AmateurMovieReviews.com

Nearly everyone in this world enjoys a good horror movie. The problem?
Very few horror good movies are actually being made these days.

If you're a Pay Per View kind of person, or perhaps the Blockbuster type, you may come across a movie entitled, Silent Hill. It was made in 2006 (usually not a good thing when a movie comes out on Pay Per View so soon after it was released). Still, that doesn't mean everything, does it? The movie could still be good.

Read on to find out.

The Silent Hill main cast is as follows: Radha Mitchell (the mother) and Jodelle Ferland (daughter, Sharon), and Sean Bean (the father, a man that hardly has a role). In short, the movie starts off leaving viewers with great anticipation. A stunning woman (Radha Mitchell), is screaming the name "Sharon," at the top of her lungs. She's barely dressed, outside, and clearly frightened. A man soon follows out of their home with the same objective (Sean Bean), but the woman is way ahead of him. She runs underneath a bridge and then comes to a clearing near a set of cliffs.
And there she finds the person she has been looking for, her sleepwalking daughter, Sharon. Sharon is standing at the cliff's edge; she looks zoned out, even zombie- like. She seems to be drifting, not really hearing her mother's cries. Then she leans forward, about to fall from the cliff when her mother tackles her, saving her from a deadly cliff dive.

All the while, struggling on the damp ground underneath her mother, Sharon keeps screaming the same thing over and over again; the same two words that she verbalizes every time something like this happens.

"Silent Hill."

Soon after we come to find that Sharon has been drawing strange pictures. The medications her doctors have prescribed for her don't seem to help the sleepwalking, nor the terror she is experiencing. What's worse, she doesn't know what is going on and has no recollection of any of her strange behaviors afterwards.

So the family, really the mother, begins to do some research (this has apparently happened in the past, as viewers don't really get to see any of the research taking place). Perhaps not so luckily, they find something. Silent Hill is actually a town. A ghost town, located in West Virginia. Sharon's mother (Rose), despite her father's protests, decides to drive her daughter down to Silent Hill, even if the entire town is apparently littered with ashes (the underground heat there is unreal).

At present, because of this, Silent Hill is no longer a place that humans live. Or at least that's what everyone assumes.

To give away anymore specifics would be to give away the movie. So here are some generalities.

First, Rose takes Sharon to Silent Hill despite local warnings not to. Second, this is one of those stories about past injustices coming back to haunt people.

Specifically, the movie focuses on terrible evils done in the name of religion. Cult- like religion. Last, it seems that many who live around Silent Hill are in on a little secret.

An evil secret.

Silent Hill starts off with some steam, for sure. The acting by the main stars isn't terrible, even if the rest of the cast, for the most part, doesn't exactly do a stellar job. Here's the thing, though. The premise behind Silent Hill is a good one for a horror movie, and there are certainly instances where the movie comes through. But. . .

The bad guys- you know, the monsters that are always present in horror flicks- are, well, pretty ridiculous. Further, though you find out what caused the evil that Sharon's family ends up at odds with, you never really get a true understanding of the nature of it. That is, there are too many questions left unanswered at the end of Silent Hill.

Everyone likes a little room for imagination, but come on.

So, in sum, Silent Hill is a movie that starts off well. Further, the main actors aren't bad, even if some of the background cast just doesn't fit the bill. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't answer all the questions that it should and the monsters are completely far- fetched.

Last problem- the film is very gory for no understandable reason.

So, Silent Hill really ends up being a B horror movie. For a B horror movie, Silent Hill deserves a C- grade. Could've been a lot better, for sure.

Therefore, unless you're a huge horror fan or someone that enjoys gore, you may want to pass on Silent Hill. It's really for those that can't get enough horror.


Robert Rousseau