Silent Hill: Revelation (2012) DVD / Blu-ray

By: Oberst Von Berauscht (Six Beers) -
How many beers do you recommend for this movie?

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The First Silent Hill film was a critical and commercial disappointment, so it is only natural that six years later Hollywood would make a sequel just as guaranteed to fail.  After all, we’re in the last fiscal quarter of the year, it’s time to start thinking about tax write-offs.  The Story focuses on Sharon Da Silva (Adelaide Clemons), a girl haunted by vague memories of losing her mother.  Ever since, she has lived with her father Christopher (Sean Bean) constantly on the run from a shadowy cult who seek to steal her back to the town of Silent Hill, a ghostly town were her mother disappeared.

A Toast

The 3-D effects in this movie were fantastic, used both to create creepy atmosphere and gimmicky jump-scares in roughly equal measure.  If you’re looking for the film equivalent of a haunted house ride this Halloween, you could do a lot worse.  And it is nice to have a horror movie out that actually focuses on monsters instead of “found footage”.

The door shut itself, Spoooooooooky…

Beer Two

If only the movie had a halfway coherent plot, it might have bene scarier.  The Silent Hill video games are all about tension building up to the reveal of unsettling imagery, with a decidedly slow-burning approach to narrative.  This makes for a difficult transition to the fast pace of the film world, as it clumsily attempts to fill every quiet moment with distractingly elaborate exposition.

Beer Three

The Romantic Interest character is so obviously connected to the evil cult that it eliminates any sense of surprise in the “reveal” scene.  And the script spends so little time actually developing the romance that Sharon goes from mildly disinterested to “willing to sleep in the same rape hotel for the night” in the span of about 10 minutes.  On an interesting note; he’s played by Kit Harrington, who stars on HBO‘s Game of Thrones as Jon Snow, son of Sean Bean’s character Ned Stark.

This might be the most depressing answer to a trivia question that no-one asked.

Beer Four

Both Sean Bean and Kit Harrington can’t seem to decide what accents they’re using.  Both seem to be attempting some semblance of American, but often fall back into British dialects in the same scene.  Accents aside, they are clearly doing their best with the material given to them.  But if they weren’t able to hold an American accent, it would have been less distracting for them just to use their normal speaking voices.

Beer Five

Since Silent Hill is based on a video game, it is understandable that the filmmakers used so many CGI effects to recreate the game’s atmosphere.  However I can’t help but wish they’d used practical methods more often, because the computer graphics stand out in silly contrast to the real thing.  Otherwise just make the whole film CGI, it’s more honest.

Beer Six

An appearance from Malcolm McDowell was a wonderful surprise.  Too bad that he’s only given five minutes screen time, basically a cameo.  Until someone listens to my pleas and makes McDowell the next Bond villain, we’re stuck with what we’re given I guess.

At least the movie has plenty of the ultraviolence…

Verdict

It’s a sloppy mess with some nice 3-D visuals

Drinking Game

Take a Drink: whenever Silent Hill is mentioned

Take a Drink: when Sean Bean’s accent slips

Drink a Shot: for Pyramid Head

If you’re a fan of the games: take a drink for everything that they “got wrong”