Silent Hill: Revelation

Reviews from the Dark Side presents
Silent Hill:  Revelation
Released 10/26/12, now in theaters

The 2012 Halloween season ends with Silent Hill:  Revelation, the sequel to the 2006 horror gem (my opinion, I know), Silent Hill.  Like the first movie, the sequel is based on a survival horror video game.  Sean Bean and Deborah Kara Unger return in the sequel.  New cast members include Malcolm McDowell, Carrie-Anne Moss, Martin Donovan, Kit Harington, and Adelaide Clemens. 

Following the events of the first film, Rose Da Silva and her adopted daughter, Sharon, are trapped in the haunted town of Silent Hill unable to return to normal reality.  We start this film with Sharon on the brink of her 18th birthday back in normal reality.  Several years earlier, it seems Rose discovered a portal that can return one person back to the other side.  She decides to send Sharon back using an amulet and communicates to her husband, Chris (Bean), that the inhabitants of Silent Hill still want Sharon to stay for nefarious reasons.  Chris vows to protect his daughter at all costs and goes on the run with Sharon over the next decade, both using various aliases to avoid detection. 

Teenage Sharon (Clemens) remembers nothing from her time in the haunted town except through nightmares where she always encounters a demonic figure named “Alessa” who she is drawn to for some strange reason.  In the newest town she and her father have established residence, Sharon (going by the name Heather), meets new people who will have a profound impact on her life in the near future.  First, there’s private detective, Douglas Cartland (Donovan) who is tracking Sharon, and later tries to warn her about his employers.  Second, there’s Vincent (Harrington), a classmate at Sharon’s new school who takes an unusual interest in the stand-offish girl. 

Trouble starts brewing as Sharon begins seeing horrific images in her waking hours that she can’t explain.  After escaping capture from a demonic figure in an elevator (that also claims Cartland’s life), Sharon returns home to discover her father has been kidnapped and to find a chilling message written in blood on the wall that reads “Come to Silent Hill.”  Together with Vincent, Sharon goes to the burning town with the intent on rescuing her father.  But Silent Hill wants her and it won’t be willing to let her leave a second time.

There is good and bad to this sequel.  First comes the good.  The stop motion photography still provides the same nice creepiness as it did in the first movie.  There was money and thought put in to the 3D technology.  It is extremely well done.  You feel like you can reach out and touch the falling ashes.  Now, the bad.  And there’s a lot of it story wise.  You know what this felt like?  “Hey, let’s use some of the creepy imagery and one or two story elements that made the first movie entertaining, string it together with a flimsy, nonsensical plot, and call it the Silent Hill sequel.”   Bad horror irritates me to no end.  Good horror is more than stringing a couple of creepy images together.  There is a method to the madness in good horror movies.  The images you see must be disturbing and must make sense as to why they are on the screen.  Great horror sets the mood with a chilling premise and sharp execution of image and plot that makes you peek around dark corners in your own home.  Whatever that was on the screen for this film wasn’t like anything I described.  It felt like the creators had absolutely no clue what horror is really about.

Let’s look at the first Silent Hill which I think is a modern day horror classic.  It was a simple, yet demented tale of revenge.  A young girl who was tortured beyond belief by Puritanically religious townspeople exacts vengeance through the physical manifestation of her rage.  So, in the sequel, we find there are yet more townspeople that Alessa forgot to take care of the first time and also seem to be just as demonic as she is.  Where Alessa wanted to keep Sharon safe in the first movie, she now wants to consume her?  All access to Silent Hill was closed down in the first movie, now cars just drive through it like any other town?  There are people that are still born and raised in this demonic town (how did Vincent ever make it to his late teens)?  The townspeople who hid from Alessa’s horrors in the first film, now walk the streets and enter buildings with no protection and are somehow shocked when they get sliced to pieces now?  You get what I’m saying.  There’s just no consistency or cohesion between the two films.  The actors do their best to try to make this work.  There's just nothing in the script for them.  Malcolm McDowell and Carrie-Anne Moss were pretty much wasted here as the psychotic leaders of the townspeople (well, McDowell was pretty much ousted now that I think of it). 

Silent Hill:  Revelation is anything but that.  I would suggest the creators of the sequel watch the first movie again.  Maybe they were following the storyline of the video game.  There are several versions and I haven’t played one to date.  I couldn’t tell you if they stayed true to that story.  What I can tell you is this movie invokes few memories of the first.  Please indulge my childish tone for this next thought, but Silent Hill:  Revelation is a big bad steaming pile of suck!

The Dark Lord of the Sith says:

* star

Ratings Legend
Zero *= Don't waste your time. Pure dreck! Dreck is too good for this! Blind me please!
1 *= Fuggedaboutit!
2 *= Average, Mediocre, Nothing Special
3 *= Good viewing. Much better than a poke in the eye.
4 *= Great. Could possibly foot the price of a non-Matinee.
5 *= Pure eye candy. Hall of Fame material here.