SILENT HILL - Blu-ray review

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.

There's not much tension to be found elsewhere, either. When a horde of embryonic-looking zombies attack, you're just thinking, wait a minute, how did all this happen if it's a coal-mining town that had fires burning underground, with so much ash clouding the sky and falling like snowflakes that the police put a locked gate on the only road leading to the town? More precisely, what's the relationship between the religious fanatics and the George Romero-style zombies? Or the human-faced horde of cockroaches, the big blade-wielding helmeted guy who looks like a Bionicle, or the woman (Deborah Kara Unger) who looks like a hag straight out of Shakespeare? We won't even talk about the girl's apparent double, the motorcycle cop whose actions are as suspicious as the lunatics, or the miners and their canary, which, if the air in Silent Hill is so toxic that police and the woman's husband (Sean Bean) who prod around have to use masks, why isn't the thing belly-up? Then again, these masks are the simple cloth clip-on variety intended to keep sawdust out of your nostrils, not toxic fumes. Look closely and you'll see lots of nonsensical details in this film.

Video: "Silent Hill" is a strange choice for Blu-ray release, because, like the game, most of the scenes are hazy and grainy. The town itself looks to be straight out of a video game, with the ash falling slowly and the haze hanging like a gauzy band-aid wrapped around the set. So it's a hard DVD to rank in terms of picture quality. There are a few scenes in the beginning that are "normal," and in those scenes the black levels are decent but the color saturation, as with many Sony Blu-ray releases, isn't full or rich. In this case, though, you'd expect that muted palette. It's a decent picture, but not superb. Aspect ratio is 2.35:1.

Audio: For a horror film, there's surprisingly little rear-speaker action, though the sound quality itself is rich and resonant. I just expected more sound distribution for effect. And the most effective sound occurs when, like the game, the radio or electronic devices start to blare out of control, signaling the approach of creatures. As with other Blu-ray releases from Sony, the sound options are an uncompressed English PCM 5.1 or a standard Dolby Digital 5.1 for people whose amplifier can't handle the six-channel sound. No complaints here.

Extras: The SD edition has six featurettes under the banner "Path of Darkness," in which cast members and the director are interviewed and try to convince you that the film is good. There are no features on the Blu-ray version.

Bottom Line: Despite having the kind of CGI competency you'd expect for a spin-off of a video game, "Silent Hill" is one big mish-mash that doesn't make sense, doesn't come together, and doesn't scare you. It's only hope is to become so bad over time that will eventually join the ranks of campy horror classics. Right now, it's as far from one as it gets.