Silent Hill

[Azazel]

I am going on Sunday because I caved during a moment of weakness.  A certain someone is going to have the added realism of scratch-marks suddenly appearing across their body during tense moments.  Lots of them.  To heighten the experience of course.

mm sexy!

It also has Sean Bean.

Excellent! I love Mr.Bean's work.

Opinion Note: I did not find it scary. I have seen friday the 13th / Nightmare on elmstreet installments that I consider more "scary" then Silent Hill. I did however find it quite sufficiently creepy, and very satisfyingly fuck-with-your-headish.

Did you see Ringu 1/2 and what did you think of them?

[schild]

Ya know, as creepy as Ringu was, I found Ju-On and Phone much scarier. Ringu was a perfectly crafted thriller, don't get me wrong, I'd sing it's praises from the mountain. But for raw scares, there's a raft of other shit (especially Korean stuff) that just can't be beat. Of course, this may just be a reflection of watching each of the Ringu things (including the TV show) at least 5 times a piece (and the original movie about 20-25 times).

[Shockeye]

Review worth reading.

[stray]

Hmm, I can't find enough from the reviewer ("Stefan") to gauge what else he/she likes. Looks like "Pop Syndicate" just launched this month.

Other than that (and at the risk of sounding prematurely fanboi-ish), the review itself sucks.

[edit]

Rose ventures into Silent Hill looking for her daughter enshrouded by a thick fog and snow like ash falling from the sky.  She catches a glimpse of Sharon running down an alley. She follows when suddenly a siren goes off and everything goes pitch black.  She flicks her torch of a Zippo lighter and continues her search only to be attacked by strange burning childlike creatures.  Just as she’s about to be overtaken, the creatures disappear. 

This goes on for the first hour.

That last line is important. Bad reviewers usually say lazy, dismissive shit like that. Either this person didn't watch the film in a theater (with a good sound system), or they really don't know how to watch a film. I'm not convinced that only that is what "goes on for the first hour".

However....

I'll drop my expectations a bit and accept Schild's advice : "It's not Uwe Boll!" Hopefully, it's not Saw either.

Going in with that in mind might make the experience a little better.

[Savant]

I had just gotten back into the groove of enjoying horror movies when Saw II completely fucked that up again.  I have hopes that this movie will set things straight again.  If not, no more horror movies for another two years.

[Fabricated]

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060420/REVIEWS/60421001/1023

Well, Ebert didn't really get it, but he had to drag his retarded views on games into it as well.

[Fabricated]

This is the best review I've read so far.

I went with two people who didn't know the games and they had no trouble understanding the plot. There is a part in this movie where it holds your hand so hard while walking you through a ton of exposition it's painful. If anyone says they don't understand what's going on in this movie then they were not paying attention or they don't understand how they're supposed to watch a film. Ebert fits for both of those.

I have no shred of doubt that Sony hates this movie. The clunky, wrongheaded marketing gave me this impression. Refusing to screen it for critics gave me this impression. They released it through TriStar instead of their typical Screen Gems. The movie is dirty and they have been pushing it away from themselves so they don't get contaminated by it. From the "difficult" plot to the intensity of the action sequences to the broadness of some of the characters to the inescapably violent and sexual subject matter to Gans' compositions and camera work (which rely on none of the easily recognizable cliches that typify the way horror movies are shot these days,) there is nothing here that a Decider for a studio as artistically bankrupt as Sony wouldn't react to with fear and hatred.

I have no hope for that proposed sequel, adapting the plot of Silent Hill 2, to go anywhere. With such pathetic studio support, I'll be amazed if this one manages to come close to breaking even in the theatrical run.

The very least that can be said about Silent Hill is it's an attempt at something other than a 70s/80s horror remake or a J-horror remake or a shitty slasher flick. It wants to be something different and it is something different. It is good for horror that there is a movie like this.

When you see whiny dickless little babies complaining that they hated it, it wasn't the way they wanted it, and that they'd rather there'd never been a Silent Hill movie you should let them know that they are lower than shit. They are bugs, made of shit, that live in a gigantic pile of shit and worship a Shit God while they suck shit into their disgusting little mouths and shit it back out and then eat it again (they love shit.) The world will be a cooler place when they're dead.

[Hoax]

Fucking shit-god worshiping bugs made of shit.  I HATE THEM!!

 

[ahoythematey]

Random Silent Hill fan said:

If they ruin this, I WILL destroy. This movie had better have the same effect as Frankenstein did way back when. People fainting; vomiting; going into shock. That is Silent Hill to me. I had better walk away feeling nauseous and very very depressed. Nausea, melancholia, and confusion are key, you sloppy c*nts.


DO IT RIGHT OR I AM COMING FOR YOU.

Damn, I thought I had high expectations.

Just got back.  While maybe not quite that emotionally disturbing, the movie was pretty grotesque in a mostly-cerebral way, but plenty graphic all things considered.  I think Gans did an awesome job and I hope people see through the prejudices of assfaced reviewers incapable of escaping their own narrow views of what a movie should be and where the source material can come from.

I would recommend seeing Silent Hill.

[stray]

Not as good as I thought it'd be (but of course), but it had it's moments. It was a bit slow at times, and I expected something more relentless. Creepy, but not scary, as Surf said. The best part was probably the score.

Also, the ending was the shit.

[schild]

A lot of people say they wanted "something more relentless." The problem is in the source. The SH games are anything but relentless. They are slow moving, pretty dull for long periods of time, and disjointed in terms of plot construction.

I love them, but the bar is set low in my brain for this movie. I have no worries that it won't be anything but fucking totally awesome.

[stray]

Hmm, the games, at least for me, were completely relentless. There were more times where I had to hit pause and take a breather than when I was just twiddling my thumbs, waiting for something bad to happen. My expectations for the film were because of the games, not in spite of them.

Maybe it's just an issue of medium and player involvement or whatever, but the games worked on an entirely different level for me than this film did (but just to be clear, I didn't dislike the film either).

[stray]

Schild, it's past midnight. Where is your opinion?

[Margalis]

The games were awesome. I wouldn't call them relentless, more like crushing. Even when nothing was really happening action-wise or plot-wise the whole thing was like a slowly contracting box.

[schild]

Just got back. Better than the game(s). It was damned faithful and well paced (for a Gans movie). I would change the opinion of it being better than the game if they remade Silent Hill 1 to play like Resident Evil 4. Every horror game should be remade with the over the shoulder thing actually.

Anyway, I'm gonna chat about it for my chronicle tonight. Goddamn that whole project is a mess. I didn't think I'd be this preoccupied before E3.

[stray]

The games were awesome. I wouldn't call them relentless, more like crushing. Even when nothing was really happening action-wise or plot-wise the whole thing was like a slowly contracting box.

Maybe that's a better description. Either way, I didn't mean relentless in the overt, Slasher flick kind of way. I just meant relentless in the sense that the game(s) offered little respite or less than overwhelming predicaments.

And like I said, the movie has it's moments. Just not enough of them -- and those are mainly towards the end. The charred babies and Pyramid Head are as nightmarish as I hoped them to be, and the ending gorefest is the fucking bomb. I hope it does well enough to warrant a sequel at least....Since I think SH 2 would make the better flick.

[schild]

--Vague Spoilers--













Oh, I positively loved the whitewash backstory scene. The brutality near the end was spot on. And pyramid head will haunt my dreams. And I welcome it. The babies were well done as well. I wish the acid spitters had been roaming Silent Hill like they should have been. And finally, I thought the nurses in the final hallway were just badass. Oh, and I'm glad they made the protaganist a chick. Other than that - good fucking stuff all around. I would like to say that in the first 15 minutes of this movie they had more dialogue than in the whole of Le Pacte de Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf, spelled incorrectly as well).

[Target_Erukul]

    Started out abit slow first, then it zipped off into Land of Soon to be Classic Films, right up until it hit a fat road block when it decided it needed to explain. Simplistic moronic 1+1=2 explanatios. A beutifully filmed rythmic film screamed to a dead stop. And it went down hill from there. Luckily it was the last 15 or so minutes but still it left me feeling cheated.
    What makes it worse is after that blatent scream of 'LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN !!'  It continued with its subtleties, the costumes colors, the fog, etc etc, but after being brained up side the head with the Sledgehammer of Captian Obvious it could not recapture its rythm.
   I am hoping for a Directors Cut released DvD titled "They(corporate execs) edited it when I wasn't looking, heres the real ending"
 

[Kitsune]

Spoilers below!





The movie really annoyed me in a few places.  Both of the parents seeming very bewildered when police arrest them for blatantly breaking the law.  The fact that nobody questioned the very, well, videogame-ish chain of events, when the mother explains to the cop that they have to go to the hotel because she found a piece of the hotel sign in some dead guy's mouth, the cop didn't say, 'That's the stupidest bullshit I've ever heard.  What the hell would make you think finding something in a dead guy's mouth tells you where your daughter is?'

The ending was kinda 'eh'.  I'd suspected that they were all dead from their various crashes, and the ending seemed to support the idea, but if that was the case, why were none of the bodies discovered, nor, apparently, the cop's motorcycle?

The visuals were great, and the movie was nicely eerie, but the writing could've used some work, IMO.  I'd consider it more a rental candidate than something to see opening night.

[Rasix]

I could not in good faith recommend that anyone see this movie. It sucked. Badly. Pretty movie, great visuals. Everything else was a steaming pile.

I really want some of what you people are injecting between your toes.

[stray]

[edit] Pointless news. Nevermind.

[schild]

I've seen it twice now (went with a different group of people). Every person has liked it and every person has disliked the same scene.

The scene that starts with "It looks like there's been a fire here" and ends with "use this rope to get around the pile of garbage, you silly platforming bitch."

[Engels]

Anyone know a place to get a PS2 emulator and/or a PC version of the original game?

[SurfD]

www.zophar.net for all your emulator needs (If they dont list it, chances are it probably doesent exist)

As for an image of the game, no idea.  I imagine you could find ISO's of it floating around on pretty much any fileshare service.

[Yoru]

Saw it yesterday afternoon.

I dunno, the movie seemed to build up and fall flat too often on various fronts. The first 'omg dark & scary' sequence started off pretty creepy, but I found it comic towards the end. Subsequent dark & scary sequences were heavily foreshadowed and, well.. not scary. Meanwhile, you have a pretty good WTF factor going on with the cop & mother storyline, and then they feel the need to jolt you out of it with the crappy father storyline, throwing off the pacing. They eventually ruined the WTF factor entirely with all the plodding, pedantic exposition. I felt like I was being physically assaulted with a giant steel I-Beam Of Clue.

And then there's the whole suspension of disbelief thing. The opening ten minutes required an excruciating effort to believe. I found neither the actions of the mother nor the actions of the cops believable in the first ten minutes. The videogamey mechanic of "go somewhere, find absolutely tangentially-related item, take it as gospel proof of needing to go somewhere else" felt forced.

The cinematography also felt a bit videogamey, like Gans was trying to replicate scenes from the game in certain parts; there were a handful of travel scenes with a static camera where someone enters the screen at an odd angle then exits it (or walks up into a closeup) that screamed 'video game'.

That said, the actual visuals and art direction were pretty good; nothing truly spectacular or revolutionary, but solid.

I'd say it's worth a DVD rental or a second-run ticket.

[Fabricated]

Anyone know a place to get a PS2 emulator and/or a PC version of the original game?

I think there may have been a PC version of the original Silent Hill but my memory fails me at the moment.

For emulation:

Emulator: ePSXe.
http://www.epsxe.com

Plugins:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/peops/

You'll need the PSX BIOS file to make the emulator work, but well, that's illegal to provide.

I took some screenies of the opening with my copy of SH1:

[Lantyssa]

I really enjoyed the movie and I do not like horror.  I know some of you did not like the ending but it felt appropriate to me.  I had no complaints about the movie.  Maybe that is because I am not used to the genre so it is easy to creep me out.

(Okay, there was something that bothered me, but it is not really a complaint.  The cop was my favorite, so a few of her scenes really got to me.  Moreso than some of the other powerful moments.)

[WindupAtheist]

Equilibrium > Matrix.

Just to go off on a tangent, I remember reading an incomplete fanfic with a really great premise.  Preston goes out to apprehend some sense-offenders, but instead of finding his old friend Sean Bean out there in that little room, he finds... wait for it... Morpheus and his two pills.  It was a lot of fun while it lasted.

[Trippy]

Silent Hills game stuff moved here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=24351.0