Common Sense Note
Parents should know that this film is too violent for children. The storyline takes the form of a nightmare, so connections between scenes and events are sometimes hard to follow. The town is ostensibly located over an ongoing coalmine fire, and the general mythos has to do with a cult that accuses and burns witches in order to maintain the group's "purity." Characters burn, stab, shoot, and throw rocks at each other; the film includes a couple of vehicle crashes, frequent scenes where the mother and/or her daughter scream in terror. Men in miners' gear appear to threaten Rose, mainly because they look scary in goggles and overalls. Various monsters are misshapen and zombie-like human-types, able to shape-shift in bad-dreamy fashion. The monsters attack with swords, the cop shoots until she's out of ammo and then submits to a dire beating. Characters are burned to death, with skin melting, bubbling, and charring.
Families can talk about the popularity of horror movies, especially among teens. Why do so many people enjoy being scared? Does a movie need to be gory to be scary?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Creepy and mostly incoherent, SILENT HILL begins with Rose (Radha Mitchell) in mid-panic. She's running after her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), a longtime sleepwalker who has wandered off into across a highway, through a nearby stretch of scary woods, and finally to the edge of a cliff that features an odious waterfall.
This time, Rose gets to Sharon in time (and her husband Chris [Sean Bean] arrives on the scene once the danger is over). The rest of the movie shows a less successful effort: she takes Sharon to Silent Hill, a West Virginia coal mining town that appears to be haunting the girl. On the way, they escape from a motorcycle cop named Cybil (Laurie Holden), who wears one serious pair of skintight shiny britches and black knee-high boots, not to mention her helmet and large handgun.
The weapon comes in handy when Cybil follows Rose and Sharon to Silent Hill, where they confront any number of misshapen, nightmarish creatures. Here the weather changes instantly, ranging from dreadful downpours to pervasive ash-in-the-air, sometimes night, sometimes day. When Sharon disappears, Rose hunts for her in desolate streets and dark alleys, occasionally running into delirious, dread-headed Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger), another mother of a missing daughter.
At times the film cuts away to Chris, who's doing his own investigating, in archives and with the help of a police inspector, Gucci (Kim Coates), who has found the wife's Jeep. Gucci tells some spastic story about the town's coal fire, the "hellish" day in 1974, when "people were dying and disappearing." It sounds creepy, but doesn't quite explain how come they're reappearing in Rose's present.
Conveniently discovering a lighter and a series of flashlights that always work no matter how old they appear to be, Rose runs into a number of oddballs, some with miners' gear and a canary in a cage, some seeming boneless, others marching in jaunty-out-of-joint step as if they've emerged from "Thriller" (If only Vincent Price might have provided voiceover elucidation). Sometimes their skin flies off like its burning, sometimes they spew bloody-seeming goo. One particular victim-monster has his head tied to his feet, and kind of scoots along the floor as if menacing Rose, who screams while standing still and holding her flashlight on her ostensible assailant, who actually never quite makes it very far, seeing as he's all tied up and bent.
At last Rose finds the head mistress in town, Christabella (Alice Krige). A self-identified witch-burner, she decides that Rose, Sharon, and anyone else from out of town needs to be burned at the stake. The hordes of folks reciting and grabbing at Rose and Cybil make for a familiar nightmare image, as do Christabella's invectives: "We fight the demon," and "We drew a line in the sand." All the while, Rose keeps telling Sharon, "It'll be okay, baby." But it won't.
Families who like this movie might also like Resident Evil (also based on a violent video game), the zombie movie 28 Days Later..., or Dark Water and The Ring, about mothers protecting their children.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentReferences to woman's pregnancy (she won't identify the father); suggestion that a janitor abuses a girl (rendered in a brief visual innuendo, not explicit); villainess suffers barbed wire tentacles going up inside her dress, then splitting her apart. |
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ViolenceSome of the child's drawings are gruesome (black chalk showing violence to bodies); car and motorcycle accidents; grotesque ghost-like figures who appear variously to be burned/charred, gooey, flayed, misshapen, bloody, and scarred; a cut throat spews blood; a nightmare creature gushes something like acid at the policewoman, whose helmet burns; weapons include guns, a gigantic sword that cuts through doors; penetration and whomping with poles, barbed wire seems sentient, winding around limbs and penetrating bodies. |
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LanguageSeveral uses of f-word; an s-word, plus repeated uses of "hell," "damn," and "ass." |
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Social BehaviorNothing you would want your kid to emulate. |
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CommercialismCoke vending machine at a gas station |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoA character smokes in the background of a scene. |
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