Film: Silent Hill Revelation

Director: Michael J. Bassett
Genre: Horror Thriller
Source: USA (2012)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Netflix Instant Watch
Grade: D+

As I get deeper into my Halloween film watching of 2013, I'm finding a few things to be true. One, it's a lot harder to make a good scary movie than one would think. Two, bad scary movies can be a whole different kind of fun. And three, the "horror" genre is about as broad as movie genres get. Is a movie like Silent Hill Revelation supposed to be "scary" in the same way that The Shining or Psycho or even Friday the 13th is supposed to be? If so, it fails on all counts. Is it supposed to just be creepy, evocative of nightmares? It does a little better there, but the astronauts encountering the monolith scene from 2001 a couple of weeks ago was infinitely more nightmarish than anything on display here. Is it gore that makes a horror film? Because the CGI here, though purposefully bloody, is still way way less effective than something like The Thing. Horror is just such a big umbrella, describing films as disparate as Lugosi's Dracula, The Blob, The Ring, 28 Days Later, and Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, that at a certain point it just stops meaning anything at all. Even with that much breadth and depth of a category, Silent Hill Revelation is not a particularly good horror movie, but it's better than my last two horror attempts, so I'll take it. It's king of the losers so far.

Anyway, I digress.

Silent Hill Revelation has enough going for it that I'm pretty disappointed it didn't turn out to be better. Notably, it's working with a pretty solid cast, though some of them are clearly slumming it here (Malcolm McDowell, this is pretty lame stuff for you, and I say that with full knowledge that you were in Just Visiting--you know, the movie where Jean Reno plays a knight who time travels to modern New York). Still: Carrie-Anne Moss? Sean Bean? Jon Snow, still knowing nothing? Enough actors with actual talent that I wonder at what point they just all felt silly. Did Carrie-Anne Moss put on her albino wig and think, "Wait, what am I doing?" Probably. 

The film has some nice visuals as well. The ash falling on the city, the disintegrating walls, the sound-activated nurses, and some nice creature effects all work in a semi-creepy way. It all feels a little too . . . CGI? Is that possible? Like someone just kept piling on the CGI to try and overcome any shortcomings. The creepy mannequin factory is nice, for example. But the spider-quin monster that emerges from it is kind of dumb. (Similarly, Pyramid head is just goofy looking, and why is his sword so enormous?) Less might have been a little more, and the amber filter on the settings gets a little old, but there is some effectively haunting stuff to look at, if you can look past the silly too-video-gamey stuff.

The film obviously was designed for 3D tricks and laughs, and it gets a little old on just a regular tv, but I won't complain too much. It is, after all, the first film of my Halloween-a-thon that kept me from getting too bored and pulling out my iPad. So that's something. Not very much, but something. And with a bar for horror this low, right now, I'll take it.

Alternate Film Title: "Worst. Carnival. Ever."