Silent Hill (2006)

[runningscared]

Movie: Silent Hill (2006), directed by Christophe Gans

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.33 miles, 8’56”/mile, 01:05:28 (recovery run)

 

So for the first time since the pandemic hit, I actually ran outside two nights in a row. Imagine that! Partly I did it because the weather was cooperating (yayyyyy fall!), and partly it was because I was experiencing that delicious paradoxical mix of cabin-fever claustrophobia and empty-nest loneliness that is 110% my life these days. But mostly, if I’m honest, it’s because the West Coast is on fire and so many people don’t have the option to run outside, because the outdoor air is akin to what comes out of the tailpipe of a poorly-tuned 1971 Ford Pinto. Seems a shame not to breathe the air while I have some.

 

Two nights of real running on real pavement took their toll on my very real skeleton, however, and so a gentle recovery run on the treadmill while snuggled up to the ever-reliable boob tube was in order. But what to watch? Well, sometimes you just want the big-budget Hollywood version of horror, the big names and E-ticket effects that are maybe just a little too slick to really be scary, but you admire the effort, anyway. Or at least the expense. So I cued up Silent Hill, a perfect choice because it’s a video game adaptation with CGI effects galore. It’s two, two, TWO new-millennium trends for the price of one!

 

Full disclosure: I haven’t played the game Silent Hill, since I never had a system that would run it, so I can’t speak to the film’s qualities as an adaptation. As a movie in its own right, though, I enjoyed it. The plot is a little… extra, though it starts out simply enough: Rose’s adopted daughter Sharon keeps almost hurting herself while sleepwalking, and frequently screams “SILENT HILL!!” when being awoken. Rose discovers that there is a ghost town named Silent Hill and decides to take Sharon there to see if they can figure out what’s causing this dangerous behavior. Silent Hill has had a perpetual coal fire burning beneath it for the past 30 years, so the roads don’t go there anymore, but Rose finds the old turnoff from the highway and crosses the bridge into town. She swerves to avoid a child in the road and crashes into an embankment; when she comes to, Sharon is gone, there’s a creepy fog everywhere, ashes are falling from the sky, and Rose sets off in hopes of finding Sharon—and some answers.

 

Of course, that’s when messed-up things start happening, like getting attacked by dozens of weird grey humanoid thingies, and occasionally spotting a little girl who isn’t Sharon but sure looks like her, and talking to a homeless woman who seems to think Rose’s locket has a picture of her own missing daughter in it. Soon enough, Cybill the Ass-Kicking Bike Cop catches up, and, after fighting off an armless grey acid-spitting nightmare, eventually teams up with Sharon, who has herself been following clues and has pulled a key out of a corpse’s mouth, been accosted by miners, and run from a swarm of enormous cockroaches with teeny human faces. (There’s a lot going on. It’s almost like everything’s happening in a video game or something.)

 

Anyway, LONG story short(er), they fend off attacks from a huge pyramid-headed guy with a Japanese Video Game Sword (you know, the ones bigger than people?), follow more clues to the town’s hotel, and wind up meeting up with the witch-burning religious kooks who have been around since before the town was founded. They send Rose into the basement, which is full of nasty things but also the key to the whole mystery of Sharon’s origin and odd behavior. And wouldn’t you know it? The cult is still up to their witch-burnin’ ways, and it’s up to Rose to save Sharon and just maybe visit vengeance upon the flock in an orgy of airborne carnage straight out of Hellraiser.

 

So yeah, it’s a lot, but I did enjoy the low-key puzzle aspect of it all, and the story kept me engaged. Silent Hill is not without its flaws, however. Some plot points seem forced, such as Rose speeding away from the cops when she hasn’t yet broken any law; Sharon’s sleepwalking issues have been going on for years, so what’s so urgent that she’ll attempt to evade the police in a high-speed chase to get to the town RIGHT NOW? And the movie is over two hours long, so some of the interminably long sequences of Rose exploring the town felt unnecessary, as did nearly the entire subplot of Rose’s husband Chris trying (unsuccessfully) to track down his wife and child or solve the mystery of Silent Hill—what exposition we get out of that could easily be delivered in a less tortuous manner.

 

I feel it’s also worth mentioning that Radha Mitchell, who plays Rose, spends a lot of time running in this flick, and I wish I had her speed and form. (And she was running in BOOTS, for Pete’s sake.) On the fright front, Silent Hill does indeed have some genuinely scary moments—the Freaky Nurse-Things™ leap immediately to mind, and maybe the tortured-to-death janitor hauling himself out of the bathroom stall and creeping around while still bound up in barbed wire. Oh, and this movie has probably the single most effective CGI “watch someone’s whole skin get torn off her body in one fell swoop” effect I’ve ever seen, so, there’s that. Although, in hindsight, given the state of the West Coast, the scariest part might well be the fires that never stop burning and the constant rain of ashes from the sky…

 

Silent Hill is an enjoyable couple of hours packed to the brim with STUFF, and I suspect you won’t enjoy it as much if you’re not paying attention, so save it for a night when you want a story to follow. If you were disappointed by the dozen-or-so OTHER video game movies of the 2000s, this one just might work for you.