17 February 2017

SILENT HILL and SILENT HILL: REVELATION: REVIEWS BY SANDRA HARRIS.





SILENT HILL/SILENT HILL: REVELATION: A DOUBLE BILL OF HORROR FILM REVIEWS BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

SILENT HILL. (2006) BASED ON A VIDEO GAME BY KONAMI. WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHE GANS. PRODUCED BY SAMUEL HADIDA AND DON CARMODY.
STARRING SEAN BEAN, RADHA MITCHELL, LAURIE HOLDEN, DEBORAH KARA UNGER, ALICE KRIGE AND JODELLE FERLAND.

SILENT HILL: REVELATION. (2012) BASED ON A VIDEO GAME BY KONAMI. WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MICHAEL J. BASSETT. PRODUCED BY SAMUEL HADIDA AND DON CARMODY.
STARRING SEAN BEAN, RADHA MITCHELL, ADELAIDE CLEMENS, KIT HARINGTON, CARRIE-ANNE MOSS, MALCOLM MCDOWELL AND DEBORAH KARA UNGER.

I gotta be honest with you. I hated both these films, stylish-looking though they undoubtedly are. I hated REVELATION even more than its predeccessor, for reasons I'll explain later.

The first one has Radha Mitchell from the excellent crocodile monster-movie ROGUE married to Sean Bean, or Boromir from LORD OF THE RINGS, which is how I personally prefer to remember him. They have an adopted daughter called Sharon who sleepwalks and constantly mumbles about a place called SILENT HILL in her dreams. What gives? What gives indeed...?

Chris Da Silva, the Dad, wants to keep going with medication and therapy for the kid. I want to state for the record that I agree with the Dad. But Mom, obviously a crazy lady, has a much worse and far more life-threatening idea than Dad's. She packs the kid into the Jeep and, against her husband's wishes, I might add, actually drives her to the place on the map known as Silent Hill. You just know she's gonna regret this, don't you...?

Anyway, in Silent Hill the Mom, known as Rose, encounters way more than she bargained for back when she was merely looking to probe a little deeper into her adopted daughter's troubled past and mind. Silent Hill is an abandoned mining town, and as cool to look at as any other abandoned town you might see in a supernatural horror film. I can't fault it on that score.

Underground fires still burn in the town and hideous malformed creatures roam at will. In addition, a totally wacko witch-burning cult holds sway over the town's remaining inhabitants and there's a sinister connection between them and Rose's daughter Sharon, who hops it the second they hit Silent Hill, leaving her mother to search frantically for her before the mad culties get a hold of her.

We've got cute little mis-shapen Coal Babies that resemble Jelly Babies in the town and a Pyramid-Headed humanoid monster with a gigantic sword and a triangular-shaped helmet called- you guessed it!- Pyramid Head. He's quite an interesting and terrifying movie villain, I'll give him that, easily as scary as Pinhead or any of those lads.

We've also got sexy but scary big-bosomed nurses with bandaged faces and impractically high-heeled shoes who like to stab at people with their sharp shiny scalpels, and a hot blonde cop called Cybill who's on Mom's side, or the side of law and order at least.

Cybill tries to reason with the cult about the burning issues of the day- excuse the pun- but there ain't no reasoning with that bunch of judgemental, fanatical Bible-thumpers. And all the while, a layer of ash floats gently and dreamily down over the alternate reality known as Silent Hill. It might sound pleasant but, trust me, you don't wanna go there...

The sequel, SILENT HILL: REVELATION, sees a grown-up Sharon hot-footing it back to Silent Hill to save her Dad, now known as Harry. He's been kidnapped by a new generation of the culties in order to lure Sharon back to the place, because it's Sharon they want, just like before. They have the sacrifice to end all sacrifices lined up and guess who's the lucky sacrificial lamb...?

Sharon has company in the form of a curly-headed schoolfriend called Vincent Cooper, who's not all he's cracked up to be either. Together they attempt to battle the horrors of Silent Hill and rescue Harry. 

Malcolm McDowell, in his day trememdously handsome and a fantastic actor, has a cameo role in
the film as a crazy guy. It's kind of hard to understand what he's doing there, as his scene doesn't seem to go anywhere worth going, if you get me. And one minute he's there, the next he's not, inexplicably.

This film starts out okay but becomes boring and virtually incomprehensible once the action switches to Silent Hill. Ditto, I felt, for the first film which, at two hours long, was at least thirty minutes too bloody long, haha. Maybe fans of the SILENT HILL video games enjoyed the films and liked watching the participants defeating different villains and getting to different levels of the game, as it were, but I'm not into computer games myself so that element didn't necessarily appeal to me.

I'm afraid both films, each of which reminded me of about a dozen other horror films, left me cold. Unsympathetic characters and a distinct lack of any type of horror-movie atmosphere saw to that. There aren't any plans for a third sequel to the franchise but, if they ever do make one, I probably won't be rushing to watch it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

 You can contact Sandra at:


http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com







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