Silent Hill

There is a well-worn adage that film adaptations of computer games can seem like watching a game being played by somebody else. Inspired by a popular series of survival-horror videogames set in a derelict US mining town that is possessed by an evil force, Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill is no exception. With its obstacle-course narrative of abrupt ambushes and perversely hidden clues, and its vividly dimensional visual environments, Silent Hill is a striking approximation of the gaming format. But the bare bones characterisation, rigidly episodic structure and overcrowded frames permissible in first-person role-play prove stubbornly uninvolving on the big screen.

Gans treats exposition with impatience. The opening shows adoptive parents Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) dash out into the night after their sleepwalking daughter Sharon, who leads them to the top of a thunderous waterfall. As Sharon peers over its edge, a vortex to a terrifying infernal realm opens before her eyes. She sees the face of a mysterious doppelganger staring out at her from the flames, before collapsing in her parents’ arms, repeating the words ‘Silent Hill’. Soon Rose is ignoring the advice of her husband and driving Sharon at night to the ghost town named in her reverie, refusing to stop for a curious policewoman along the way, and smashing at high speed through a metal enclosure gate as if to the action movie born. Bean is given little to do during a half-hearted search for his missing family except shout into his mobile. He soon drops out of the story, later to be found napping at home on the settee when Rose and Sharon return battle-scarred. Rose is the resilient mother, Christopher the concerned father; Roger Avary’s script fleshes out neither beyond these archetypes.

Conversely, Sharon’s back-story – her connection with Alessa, the girl-demon tormenting Silent Hill’s paranoid, puritan inhabitants as revenge for burning her alive – unravels at inordinate length. The director, whose period horror movie Le Pacte des loups (2001) also featured a society fearful of supernatural forces it could not understand, at times reaches for the allegorical resonance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in his depiction of a community whipped into zealous frenzy by superstition. He is more at home milking sealed-off-community-with-a-sinister-past clichés: the radios that buzz out of frequency when the town’s borders are broached; the nearby gas station attendants whose eyebrows raise at the town’s mention.

Juggling different time dimensions, Gans uses a distinct visual scheme to separate Christopher’s search for his family – captured in golden, sunlit tones – from the possessed Silent Hill. The moment when Rose realises that the thick grey fog enshrouding Silent Hill is airborne ash from a still smouldering subterranean fire is memorably achieved – a rare example of atmosphere. Less successful are relentless scenes in which Rose is assaulted by a menagerie of deformities. Such grotesquery is not enough to keep a story afloat – unless, that is, the spectator is in control, finger on the trigger.

This review features in the July 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Stay Alive

From Angel Heart to The Skeleton Key, horror films have found fertile terrain in the miasmic swamplands and arcane superstitions popularly associated with Louisiana. Stay Alive, the last film to be shot in New Orleans before the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last summer, makes familiar use of a haunted plantation but otherwise wastes its locations. Director William Brent Bell’s interest in the real world, like that of his videogame-playing protagonists, is subsumed throughout by a preference for the virtual sheen of graphics.

The film’s title refers to an unreleased first-person shooter game in which grisly ‘game over’ moments ominously foreshadow the exact nature of the gamer’s impending demise. When an eager beta tester is killed playing ‘Stay Alive’, a group of his friends take up the multi-player challenge, unwisely reading aloud the game’s introductory incantation and entering a crepuscular game-world of inky skies, a forbidding tower and crypts swarming with preternatural adversaries. That these adversaries include crawling child-women with long dark hair is not the only giveaway that Stay Alive’s plot is borrowed wholesale from Hideo Nakata’s The Ring.

Stay Alive is unlikely to win over audiences wary of movies either centring on computers or adapted from computer games, especially as the film-makers struggle to integrate pixels and reality. Forced by serial tragedy to abandon playing the game in favour of hunting down its developers, survivors Hutch, Abigail and Swink trace the genesis of ‘Stay Alive’ to a decaying plantation mansion recognisable as the one from the game. As Hutch’s climactic search is intercut with Swink’s simultaneous exploration of the mansion in 3D platform mode, the editing is brisk, as if apologetic for making us experience these scenes twice.

At the heart of the mystery is Elizabeth (Erzsébet) Báthory, history’s notorious ‘Blood Countess’, who murdered her way through the young girls of 16th-century Hungary, though it is not explained why her story has been transposed to New Orleans or what her connection with 21st-Century videogame programming might be. It feels broadly logical that her spirit should be reawakened by the game’s opening invocation, but her motives for meticulously replicating the in-game deaths remain vague.

Eschewing the current trend for gratuitous gore in horror cinema, Stay Alive insinuates rather than revels in its gruesome content, though elliptical cutaways suggest a clumsy, late-in-the-day re-editing for a teenage audience more than faith in the viewer’s ability to imagine what is not shown. Otherwise, the uninspired direction adheres to a horror-by-numbers formula over-reliant on amplified musical exclamations, the sounds of clapping thunder and neighing horses.

This review features in the July 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Scary Movie 4

Out-sequelling original inspiration Scream, the Scary Movie series continues with what the new film’s poster assures us will be ‘the fourth and final chapter of the trilogy’. As with his Scary Movie 3 (2003), director David Zucker shows increasingly less interest in the horror genre parody of the Wayans brothers’ first two films in the series in favour of a less focused pastiche. With non-horror fare like Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby brought in for lampooning alongside Saw and The Village, and featuring running jokes from the previous instalments, Scary Movie 4 presents a thick pea soup of intertextuality that would likely flummox even ardent cinernagoers were its humour subtler.

More than ever before, the plot exists as a surreal pot-pourri of elements from better films. The forced logic of the narrative is best experienced as a warped dream. Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) moves into a new house to look after an elderly disabled woman (played by Cloris Leachman providing an unfortunate reminder of earlier, funnier horror spoof Young Frankenstein) and is menaced by the sprite-child from Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, who claims that his father holds the secret to repelling a destructive invasion by ‘Karma Chameleon’-playing alien tripods (or tr-iPods). As displaced communities take to the road in an apocalyptic exodus a la Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Cindy and Scary Movie regular Brenda (Regina Hall) make their way to a prelapsarian settlement straight out of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. There they find the boy’s father, and much fun is had by the characters not speaking about ‘those we don’t speak of.’

These random, unconnected cinematic targets make for a more piecemeal parody than was provided by the first Scary Movie film, which focused on the Wes Craven school of ironic teen slasher movies. If it seemed redundant to satirise films that were essentially commentaries upon themselves (Scream had already made all the knowing genre jokes that the Scary Movie series has subsequently turned into a cottage industry), at least the portentous, post-9/11 solemnity of the Spielberg and Shyamalan films is more in need of deflation. Yet of the movies spoofed in Scary Movie 4, perhaps only Brokeback Mountain is sufficiently iconic to raise audience-wide chuckles of familiarity, and this opportunity is squandered with a broad and rather obvious camping-up of that film’s delicate love story. The romance is squeezed into the narrative in one of those self-contained flashbacks that Zucker has been doing since the Saturday Night Fever sequence in Airplane! (1980).

Infantile comedy and snide stereotyping still dominate, making it difficult to warm to the few compensatory pleasures. Craig Bierko’s merciless send-up of Tom Cruise’s infamously animated appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show arrives too late. In one of the more inspired gags, a dazed swarm of dispossessed citizens of the type familiar from so many disaster movies is mistaken – as if they have wandered into another film for an army of zombies and gunned down: it is a witty acknowledgement of Scary Movie 4’s genre confusion, albeit one with unpleasant echoes of real-life post-trauma imagery.

This review features in the June 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.