Silent Hill (2006) Dir: Christophe Gens

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Based on the popular survival horror video game franchise, which originally debuted in 1999, this Christophe Gens directed horror film has garnered a respectable cult following in the horror community, particularly from those who are mutually interested in the games from which the film takes its name. I'm aware of the both pieces of media, but had never engaged with either until now.

I must admit, the visuals weren't great. On the contrary, some of them were laughably bad - this was especially true of the mutant baby creatures. Unfortunately, the graphics looked straight out of an original PlayStation game - this is hyperbole, of course, but you see my point. This was both helped and hindered by how visually dark the film was at different points. It was genuinely hard to see anything sometimes.

One thing I did like was how the film went to great length to make certain scenes look and feel like parts of the game it was based on. It felt like the protagonist was completing challenges from the video game - it was strange, but I must admit it was kind of cool. The world-building and set design also felt straight out of a video game, which was, in my view, another positive - the physical world felt pretty comprehensively formed.

Where this film suffered, and badly, wad with its writing. The dialogue was very dodgy and extremely scrappy - to call it clunky would be too kind. The story itself felt very muddled, thanks in psrt to a virtually pointless and distracting subplot, which seemingly served only to disrupt the rhythm of the main plot. The film wasn't scary in the slightest, but that wasn't helped by how amusingly bad a lot of the visual effects looked.

Radha Mitchell's starring performance was a really inconsistent, up and down affair. In some scenes she was diabolically poor, and yet, in others, she was arguably very convincing. It was quite a surreal display, in that sense. She did, in fairness, seem to get more watchable as the film progressed, but to call hers a good performance would be a little bit of a stretch.

Laurie Holden, of 'The Walking Dead' fame, provided the most memorable of the key supporting roles, though not entirely for positive reasons. Much like Mitchell, she had a very mixed time of things, and, also like Mitchell, she had her worst scenes early in the film. She had some fairly decent enough scenes in the middle portion of the film, but that was as good as it got, unfortunately.

Sean Bean is very good at a great many things, but an American accent is not one of them. It didn't help his case that his dialogue was absurdly bad, which left him little chance of delivering anything more than a tepid performance. Jodelle Ferland honestly wasn't in the film anywhere near as much as I expected her to be, but, for what it's worth, she did fairly well. This was, mind you, in spite of the terrible dialogue she had to produce during some scenes, especially early on.

Overall, I thought this was, from a critical perspective, a terrible film. However, it had something of a 'so bad it's good' feeling to it, which makes me want to revisit it. Either way, there's no avoiding that the film is a mess. A quirky mess, but a mess nonetheless. It had character, which made it watchable, but I struggled to take it seriously as a horror film.