Silent Hill movie

Mmm, grainy barely-visible SH movie clip...

Despite having to crank the gamma up just to see anything that was going on, that clip was a nice little treat. Too bad it cut away right before the gore.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Sounded like "Reaper" to me at a first listen, but it could be "Rebirth". Maybe. *hoping for "Rebirth"*

In any case, nice to see a trailer with a little new footage, even if the voice-over makes it sound like typical horror cheese. The shot of Pyramid Head was sweet, inexplicable cockroach posse and all.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Eleo

But it's obvious that a compromise between cliche American horror films and Silent Hill had to be made; the movie has to appeal to the average movie goer and not just video game fans.

You don't know the half of it. Have you checked out the blog on the movie's main website? It has some answers to various questions, and one of them is this little gem about why they swapped Harry for a female lead.

Quote:

It quickly became clear however Harry never acted like a masculine character. He was constantly dizzy, fainting, talking to himself, screaming and in fact was very vulnerable. We didn't want to betray the nature of the game by changing the character's feelings and motivations, so we felt it was better to change to a female protagonist and retain all those important qualities.

I'll say here what I said about it in my journal: Fuck, aren't we past this stereotyping shit yet? Apparently in American horror movies, only women are allowed to be afraid. God forbid male characters express anything resembling human emotion or show any sign of vulnerability when a mannequin-raping demon with a giant knife wants to skin them alive.

If that's their criteria for a male lead, we should all hope they DON'T get to make Silent Hill 2 into a movie. Oh noes, James shows EMOTION from time to time! Holy shit, quick, give him tits and a vagina so the American movie-going public doesn't have to feel uncomfortable about a male expressing emotional pain!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I stand by the idea that they DVD should have multiple endings on it (if they filmed any), including a UFO ending. SH1's UFO ending looks like it was thrown together by high and/or sleep-deprived programmers at 2AM. It's not as if it requires much in the way of time or effort to splice a few voice clips together, throw together some synthasized sci-fi music, and choppily edit some scenes to have aliens (or just screw that and draw some goofy illustrations for the scene instead). Even if the movie somehow ends up sucking, I think I'd still have to buy the DVD if it had a UFO ending.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

That's your problem right there: you went to Blockbuster. Blockbuster won't have Jacob's Ladder. If it's not on DVD and widely distributed, they don't want it. When I went looking for Jacob's Ladder, I eventually found it on VHS at Jumbo Video. A few of the older local-owned rental stores also had it on video. So my advice would be to stop by a few of those and hope for a stroke of luck.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Mobius One

I found it at my Blockbuster AND on DVD. That's where I was able to rip the scene that Mr. shakey head was in.

Really? Either your Blockbuster sucks less than mine, or the DVD has gotten much more distribution in the years since I've watched it.

The crazy shaking thing makes for cool gif. The whole hospital scene was all kinds of awesome, easily the highlight of the movie.

Most amazing jew boots

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...p-345559c.html

Hey, any publicity is good publicity. *snicker*

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Inhert

and I thought of something:

Spoiler:

do you think that those two gasmask man could be Rose husband and the detective trying to find her? but because she's in foggy or dark silent hill, she see them as a treat?

It's possible, but...

Spoiler:

...if you watch the 14-minute "Making Of" thing that was linked a few pages back, you'll see that there are some scenes where Rose and her husband are in the exact same place at the exact same time, but they don't see each other because they're in different dimensions (Rose is in dark or foggy Silent Hill while her husband is in the real-world "ghost town" Silent Hill). I won't dismiss the miner possibility just yet, though. It'd make wonderful use of that that good ol' "They look like monsters to you?" line from SH3. Maybe all the different "layers" of Silent Hill start to melt together at some point in the movie, and that's how Rose sees her husband and Gucci when that starts to happen. Speculation! We'll know next week.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Motsy

As for an actual soundtrack release, there aren't any plans for one yet. Yet.

If the making-of thing and the trailers are any indication, a movie soundtrack would feel kinda like a Silent Hill "Best Of" album.

Going to see the movie opening night, with one or two friends. One of whom has a homemade Pyramid Head costume (he scared the crap out of some little kids with it last Halloween, heh), and I'll be spending this week jokingly pestering him to wear it to the movie.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Just got back from the movie. Here's the review I wrote up in my journal. Some of my opinions might change when I have more time to digest the movie a bit, but it's a general first impression.

Spoiler:

In general: a lot of really cool monsters, really cool moments, and frequently dead-on pacing and atmosphere, dragged down by too many characters, some unnecessarily over-the-top details, and an unnecessary attempt to re-invent certain plot points of the series that really, really don't need to be re-invented. Particularly not the way the movie tried to do it.

Also, not enough Pyramid Head. But you can never have enough Pyramid Head.

This is a movie that's really, really good in the details. Just bad in the execution of what goes on in between the details. The setting? Lovely. Wonderful. Silent Hill through and through. As Rose wanders through the town, through the school, through the alleyway, it FEELS like Silent Hill. It really, really does. And those moments are wonderful. The alleyway scene is one of the highlights of the movie, and it does an amazingly good job of combining original ideas with the monsters, the scares, even the camera angles from the game. That one scene is what the whole movie could have -- SHOULD have -- been. If only. But even when the plot was getting ridiculous, the settings and atmosphere were always a treat. Both misty and dark Silent Hill were handled as well as you could hope for or better. Makes me wish the whole movie had just been Rose wandering around. Preferrably alone. The movie goes downhill when people start talking.

The detail in the monsters is amazing. The scene with the patient demon was one of my favourites, everything from how it moved to the acid spray. At that moment I really, really had hope that the movie would keep up to that standard of awesome. It didn't. Though it wasn't without its shining moments. When Pyramid Head saunters onto screen, casual as you please, it's just such an SH2 MOMENT. Even with the unnecessary posse of cockroaches. (Guys, PH is scary enough on his own. He doesn't need bugs following him around.) The Janitor was actually very well done despite being a bit more human-looking than the average SH monster, and I'll give the moviemakers props for making him actually kinda cool. If you can appreciate atmosphere, monster design, and settings, you'll do fine with the movie.

But oh, where to start on the rest...

Among other things, there's just this overwhelming sense of things slipping under the radar. Sharon is dying, apparently, but other than a brief mention at the beginning, you don't hear any more about it. It's sort of Advent Children-ish in that way. Remember how absolutely non-crippling, boring, and underwhelming Geostigma was? Well, that's Sharon. "She'd dying from a horrible disease!" Uh... Yeah. She seems to be getting on perfectly fine, but I guess I'll take your word for it, movie. It can't be that important, considering you never brought it up again after the first five minutes.

Then there's the cultists. Holy fuck did they annoy me. Bad acting aside, I hated them for the same reason I hated one of the stories in the graphic novel: too many people around = NOT SCARY. Or rather, it means they steal the show away from the more personal stories, eat up screentime, and utterly making you lose sight of the presence, threat, and punishing/redemptive nature of the TOWN. Too many people, too much (usually cheesy) dialogue from said people, and every scene with them just had me waiting for Rose to get back to exploring the town. And for a movie that put so much work into the monster prosthetics and set design, it's beyond me why they couldn't come up with character designs that didn't make all the cultists, Dahlia, and evil-Alessa look like hobo bag ladies. It was just silly and embarassing, and made sure I couldn't take any of them seriously.

Speaking of Dahlia... Gah. The way they turned Dahlia into a loving, suffering mommy was annoying, but it was just one part of the stupid changes made to some of the characters and series plot. What they did with the town's kooky religion just doesn't hold a candle to the way it's supposed to be, and the changes made to the religion just plain bothered me. A lot. Since when do the cultists hate witches? Anyone remember Saint Jennifer (I think that was her name)? That witch briefly mentioned in a few of the games, burned by the TOWNSPEOPLE and basically made a saint within the cult? The cultists aren't afraid of the darkness or the evil of the town. They CREATED it. They WANT it. They SUMMONED the demon. What it made of Silent Hill is their "paradise". It might have backfired on them, but the whole thing loses its impact when you ditch basically everything interesting about it and replace it with that bloody witchburning nonsense. They ditched the entire story around Alessa being a vessel for Samael, her mom and the cult burning her, the fact that she's supposed to give birth to their god and create paradise, etc. Now she's basically just a random girl burned alive to "cleanse" her after she was raped, and poor sad mommy Dahlia feels bad about letting it happen.

No. Just...no. Dahlia's a stone-cold bitch and a nasty piece of work all-around (see SH4 for extra reasons why). The cult is kooky, but they're far more interesting in their kookiness than that "OMG WITCHES!!!1" crap. Would it have been so hard to stick with the original plot? Or failing that, to just ditch the cult and Alessa altogether and doing a more original plotline rather than getting rid of most of what made them interesting? Geez. Just have Sharon be connected to a different little Silent Hill girl. The cult ran an orphanage, I can't imagine they didn't horribly torment at least a few other kiddies. Have the cult in the movie be a splinter group or something. I might not have liked them any more, but I could have stomached that more easily. Just don't change things around, cut out everything interesting about the cult and Alessa, and pretend it's the way things happened. It's not. And it's far, far less interesting.

Geez, I promised myself I wouldn't be obsessive and nit-picky about the changes the movie made to the game details. It's a movie. It's not the games, and it can't pretend to be. But a wonderful setting, great monster effects, and a bit of fanservice can't make up for doing something utterly retarded with the very things that make the series' plot interesting, doing it for apparently no reason, and doing it badly.

I don't know what to say about the movie overall, honstly. I applaude it for what it did well. Kudos to them for getting the monsters, setting, and atmosphere so accurate, and for making some parts of it genuinely FEEL like the games. But it seems like the other aspects of the movie had a lot of trouble keeping up with that. The annoying lines, cultists, and plot changes for all the wrong reasons... They should have been minor, incidental gripes in the midst of all the good things the movie had to offer, but they just kept distracting me all the way through. Disappointment.

Though the ending (the VERY end, not so much the scene in the church) was pretty good. Mother and daughter taken over by Silent Hill, and they get their own little "heaven" for their trouble.

My advice: don't treat the movie as a remake of the first game. Treat is as a side-story akin to the graphic novel stories, one that just happens to pull a lot of details from the games. It really feels more like the graphic novels than anything else, in how the story is told. Compare it to those if you must, don't get bogged down comparing it to the first game. That way you'll be more able to enjoy the good aspects of the movie while ignoring some of the stupider ones. The settings, monsters, and atmosphere are all wonderful. It's what's going on in their midst that will have you rolling your eyes and muttering about the VG movies curse.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by a_gerontophile

So I heard this movie's actual plot was hardly like the game? Didn't the game have to do something with giving birth to God? (Something about Cheryl being Daughter of God, Mother of God in Silent Hill 3.)

Spoiler:

The movie ditched the entire "Daughter of God, Mother of God" thing. And the entire thing about Samael being in Alessa's soul (you know, that little detail that the first and third games COMPLETELY REVOLVE AROUND). And just about everything else the games have established about Alessa and the cult's religion, except the fact that Alessa was burned alive and eventually got enough bad mojo going to turn the town evil and take everyone with it.

Quote:

So what does that do for sequels? Won't the plot just run terribly off course like the Resident Evil series? Also, Pyramid Head's appearance in this movie would make his appearance in a movie adaptation Silent Hill 2 pretty lame.

At this point, we should probably all hope they don't try to do Silent Hill 2 as a movie. It would look beautiful, but considering the plot details they've made a mess of in this movie, a good adaptation of SH2's plot probably wouldn't be in the cards.

Incidentally, for all the people wondering about the "I am the reaper" line... Yes, it is indeed "reaper." But it actually isn't cheesy in the context in which the movie uses it. There's no voice distortion, and it's just one little snippet of a longer sentence. Just so you know.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.