Starring: Adelaide Clemens, Sean Bean, Kit Harrington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Malcolm McDowell, Radha Mitchell, Deborah Kara Unger, and Martin Donovan
I'm so happy that this is the last weekend of October! That means we get a reprieve from bad horror movies for a couple of months. So far in the fall, we've had Sinister, Paranormal Activity 4, and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. All of these attempted fright fests leave a lot to be desired as there has been nothing scary about the scary movies this year. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is the last of the bunch, and it's almost needless to say that it doesn’t get the job done.
Eighteen year-old Heather Mason (Adelaide Clemens) is having some serious nightmares in which she finds herself in a place known as Silent Hill, a place she's been told to avoid all her life. Along with her father Harry Mason (Sean Bean), she moves from place to place in an effort to evade the dark forces trying to bring her back to Silent Hill. In fact, she's moved five times since she was eleven years old. Her name is not even really Heather. It's Sharon. Now, she's settled in another suburban town with her dad in the hopes of remaining under the radar for a while.
On her first day of school in the new town, things quickly go awry. She's being followed by a strange man, Douglas Cartland (Martin Donovan). Though she has made it clear to all her new classmates that she has no interest in making friends, some boy named Vincent (Kit Harrington) is pursuing her. Finally, her father disappears, and all signs indicate that he was abducted and taken to Silent Hill. All in all, it has been one bad day for Heather, and things are only going to get worse. She's decided to go to Silent Hill to try to rescue her father and confront the dark forces that have been plaguing her all her life.
I'm going to start off on a positive note. The visuals and special effects in Silent Hill: Revelation 3D are pretty impressive. The 3D is some of the best I've seen in the last several months. That's it. That's the only positive thing I have to say about the movie. Now that this is done, let's get to the real talk about this flick. There are no genuinely terrifying moments in Silent Hill. This is to be expected though when all you've got is torture porn, a giant stuffed bunny, and Pop Tarts in your arsenal of frights. Without anything scary about it, director Michael J. Bassett has just put together one utterly boring flick.
The fact that the movie is boring is certainly not helped by the fact that the plot is choppy. A boring film that doesn't have a halfway strong story just makes shuteye such a serious temptation. Most of the major plot points seem forced upon us just to keep the story going. The developments for Kit Harrington's Vincent are a prime example of this. While I won't reveal what these developments are, I will say that they're totally unnecessary, and the screenwriters should have written something more natural to push Heather's quest along. Ultimately, the film has a certain randomness to it because of its choppy plot.
Demonic girl Alessa is right when she says that we're in hell. We're in movie hell. I'd have to be possessed to ever watch his film again. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D gets a wasted rating. It's just a boring mess, and the only way out of this movie hell is the shot glass. Have a few rounds of some mystery shots with this one.
