Silent Hill: Revelation 3D – Film Review
Director: Michael J Basset
Starring: Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harington, Carrie-Ann Moss, Martin Donovan and Sean Bean
Distributor: Lionsgate
Back in 2006, Christophe Gans made a fairly decent stab at adapting the popular video-game franchise, Silent Hill, into a film. Many hardcore fans felt that the effort was too mainstream, overly action orientated and didn’t quite capture the essence of the series. Nonetheless, the film did well enough and stands proud as one of the few successful video-game adaptations. Now, take everything that was wrong with that film, multiply it tenfold, and you have Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.
The most recent iteration of the Resident Evil film franchise stands at its most ridiculous, and yet it is more enjoyable than Silent Hill: Revelation. This film has serious potential to be a cult hit, up there with other awful horror films such as Killer Klowns from Outer Space or Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. It reunites several cast members from Game of Thrones which affords me the glorious opportunity to exclaim: “Brace yourself, pure shite is coming.”
The plot picks up where the original left off, distorting that genuinely satisfactory ending to meet this film’s diabolical needs. In Revelation, it is revealed that Sharon (Clemens) did not die or get stuck in Silent Hill, and was in fact returned to her father, Christopher (Bean). Living in fear that the Order from Silent Hill will one day find her, Chris, now renamed Harry, moves them from town to town in order to keep them off the scent.
At her new school, Sharon, under the alias Heather, finds herself stalked by fellow student Vincent (Harington) and private detective Douglas (Donovan). These events prefigure what is to come as Harry is kidnapped in an attempt to lure Heather back to the sinister Silent Hill. There is more to the plot than that, but it becomes so appallingly meaningless and idiotic that to publish it here might actually bring the standards of the Internet down a notch.
To be blunt, Revelation is striking in how badly it is made. It doesn’t just give a middle finger to the fans, it does to them what Pyramid Head did to that Mannequin creature in the second game (avid fans will know this is definitely not a good thing). Names, characters and symbols are all lifted from the franchise and then dropped haphazardly almost anywhere in the narrative, often completely out of context. The goal here seems to be simply to squeeze as many references into the paltry running while wrapping a paper-thin narrative around simply terrible CGI.
The most impressive thing about the film is probably the creature design, with one or two rising to the heights of being ‘slightly unsettling’. Pyramid Head (not Red Pyramid, as the credits refer to him) is decidedly ‘meh’, adding little to the table, while the absurdly slutty nurse monsters jump through the same hoops as in the last film. A mannequin monster in the second act has potential, but lacks the presence to be in any way threatening,
Which brings us to a major crime committed in this, or indeed any horror film. It simply isn’t scary. The film is barely unsettling as the CGI highlights how fake everything looks. Which is a shame because the visuals are clearly the films selling point. In the first ten minutes of the film, during a breakfast scene, a pop tart jumps out of a toaster. Got that? You are now conditioned against the only point in the movie that will come close to making you jump. Atmosphere is simply non-existent whereas the performances…
Did you know?:
In many cinemas, there are special screens with an audio descriptive function for the visually impaired? It’s true.
Well, Revelation is one of the few films that will never have need for this function because every character has a tendency to state the obvious.
“Is that a gun?!” he asked, while holding what is either a gun or an aggressively shaped stapler.
“We found this jacket. There’s blood on it.” said the police officer grimly, while the camera ZOOMS IN on aforementioned garment.
This dialogue doesn’t get any better and is generally quite painful to listen to. It seems doubtful that a second draft of the script was written, or even if there was a script to begin with. Clemens and Harrington are the worst offenders here. Apart from being given dialogue that borders on the hysterical, their delivery sometimes suggests that English isn’t even their first language. Syllables are strongly enunciated, as if this were a primary school nativity play. There is supposedly some kind of romantic relationship blossoming here also, but it is so forcefully cliched that it is almost impossible to believe they’re being serious.
The one good thing to come out of this film is that, because it is so ball-bustingly awful, it is all too easy to distance it from the franchise itself. Console yourselves, horror fans, with the fact that this 3D vomit does not affect the games that you once loved. They are still as good as ever (the earlier ones anyway). Maybe someday, a director like David Lynch or Guillermo Del Toro will make an adaptation that does the series justice. Until then, you can always admire this for what it is: a ludicrously expensive parody and one of the few films in which Sean Bean dies twice.
Score: 1/5
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