrist recommending taking the daughter to the town might’ve sufficed; at least then we could shift the blame from the principal character to this unnamed crackpot. The movie also plays out a little too much like a video game. At first it’s kind of cool to see the survival horror game framing and the camera panning about the stages and the way the characters follow the simple clues, but after a while it just gets boring.
And while I understand that some of the stupidity in the film is part of the games’ mythology, I really could’ve done without the fanatical townspeople and the witch burnings. That part could’ve played out better if there had been more emphasis on just how their actions had backfired — say, some rite involving the seal was misperformed, thereby opening the gateway to HELL — but I just wasn’t too keen on the whole thing being the result of some little girl’s nightmare fantasy. What the fuck was that little girl smoking to imagine shit like that? I guess having your flesh cooked will put extreme horror in your head. Not that Silent Hill was scary, mind you, because it wasn’t. At all. Certain characters were creepy, but any Clive Barker film has this film totally licked in that department.
Overall, I’d give Silent Hill a C/C-. On a scale of 1-10 stars, I’d give it 4 or 5. I didn’t hate it, but reading these orgasmic reviews on IMDb still makes me want to smack the shit out of the people that totally loved it. It may be the best video game adaptation to date (that’s gotten a U.S. theatrical release, anyway; tons of neat animes have been produced) — until a second viewing convinces me otherwise, however, I’m still giving that honor to Mortal Kombat — but that really isn’t saying much.
Pyramid Head is a really cool guy, though. 🙂
Yes, parts of the movie were full of holes. The beginning was too slow and the ending left a lot of questions for me (the biggest one being “how are they STILL stuck in the fog world?!”). It took the majority of the plot from the second game, and the director just filled in the glaringly obvious holes with whatever his mind could think up. I did like the movie, but it could have been better…much better. At least it wasn’t like Transformers…
Despite my disappointment, I did get a chuckle out of hearing Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” shortly after Rose was attacked by the smoldering children. That scene made me both laugh and feel a bit wary, because if a song is playing somewhere in a desolate town, you have to wonder just WHO turned it on.