Right off the bat I'll admit to you that I've never played any of the four Silent Hill games. In fact, my only real exposure to Konami's horror videogame series was playing the demo for the fourth entry (subtitled "The Room") for about fifteen minutes before becoming extremely bored with it. So, obviously, I can't tell you just how "faithful" French director Christophe Gan's adaptation is - but if it's as lacking in real plot as the movie, I have no real desire to ever play the games.

Radha Mitchell is Rose, a twenty-something mother who we see in the opening scenes saving her sleepwalking daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), from unknowingly jumping off the edge of a cliff. Before she passes out, she utters two words: "silent hill".

Unable to deal with her nine-year-old's problems, Rose learns that Silent Hill is an actual town in West Virginia and decides to take Sharon there in order to try and lull her out of her constant fits of nighttime wandering and visions. It's too bad, then, that Silent Hill turns out to be a ghost town that was abandoned years prior due to coal fires burning beneath the surface - which is supposedly due to the fact it was a mining town.

From there we spend the first hour of the movie watching Mitchell's character running around town screaming "SHARRROOONNNN!!!" at the top of her lungs while every once and a while some freaky looking monsters pop-up and attempt to attack her. There's also a pointless female motorbike cop (Laurie Holden) thrown into the mix and scripter Roger Avary (who was once pegged to scribe a new Phantasm movie and also was involved in Quentin Tarantino's earlier flicks) tosses in Rose's worried husband (Sean Bean) in order to try and give the movie some background as hubby searches for the history of Silent Hill.

Oh, and there's also some nonsense to do with town residents (who still live there in fear of "the darkness") following a maniacal religious leader, a bunch of hokum about witch burnings, and a revenge seeking woman who was burnt badly as a child and made a pact with a demon to get back at our cult members.

It's all about as clear as mud...

Director Gans tries his best to build up some eerie mood in the early stages of Silent Hill, but it just doesn't work as there's virtually no character development, the script is loaded with rotten dialogue and a bunch of set pieces with no forward momentum really, and we're just too bored to care. This is a movie that could've been forty-minutes shorter and benefited from the editing.

Things do pick-up in the last half hour as we see some demon nurses slashing throats, a woman get her skin ripped-off, and a finale involving some nasty barbed-wire tendrils - but it's not nearly enough to save Silent Hill from being yet another weak ass video game movie and a frustrating effort due to Avary's piss poor writing. I know horror movies are usually thin on plot (especially slasher flicks), but at least they have some sort of story "flow", something extremely lacking here.

If you're a fan of the games, I'm sure you'll wring more enjoyment out of this. Otherwise, unless you're looking for some generally well-done CGI creatures and an inkling of gore, you're better off skipping this completely and re-watching the first Resident Evil movie (as much as it pains me to write that...). (Chris Hartley, 4/25/06)

Directed By: Christophe Gans.
Written By: Roger Avary.

Starring: Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger.