STAY THE FIGHT! STRENGTH, EFFORT, AND DISCIPLINE. THESE ARE THE WATCH WORDS OF A WARRIOR -- Kevin Michael Vance
Title - Kevin Michael Vance - writer/musician/purveyor of raw materials
STAY THE FIGHT! STRENGTH, EFFORT, AND DISCIPLINE. THESE ARE THE WATCH WORDS OF A WARRIOR -- Kevin Michael Vance
STAY THE FIGHT! STRENGTH, EFFORT, AND DISCIPLINE. THESE ARE THE WATCH WORDS OF A WARRIOR -- Kevin Michael Vance

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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon


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Title: Silent Hill
Director: Cristophe Gans
Year: 2006
Reviewed: August 30, 2006

Rating:   Fast Food Meal-Third Highest Rating
[Rating Definitions]

  Silent Hill

Silent Hill. Well, let us call it interesting. I give Silent Hill, the movie, a low FAST FOOD MEAL review.

I liked Silent Hill. It reminded me of a The Ring with much more gore. With that said, it suffered from many of the typical problems of most horror films; i.e. bad acting, bad writing, unrealistic characters acting unrealistically towards horrifically bad situations. There is a cop in the movie, an extremely attractive and bountifully endowed female, whose "supposed" biker-cop uniform is the tightest piece of leather I've seen on a lady since Trinity in the Matrix. She looks more like a stripper-cop than, well, an actual COP. There's a lot of screaming, most of which seems superfluous. The story is okay. I did like it, but there's not much original about it, which is not to say that this is bad, but simply, not that original. I have not played the game (I want to, after seeing the film). And am judging this review on the R rated DVD.

What IS good about Silent Hill, no, scratch that. What is GREAT about Silent Hill is its unparalleled and unique vision of hell; which is both seriously disturbing and captivating, both horrifically gruesome and darkly beautiful. It's like Cirque du Soleil in hell. The monsters, and or, demons are some of the most innovative and irreplaceable designs since H.R. Geiger did the Alien for "Alien". However, and I must chide the director for this, they were made less- less imposing, less disturbing, less shocking- by the copious amount of CGI enhancement. With the DVD of Silent Hill you get a decent amount of extras, one being creature design. While watching the film, I thought that many of the creatures were purely CGI. I was wrong. It turns out that all of them were on set: actors in costumes. And the costumes were wonderful and quite exceptional. But during editing (I assume) the director chose not to show the wonderful creature designs untouched, rather, he "enhanced" them with liberal CGI additives; which in essence, detracted from their inherent disturbing and scary qualities. This, me thinks, is a big, big mistake. Don't mess with something that works, and those warped costumes worked perfectly without any touch-ups or additives whatsoever. The set-dressings are amazing, as are some of the sets themselves. Someone threw a bucket-load of money into this film and it shows. Silent Hill is big budget. There are fountains of red-running splendor in this film, copious waterfalls of gore and viscera and everything gross that will make the most jaded horror fan straighten up and take notice. For some reason I had, thought they'd slapped this movie with a PG-13 rating in the theatres (which still might be the case), but as stated before, the DVD I witnessed was R, and the filmmakers leeched every ounce of adult fun out of the rating that they could. As soon as the end rolled around, and the main antagonist was being raped by barbed wire and screaming about her innocence to the demonic presence of the child she had sent to hell by roasting over an open fire-pit because the ignorant, close-knit (probably Southerners from Tennessee), terrified parishioners had burned her for being a witch I was, well… pretty well and good, hooked.

Silent Hill is fun. Hellish fun! It is disturbing in parts because of its wonderfully, twisted and ghastly sensibility and sinister, macabre imagery, disturbing in other parts because of the bad acting and even worse writing, but it does succeed in many ways; all dark, all drear, all tolling the reapers bell and trumpeting the land of nightmares. Go see it. Just make sure you have the R rated, or maybe even, the unrated version. And while you're at it, see The Hills Have Eyes.
   



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