Silent Hill (Blu-ray)

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Some things are better left alone.

And I'm not talking about the town of Silent Hill. I'm talking about the highly successful PlayStation game. What made anyone think that it would translate well to the big screen?
The only way that could have happened is if someone came up with a new gimmick and armed every theater seat with a remote control, the way that earlier audiences donned 3-D glasses or sat in chairs that literally shook.

There's not much shaking in this horror film.

Instead of Harry Mason searching for the daughter who's disappeared into a gully near an old resort town where they were heading to get over the death of Mrs. Mason, it's a woman named Rose (Radha Mitchell) who's taking her daughter (Jodelle Ferland) to Silent Hill because the girl, who's in the process of being adopted, sleepwalks straight to a cliff and appears to want to jump into the abyss. Why Silent Hill? Because that's what the girl mutters during her possessed dreamstates. And this kid was from West Virginia, which is where Silent Hill is located. Mom is hoping to find the reason for her frightening cliff-diving behavior, and, hence, the cure.

It doesn't take long for director Christopher Gans to lead us to the brink of boredom and confusion—neither of which lets up one bit over the course of this overly long (127 minute) movie. As the mother and daughter sit on a pastoral hillside looking like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting, why aren't they disturbed by the billboard that's behind them: "Do you not know that we will judge angels? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?" Corinthians 6: 2-3, compliments of the Blessed Parish Ministries. But the next line in the Bible, which isn't on the billboard, really says it all: "And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?" In this case, that would be a big, uh, yea-ahh!

There's nothing competent and everything trivial about the way that religion is used in "Silent Hill." I've always thought that the movies to most effectively work religious fanaticism to horrific effect were Stephen King's "Carrie" and "The Night of the Hunter." And maybe the film version of "Silent Hill" would have been helped had they focused more on religious zealotry rather than trying to incorporate a grab bag of monsters and perils. You don't question those things in a video game. Heck, you want a bunch of different creatures to evade or defeat, and in a horror-themed game, the scarier the better. But move some of that to the big screen and it just doesn't translate. For a horror film, "Silent Hill" isn't all that scary because it's too illogical for any of it to make any sense and generate palpable tension. And when the mother searches for a daughter who turns up missing after an automobile crash near the town, her search doesn't have any of the focused urgency we've seen in films like "The Forgotten" and "Flightplan." It's as if she's only (big surprise) walking through a video game, with nothing real at stake.