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Director: Christophe Gans

Release Date: 21 April 2006

Tagline: Enjoy your stay.

Main Cast:

Radha Mitchell … Rose Da Silva

Sean Bean … Christopher Da Silva

Laurie Holden … Cybil Bennett

Jodelle Ferland … Sharon / Alessa

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What an unmitigated pile of drivel this is. It’s an absolute mess of confusing plot which is full of holes, appalling dialogue, atrocious acting and the most utterly ridiculous and pretentious ending you are ever likely to see. It’s also far too long (about 2 hours too long, I’d say).

It ‘borrows’ highly from Asian horror styling (the traditional ‘ghost girls’ as seen in Ringu and The Grudge), Don’t Look Now and cheesey horrors from the 1980s (there’s a scene with the barbed wire that is very reminiscent of the ‘tree rape’ scene from The Evil Dead . The difference here being that the latter was a humorous film).

The main character spends the first half of the film (maybe even more) just running around shouting “Sharon!”. It would have been far better if they had Ozzy Osbourne in the main role ;-D

What the hell was Sean Bean doing in it? Could they not find a mediocre American actor to play the part rather than a mediocre British man? His accent swings from terrible American, to Yorkshire and even, at times, Irish.

On the plus side, the visuals are very atmospheric and the special effects are pretty good. It is for these reasons that it gets more than 0 stars from me. Oh, and there’s the part when all the zombies or whatever they were started shuffling in a little group and I thought the soundtrack was going to break into Michael Jackson’s Thriller…

Silent Hill is yet more proof that video games should never, ever be made into movies.

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