Silent Hill
 
Oh dear, more mainstream substandard regurgitated tripe to get the multitude into the cinemas and to switch off their brains. Where do you start with a critical analysis of something like this? … Let’s first look at the script which has the character of Dahlia Gillespie (Deborah Kara Unger) saying things like ‘Lambs without a shepherd, shepherd without a flock. It's your sins which hold you here!’ you know straight away that you’re not in the company of a writer of the calibre of somebody like, say, Robert Goldman. Then there are the visuals … the CGI effect of the fog falling onto the town of Silent Hill and the monsters which, incidentally, are (mostly) not CGI but rather live actors covered in latex and makeup will have you holding your head in your hands wishing that you purchased a ticket for the absorbing documentary ‘Enron - The Smartest guys In The Room’ or for the fantastic drama of ‘Three Burials of Masquerades Estrada’ and perhaps you would have done if these were showing at your local multi-screen cinema (which despite having, lets say, 15 screens is only showing a choice of 7 movies) but that is a topic for another time and one which I feel very passionate about. The same way I feel about going into you local music store and having them having the racks filled with the utter garbage that pollutes the charts and not having contemporary artists like Ben Weaver or legendary artists like Red Allen anywhere to be found. It’s all about accessibility, Anyway, I digress, back to the movie.
 
This movie has been made (aside from having a ready audience due to it being based on a series of successful computer games) for the purpose of appeasing the audience with gore, much like the same reprehensible ‘Hostel’ that is doing the rounds at the moment.
 
This movie is stuffed with bad acting, dialogue, and plot and the pain that this causes is underlined and enforced by its length of 127 minutes. Now I’m aware that this is the average length of a film nowadays but when you are watching a bad horror film time moves VERY slowly and by the time you emerge from the cinema, you’ll swear that two days have passed since you last saw the sky
 
Director Christopher (Brotherhood of the Wolf) Gans fails to keep things coherent and some important key things are not clearly explained. Instead he fills the movie with enough padding that would put wonder bra out of business. The padding is most obvious in the side plot involving Rose's husband and the local police. I have heard that the original script only contained the female leads and was rewritten to include the husband at the studio's request. In short, yes, there are many things wrong with this movie but studio interference is one of the main glaring failings. Hollywood greed strikes again and consequently they have released another substandard product.
  
Paul Elliott