Silent Hill (DVD)

...original Sony Playstation (PS1) called Silent Hill. This was very much in the same vein as the likes of Resident Evil (1996) in that it is within the 'survival horror' games genre.

Unlike Resident Evil, Silent Hill was very much less in the gamers' face, with more emphasis on a subtle approach to the scares and monsters which made for an extremely ominous atmosphere with a level of suspense that made Silent Hill an experience that ...
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The original Silent Hill game sadly looks a little rough around the edges these days as it is on the PS1... It was followed up with Silent Hill 2 (which is also available as a director's cut - with an extra bit of game play as another character after the main body of the game has been completed), Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill 4: The Room - all of which are available on the PS2 format and are extremely unsettling - so the franchise started ... more

* Please note: This review first appeared on www.dooyoo.co.uk under my dooyoo alias dlb74 *

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Back in 1999, I bought a game for the original Sony Playstation (PS1) called Silent Hill. This was very much in the same vein as the likes of Resident Evil (1996) in that it is within the 'survival horror' games genre.

Unlike Resident Evil, Silent Hill was very much less in the gamers' face, with more emphasis on a subtle approach to the scares and monsters which made for an extremely ominous atmosphere with a level of suspense that made Silent Hill an experience that the player wouldn't forget in a hurry - particularly when they had just switched out the light at bed-time. Sweet dreams!

The original Silent Hill game sadly looks a little rough around the edges these days as it is on the PS1... It was followed up with Silent Hill 2 (which is also available as a director's cut - with an extra bit of game play as another character after the main body of the game has been completed), Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill 4: The Room - all of which are available on the PS2 format and are extremely unsettling - so the franchise started as it meant to go on.

So… there's a little background on the Silent Hill franchise. As game players and fans of Silent Hill waited for a new game, the news broke that there was going to be a movie adaptation of the game. This was met with extreme caution by fans of the series - myself included - as game to film conversions are generally a very hit and miss affair - sadly with most being the latter of the two. Having had two Resident Evil movies (with a third on the way next year - Resident Evil: Extinction) that were entertaining enough but by no means as good as they could have been, the question being asked by anyone even remotely interested in Silent Hill was whether it would do the source material justice or end up as average as the Resident Evil movies?

One of the first pieces of good news about the Silent Hill movie was that it would be directed by French director, Christophe Gans - who is most well known for the strange period piece/horror/thriller The Brotherhood Of The Wolf (or in its original French title: Le Pacte Des Loups) so it was to be helmed by someone who certainly knows how to direct an effective and stylish horror story. So far so good…

Then photos from the sets began to appear on the internet. They showed the deserted and rotting streets of Silent Hill and having played the games, I immediately thought of something very odd… I was looking at photos of a place so incredibly familiar to me. My feeling was that I had been on those very nightmarish and deserted streets before.

I was back in Silent Hill…

The question remained: Would the film be any good and do justice to the source material and the fans who already loved it?

Read on and find out… We're in Silent Hill… and we've been expecting you.

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THE PLOT:

The plot to the movie takes a slightly different direction from the first game on the PS1. In the game, the main character was a man named Harry Mason who was driving through the night with his young daughter, Cheryl at his side.

A female motorcycle cop overtakes his car and a short while later, Harry passes the abandoned police motorcycle lying on its' side at the side of the road with no sign of the cop… Moments later, he sees what appears to be a young girl on the road ahead of their car and swerves to avoid her. We see the car pass through the girl as she throws her arms defensively across her face… a ghost?

Harry's car then plunges off the road - knocking him unconscious with the impact… When he awakens, Cheryl is gone and he finds himself in the strange and desolate fog-ridden world of Silent Hill where nothing is as it seems…

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Sorry for mentioning the start of the game - but it is relevant in that the plot is very similar indeed but with some changes in the characters. The character of Harry Mason has been replaced by that of Rose Da Silva (played by Australian actress Radha Mitchell who has starred in some popular films such as Pitch Black, Man On Fire and Finding Neverland) who has a young daughter named Sharon (not Cheryl as in the game) with her husband, Christopher (Sean Bean).

Sharon sleepwalks a lot and at the start of the film, we see Rose and Christopher frantically searching around their home in the middle of the night for her. She has crossed a nearby busy road and has sleepwalked to the edge of a cliff overlooking a steep drop down to a river. As she is about to unconsciously throw herself over the edge, Rose finds her and manages to catch her before she plummets down the ravine.

Sharon is mumbling the words "Silent Hill" over and over. As Christopher finds Rose and Sharon, Rose tells him she has said it again. This indicates it has been a reoccurring situation that the family have been enduring.

Rose looks up more information about Silent Hill and discovers that it is now abandoned following fires that raged through the town thirty years previous. An interesting point raised in the film that isn't really touched upon in the games is that the fires that started are still raging beneath the ghost town to this day. A creepy idea in itself.

With the knowledge of where Silent Hill is, but not entirely sure of how to find it, Rose takes Sharon despite Christopher's attempts to dissuade her and drives her through the night in order to try to find an explanation of why the young girl is haunted by the town of Silent Hill.

En Route, Rose stops off briefly at a garage and a drowsy Sharon wakes up and gets very upset at the fact that her nice happy drawings in her sketch book have been changed into dark and oppressive images. A female motorcycle cop (named Cybil Bennett as in her game counterpart and played here by Laurie Holden who has appeared in many TV shows - including the X-Files and several some movies - including The Majestic and The Fantastic Four) notices the small disturbance and becomes curious enough to pull Rose over a little further down the road.

Having parked her Jeep for the cop, Rose notices a road sign pointing toward Silent Hill. Sensing that she is close to her intended destination and fearing that the cop is going to be a problem in her getting there, Rose accelerates off as the cop approaches her Jeep. Moments later, the radio in Rose's Jeep goes crazy - with loud static hissing - making Sharon panic in the passenger seat. As Rose attempts to switch off the radio, she takes her eyes off the road for only a moment. When she looks back up, she sees the figure of a young girl on the road in front of them and swerves to avoid her (déja vu, anyone?). Rose is knocked unconscious as the Jeep plunges off the road…

Upon waking up - still at the wheel of her Jeep, Rose slowly comes to her senses and realises with horror that Sharon is missing. She gets out of the Jeep and steps into the eerie, silent town of Silent Hill. It is a very tranquil but deeply unsettling place - where the streets are shrouded in a ghostly fog that seems to drain a lot of the colour from the world around it… and ash falls gracefully to the ground like snow.

Rose runs off into the fog calling out for Sharon - who she appears to catch a glimpse of running ahead of her through the fog. As Rose takes off after her, the shrill cry of what sounds like an air-raid siren fills the air. Suddenly, around her the grey daylight fades to a darkness like that of a pitch-black (no pun intended given that Radha Mitchell starred in Pitch Black back in 2000) night. Moments later, by the faint light of a cigarette lighter, (though we never see Rose smoke) Rose has her first nightmare encounter in this hellish place. Will Rose find Sharon and escape the demonic clutches of this tainted town?

Watch Silent Hill and all shall be revealed…

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THE ACTING:

The acting in Silent Hill is generally of a very high standard - especially when you consider the source material on which it is based. The scripts of the games are not too deep - but then games are rarely blessed with an outstanding script. The first game suffered from a fairly stilted script which sometimes affected the pace of the story but when the series hit the PS2, the general quality of the games improved - including the graphics, game play and even the quality of the scripts.

The script for the movie was written by Roger Avary who has written for other big movies - having written some dialogue for Reservoir Dogs. He also wrote the stories for Pulp Fiction and wrote Killing Zoe among others). The script is very good all things considered and although perhaps quite confusing in places (as are the plots in the game - so this is consistent) could be a nightmare for the actors and actresses to handle - especially the multiple roles of Sharon Da Silva/Alessa Gillespie (played with great conviction by child actress Jodelle Ferland - who has appeared in quite a few TV shows before her role in Silent Hill). I think it is fair to say that the cast and script compliment each other very well.

Radha Mitchell is very good as Rose Da Silva - bringing a freshness to the horror movie heroine. Her character arc is pretty impressive too as she starts out being terrified with the experiences she has in the world of Silent Hill (as we pretty much all would be if this scenario were real) but slowly becomes more strong as she survives new horrors and becomes more focused on finding and saving her daughter.

Sean Bean is (in my opinion at least) a very good and dependable actor. Silent Hill is no exception to this but for two minor niggles. He has a strange accent in this one. It's not enough to take away from his character's credibility but it's somewhere between an odd American accent and his native Sheffield accent. The other gripe could be that his character doesn't have a hell of a lot to do in the film. His character heads to Silent Hill in search for his wife and daughter. Once there, he is accompanied into the deserted town by police officer Thomas Gucci (Kim Coates) who knows all to well about the horrors that the town endured thirty years earlier. The problem is that they find no trace of Rose or Sharon as they are still grounded in the real world version of Silent Hill - while in the exact same places they are looking, Rose is running for her life in the version of Silent Hill that has been swallowed by a living darkness. Does this sound confusing? It is but it's certainly an intriguing idea for a story. It worked well in the games - and works well in this conversion from game to film.

Laurie Holden is absolutely fine as police officer Cybil Bennett. She is initially a tough as hell character who having given her job has made her a strong personality. The intriguing thing is that after initially catching up with Rose in Silent Hill (having crashed her bike nearby…) has a reverse character arc than that of Rose - as Cybil shows herself to be weaker and more vulnerable as Rose becomes stronger.

There are many other notable performances in this film from the cast who play inhabitants of Silent Hill including Deborah Kara Unger (who has starred in such films as Highlander III: The Sorcerer, The Game, Payback and White Noise amongst many others) who plays the role of Dahlia Gillespie and Alice Krige (who has starred in many TV shows and some notable movie appearances such as the Stephen King penned Sleepwalkers and Star Trek: First Contact - in which she played the terrifying Borg Queen!) as the deeply unnerving Christabella.

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THE SPECIAL EFFECTS:

The special effects in Silent Hill are extremely good and are very fitting to the story - being every bit as disturbing as fans of the series would have hoped they would be.

There are some notable points to mention here regarding a lot of the monsters in the film. Whereas a lot of films nowadays rely on CGI to create their scary monsters, Silent Hill for the most part remains old school by having people dressed up as the creatures on set and therefore interact with the actors in the scene perfectly. Amazingly, this technique gives the monsters in Silent Hill a deeply menacing appearance which will be instantly familiar to those who have played the games in this franchise - and will spook the hell out of those visiting Silent Hill for the first time.

There are CGI effects in this film too - for the parts of the story line that require effects that would have been almost impossible to create as live action events on the set. For the most part, the CGI effects serve the story very well and do not take the viewer's attention from what is going on in the film.

Other than the beasties that overrun the town when it is plunged into the darkness, the effects of the fog itself is very impressive and conveys the oppressive feel of the games perfectly. Given the nature of this film, it is worth mentioning that there is more than a fair share of blood, guts and gore flying around occasionally - but please note: it is very rarely gratuitous.

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THE MUSIC:

The music in Silent hill is from Akira Yamaoka - who created the music for the video games of the Silent Hill series. There is a little degree of cheating going on here though as there are some bits of music within the film that have in fact been lifted from the games. The very start of the film has the original theme music from the PS1 game playing over the company logos. There are some bits of music through the film that are recognisable from the games while the end credits to the movie are accompanied by a song called "You're Not Here" which was originally the opening song from the game Silent Hill 3.

Other music included in the film has been composed by Jeff Danna who has composed music for numerous TV series and movies - ironically one of which being the second Resident Evil movie - Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Strange that he should be involved in different projects that in their original game formats are often compared to each other.

All in all, the music serves the movie very well and doesn't steal our attention away from what is going on onscreen - but more often than not adds to the tension of what is happening.

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MY HISTORY WITH THIS FILM:

As you have probably realised already, I have a long history with the town of Silent Hill and this movie was for me a continuation of the series. I am fairly certain that given the popularity of Silent Hill, there will likely be more games and movies in the series.

I look on this movie as well as being a continuation of a story for fans of the games, as being an introduction to those who have never held a joypad in their life. It's an origin story of sorts with some interesting background information about the town of Silent Hill itself (some of which will be new to the fans of the games too!). Although having played the games arms anyone who watches this film with a considerable amount of knowledge and experience of the strange place depicted in this film, I would say it is more than plausible that anyone who has a liking for the horror genre will enjoy this film even if they don't know about the games on which it is based.

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THE DVD:

The presentation of the film on the DVD is very good indeed. There are perhaps only a few very small gripes I have with the DVD. Both are with the picture quality - which is generally excellent. The first small niggle is regarding a small, faint line that appears to be on the bottom widescreen bar onscreen. It would be interesting to find out if this is an occurrence that is on all copies of the DVD. If it is, I would have preferred it to have been dealt with prior to it's release - but in all fairness, the line is so very faint that it doesn't intrude on watching the movie.

The other niggle I have is that the film appears to suffer from slight mosaic-like pixelisation - especially on very dark portions of the picture - this is a bit of a bummer on a film that is set a fair bit in the dark. That said, thankfully, this problem isn't bad at all dark parts of the movie and bearing in mind it might well be the way in which my own DVD player (an Hitachi DVD P335E) is handling the image and may not necessarily be the way the image plays on other players.

Sound wise, the film is fantastic with loud and scary sounds working out the speakers when loud and scary things are happening onscreen.

FEATURE RUN TIME:
120 Minutes

PRESENTATION RATIO:
2.35:1 Anamorphic PAL

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES:
English Dolby Digital 5.1

AVAILABLE SUBTITLE TRACKS:
English for the hearing impaired

EXTRAS:

Although this is only a one disc edition of the film (which makes me wonder how long it will be until the studio decide to release an extra-feature loaded 2 Disc edition as normally happens these days) although it is fairly light on outstanding quality extras, the making of documentary is very, very good and shows that this film has been a labour of love - given that Christophe Gans is a fan of video game series and was therefore wanting to do the film and the fans of the series justice. I feel that he has succeeded - which is not always an easy task (Paul W.S. Anderson is a huge fan of the Resident Evil video games and yet when he wrote and directed the first Resident Evil film and wrote the second film - leaving the directing to Alexander Witt, he still couldn't carry it off as well as Christophe Gans has with Silent Hill).

The making of has a run time of 47 minutes and 18 seconds and is split into the following segments:

SILENT HILL - ORIGINS:

This goes into the origins of the Konami game released back in 1999 and how Christophe Gans was hooked on it and always believed this would be an incredible idea to port from game to film. It is extremely insightful as to how Gans operates as a director and how he cares for the material he is dealing with.

CASTING SILENT HILL:

This covers the cast that they chose to portray the characters and why they cast them in their roles. It's quite fascinating due to the interesting behind the scenes on set footage of the movie being filmed.

BUILDING SILENT HILL:

This segment was incredible to watch, as it showed the people responsible for designing and building the sets. As I said at the very start of this op, the look of Silent Hill as it seen in the games is carried across perfectly into this film and it's very easy to see why. The people responsible for creating the hellish vision that is Silent Hill are nothing short of geniuses. This shows footage of the lengths they went to in creating the indoor sets to finding the small town of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada - large sections of which were about to be refurbished. As a result of this, there were many, many shops and businesses that had temporarily closed down and cleared out whilst awaiting the overhaul - this gave the film producers the perfect opportunity to dress up the existing town to double as Silent Hill for the exterior shots. The footage of the crew messing up the town to make it look like it has been getting covered in ash and decaying for three decades is absolutely breathtaking.

STARS AND STUNTS:

This segment shows how the stars of the film were able to do a majority of their own stunts - with the help of minimal wirework and using harnesses. In doing this there were a lot of moments in the film where you see fear on the faces of characters and realise from this segment that a lot of the time they are not acting!

CREATURES UNLEASHED:

This segment is absolutely incredible. It shows how the creatures of Silent Hill were recreated for the movie. The amazing thing here is that it shows that the majority of them were actually people dressed in extremely fantastic monster suits and are very rarely created within a computer. As well as going into the creature design itself, this segment goes into how the costumes were created and is very, very interesting.

CREATURE CHOREOGRAPHY:

This segment goes into how the people who had to be under the make-up in order to bring the creatures to life went to painstaking lengths in order to give them an otherworldly feel through their movements. It's just another element that shows just exactly how much thought actually went into this film and proves that it wasn't just rushed from page to screen in order to make some easy money.

Other elements within the extras are:

PRODUCTION PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY:

This is somewhat disappointing as it contains only thirteen photos! My recommendation is that if you want to find lots of great photos from the movie - whether it be pre-production or movie stills, you'll find much more on the internet than you will find here.

ORIGINAL THEATRICAL TRAILER:

This extra does exactly what it says on the box. A good enough trailer that serves it purpose well. An interesting point about the trailer is that it shows Rose's Jeep passing through the ghostly figure (as Harry Mason's car does in the original game) though oddly we don't see this shot in the film itself.

ORIGINAL UK TV SPOTS:

This includes three small TV ads to promote the movie upon its release. The overall run time of all three is a mere 55 seconds.

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MY CONCLUSION:

A very satisfying horror movie which given its source material is far better than this could have been. This is undoubtedly down to the direction of Christophe Gans and the other crew who ensured that this would remain faithful to the games and fans of the games.

Though the film itself is very impressive it is definitely worth mentioning that it contains some pretty disturbing imagery (as with the games themselves) and is pretty horrific in places - especially when considering its 15 certificate in the UK.

Some people may find the end of the film infuriating as it is somewhat ambiguous… I myself find this to be consistent to the way the stories from the world of Silent Hill have always worked. The ending of the film despite being a little unclear is intriguing to me and makes me think it could lead to a sequel… and why not? At the time of writing this op, there are four Silent Hill games available and they haven't yet run out of steam - so there's no reason why there couldn't be several Silent Hill movies.

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Thanks for reading this op and have pleasant dreams!

Derek. 

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