Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

(2006)

(2012)

SPOILER WARNING FOR BOTH MAYBE! I’M NOT SURE YET. Sorry for yelling.

Despite my disinterest in the horror genre, a friend had effectively initiated me into the Resident Evil videogames, mainly because he was always playing them in the background at social gatherings and I became curious. This instigated a very VERY long desensitization process.

I never liked supernatural horror because it seems like it has no rules. It’s nice to have some understandable limitations on what can and cannot happen as a story progresses. Supernatural stuff often throws all the rules out the window to instill that feeling of unease or dread. That may be the goal of horror but it makes for bad storytelling in my opinion.

Silent Hill games were based on supernatural horror and I had no stomach for it. Resident Evil games had some spooky places and a few jump scares but Hill was just creepy from start to finish.

After some harrowing life events and a considerable more desensitization (particularly due to Resident Evil 7, a terrifying new direction for the series that led me to wash my hands of it) I decided to revisit the original Silent Hill game via a YouTuber’s play-through. Its old janky polygonal graphics were not as frightening to me as they were in my youth.

Now there’s a new Silent Hill film in theaters. I’m probably not going to see it in theaters. But it reminded me of the earlier films and how everyone said how bad they were. 

George was curious. I’m George.

It’s hard for me to resist finding out why something is so unanimously considered to be terrible. I’m happy to take someone’s advice and see a good movie but if you tell me a movie sucked fatty, I promise you, I will be seeing it within the next hour.

I have to admit, it took a while before I found something to bitch about while watching the first Silent Hill film. The ashy fog-filled atmosphere combined with musical cues taken straight from the game were unnerving in a fun way. The sense of intrigue I had was genuine as I watched Rose follow her adopted daughter through the town.

When “the darkness” came, the effects of paint peeling off everything and falling upward, turning the whole city into a decaying industrial hellscape… that was pretty cool, even if it was supernatural.

But eventually the mystery of Silent Hill begins to unravel. Well, more accurately, it begins to reveal itself as a tangled mess of barbed-wire. I mean that both literally and figuratively. The plot is just a mess. I was happy with the video game trope of “go to this place, meet a horror, find a clue, repeat”. Unfortunately, plot development tries to rear its ugly head.

Gradually we learn that several years prior to the events in this film, a mother had a child out of wedlock and I guess that was a big problem for the local cult who deems everything they don’t like as bad and evil, especially little girls with hellish psychic powers. Naturally (because it’s the only heartless brainless bigoted hypocritical course of action available) the child had to be sacrificed.

Long gruesome story short, the ritual goes awry, a fire runs rampant and somehow ignites a never-ending fire in the coal mine under the town thus resulting in the constant ashy fog. The child is understandably irritated at being immolated half to death and makes a pact with a demon as one does. This splits the girl into three versions: vengeful burn victim girl, ghosty creepy demon avatar girl, and happy nice girl who is plagued with somnambulistic visions of the town.

Just in case you’re not confused yet, happy nice girl version of the child got to start out as a baby again thanks to supernaturalness and was adopted by Chris (Sean Bean) and Rose (Radha Mitchell) thus setting into motion the events we witness in the film.

If all that seemed concise and perfectly understandable, congratulations! To me. It means I’m a far better writer than whoever contrived this claptrap and attempted to present it as a comprehensible cinematic story.

Don’t expect to find these perfectly accurate details readily accessible in the film though. In order to understand any iota of what the hell was going on, I had to delve deep into the dark web and painstakingly unearth plot point after plot point. Seriously, it was like an episode of Mr. Robot. I had to fight a sumo wrestler.

Unfortunately, critics are right. This is sign for a bad movie, but like I said, it was intriguing and visually stunning. While it was a bit gruesome at times, I believe it kept the gore and terror relatively low key on purpose. It is based on a videogame after all and as we all know, video games are made solely for children. <—-Sarcasm.

The climax was pretty cool mainly due to the soundtrack’s sudden use of a pipe organ. I suppose the thousands of telekinetically writhing rusty barbed-wires whipping around the room was also impressive but that pipe organ slaps bro!

The sequel, Silent Hill Revelations, is basically more of the same but with really low quality film stock. Seriously, it looks like a Hallmark movie… an OLD Hallmark movie. I couldn’t believe Sean Bean was still in it, let alone Malcom McDowell and Carrie-Anne Moss. The film’s entire budget must’ve gone straight to them, leaving nothing in the ashy fog and barbed-wire fund.

I did like the spider monster comprised of manakin parts. I could watch a whole movie consisting of people trying to get away from that thing. Yes, it was clearly designed to take advantage of the 3-D trend popular at the time, but it was still a sweet effect.

The fight at the end between the Carrie-Anne Moss monster and Pyramid Head was exactly what I didn’t know I had always wanted to see. I’m not sure I understand why Pyramid Head is suddenly our champion, but it made for a rad climax. It was clearly fan service, but I’m okay with it.

If you can stomach the horrid look of the monsters (which ain’t pretty, let me tell you), I recommend watching the mannequin scene and the final fight. Skip the rest, especially the Happy Burger scene. That was bloody disgusting and almost beyond my threshold for horror if it hadn’t been so cheaply fake.

Apparently, there are a myriad of fan films made in homage to Silent Hill, probably to compensate for the fairly crappy couple of official films. Some of these looked even cheaper than Silent Hill Revelations if you can imagine such a thing. Others looked like small-time filmmakers utilized well the resources they had and produced something fairly interesting. Some are on YouTube and others want a donation before they let you watch it. It makes it confusing when trying to figure out what are official movies and what are not. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t differentiate. I’ve seen some pretty well written and even well executed fan films before.

I’m curious enough to see the new film, but I’ll probably wait till it comes out on streaming services.