Silent Hill: Revelation

 

Early in Silent Hill: Revelation, its teenage heroine, Heather Mason (Adelaide Clemens) has an ominous nightmare, where she is warned not to go to Silent Hill.  It's good advice, and it's a shame she doesn't follow it, given how much she suffers during the course of the film.  But, even her suffering is no match for that which the audience goes through, because of her decision to ignore the warning.

This is a silly, incoherent, and unnecessary sequel to 2006's video game adaptation, Silent Hill.  The original film had strong atmosphere and an artistic visual style, thanks to director Christophe Gans.  It also had a pretty weak script credited to Roger Avary.  With Gans not interested in returning for the sequel, and Avary dealing with a prison sentence, the task of this film fell to relative newcomer, writer-director Michael J. Bassett, who shows a total lack of understanding of just what made the original film and the video games that inspired it a success.  The Silent Hill series has always been psychological in nature, drawing upon the fears and personal demons of the innocent people who happen to wander into the hellish ghost town.  Here, Bassett treats the movie like a haunted house spook ride, with things constantly popping up, but nothing creating any tension or suspense.  This is a movie where things keep on happening, and ghoulish creatures lurk up on the screen, but none of it has any impact whatsoever, because none of it means anything.

The film attempts to continue the plot of the original movie, and mix it with the plot of the Silent Hill 3 video game.  It's many years since the events of the first film, and grieving husband Chris Da Silva (Sean Bean) is still haunted by the loss of his wife, Rose (Radha Mitchell), who disappeared into some kind of strange hellish limbo along with her daughter, Sharon, at the end of Silent Hill.  Through reasons too complicated to explain, Rose somehow found a way to return Sharon to her husband, but she had to remain behind.  Ever since then, Chris and Sharon have been constantly on the run from their past, moving from town to town, and living under assumed names.  Chris is now known as "Harry Mason", and his daughter is now "Heather".  He's told her nothing about what happened in the past (she thinks she was in a car accident, lost her memories, and her mother), and as Heather's 18th birthday approaches, it seems that the past has caught up with them.

A creepy detective (Martin Donovan) starts following Heather around everywhere, saying that he needs to talk to her about her past.  There's also Vincent (Kit Harrington), the new boy at school, who seems oddly interested in Heather, and seems to always appear out of nowhere, as if he's following her.  Then her dad gets kidnapped by some silly cult members from the town of Silent Hill.  What follows are a lot of set pieces that are supposed to be nightmare-inducing, but are instead just dull, thanks to the film's insistence on tired, sloppy jump scares.  We also get more exposition dialogue than just about any movie I can think of in recent memory.  Seriously, these characters stop the action every five minutes just so they can explain the backstory, or even what the audience is supposed to be looking at.  Even with all this explaining going on, I was still confused by the incoherent storytelling, and this is coming from someone who has not only played the game, but read multiple detailed explanations on its plot.

That's because the plot is the last thing on Revelation's mind.  So is entertainment, creating anything that resembles suspense, and rounding up a decent cast to tell its story.  I'm not kidding when I say that this is the worst-acted mainstream movie I have seen in 2012.  Anyone who knows me will tell you that I will bend over backwards to try to complement an actor.  After all, they're up there on the screen, giving it their all.  But here, I just can't do it.  There's not a single convincing performance in the film's entire 94 minutes.  There are, however, some memorably bad turns here.  Malcolm McDowell, in particular, has a bizarre scene-chewing cameo where he plays an inmate at an asylum.  Apparently, McDowell was told to play the part as if he were playing Hannibal Lecter in a bad community theater production of The Silence of the Lambs.  He's in the movie to rant and rave like a madman, then turn into a monster for reasons I didn't really understand.  Other actors, such as Carrie-Anne Moss and Deborah Kara Unger, exist simply to wear hobo's rags and walk around cheap looking sets.

And thanks to a greatly reduced budget compared to the first movie, this sequel also screws up the one thing most people liked about the first film - the visual style.  Everything just seems smaller and less impressive here.  The CG used to bring some of the monsters to life looks about as convincing as the stuff you'd see in a SyFy Channel Original Movie.  Even the famous fog that constantly covers the streets of Silent Hill doesn't look right.  I'm trying my hardest to think of one positive element I can report on.  I'm going back through my memories of this movie, and I'm coming up empty.  It doesn't even have the decency to even try to be genuinely scary.  It doesn't thrill, it doesn't excite, and there's no reason it needed to be made, other than to bilk a couple bucks over the Halloween weekend.  There's no excuse for that, especially when you consider the video games that inspired this movie feature some of the more disturbing ideas and images to be dreamed up in its medium.  All writer-director Bassett had to do was follow their example.  The fact he did not is his own fault.

 

Were it not for The Apparition, Silent Hill: Revelation would easily take the crown as the worst horror film of the year.  But, it can still lay claim to being one of the worst films of the year, so that's something.  I know that there were fans of the games who were disappointed with the first movie, and how it deviated from the game's plot.  I wish I could see the looks on their faces when they witness this mess.

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