Silent Hill: Revelation

Set as an adaptation of Silent Hill 3, the most terrifying to-date of the series, Silent Hill: Revelation had, in theory, a sumptuous selection of both grotesque and petrifying scenarios to work with. With the perfect casting of Adelaide Clemens and Sean Bean as Heather and Harry Mason, the movie should have been a slam dunk guaranteed to satisfy Silent Hill fans on all levels. So why wasn’t it? The nanobots reveal the boring truth in this tell-all Scorecard!

• Opening the film with an homage to Silent Hill 3’s beginning in the rusted-out Lakeside Amusement Park. = +10pts 
• Bondage merry-go-round. = +3pts 
• Sean Bean dies in the first five minutes! = +4pts 
• Oh, it was only a dream. = -4pts 
• Sean Bean’s attempt at an American accent. = -3pts 
• Pop-Tart jump scare. = -7pts 
• Heather (Sharon? We lost track already) barely conceals her disappointment at receiving a white vest for her birthday. = -2pts 
• Sean Bean has been pulling out his daughter’s Silent Hill-related diary pages and saving them, possibly to make them into a collage to give her as another disappointing birthday present. = -4pts 
• Not being able to tell if the expository scene with Sean Bean and his ghost wife is a hallucination or a flashback. = -8pts 
• When the face of the hobo that Heather is trying to ignore suddenly turns into a sewn-up arse, she probably should have called in sick to school. = -3pts 
• Heather’s new school is apparently Bayside, and she’s the new Screech. = -4pts 
• Saying that someone’s clothes look like they came from Goodwill hasn’t been an insult since the screenwriters were in elementary school. = -3pts 
• Heather’s scathing speech does little to offend the disaffected Barbizon models that make up her new classmates. = -7pts 
• Jon Snow’s portrayal of Vincent (dressed more like a Vinnie) with an even worse attempt at an American accent than Sean Bean’s. = -6pts 
• Awkward social networking references slapped in to make the actors more believable as teenagers. = -4pts 
• While the armless contortion monster from the first film (and Silent Hill 2!) does little but stagger about in Heather’s daytime hallucination, at least it’s something. = +4pts 
• Heather feels that she’s being followed by a molester and calls Sean Bean. Rather than tell her to call the police, he tells her not to come home. = -5pts 
• After happening upon an evil birthday party, complete with evil birthday clown, Heather gets an insider look of where McDonald’s meat comes from (spoiler: it’s people). = -11pts 
• The molester reveals himself to be Douglas, a private dick formerly working for the evil cult trying to bring Heather back to Silent Hill. He’s like totally trustworthy and stuff now, though, so Heather starts following him around. = +3pts (The innocence of youth.) 
• A monster that’s less something from Silent Hill and more a rejected Cenobite from Hellraiser suddenly appears and chops Douglas’s fingers off directly toward the camera. = +2pts in 3D, -6pts otherwise. Total = -4pts 
• Heather visibly annoys the mall janitor after she runs screaming from his supply closet and nearly overturns his mop bucket. = -3pts 
• This isn’t Winterfell, Jon Snow; why are you wearing so many jackets? = -7pts 
• Even after giving Heather his overcoat, Jon Snow is still wearing four layers of clothes. = -3pts 
• The crazy old man who giggles at the stuffed bunny that he pulls out of a box. = +5pts (It’s sad that this scene is one of the film’s highlights.) 
• Despite Heather’s house being splattered in blood (some of which is telling her to go to Silent Hill), Jon Snow questions her motives for wanting to bring a gun. = -9pts (You know nothing, Jon Snow!) 
• Heather and Jon Snow don’t save their game before they go on to the next level. = -3pts 
• When the police arrive and see the Silent Hill save point on the wall, the black cop asks the white cop if he thinks it’s a gang tag. = -6pts 
• Flashback scene where Sean Bean straight-up stabs a dude in the chest! = +9pts 
• On their way to Silent Hill, Heather reads from The Book of Boring Plot Exposition while Jon Snow tries not to fall asleep at the wheel. = -4pts 
• If you’re a high school couple looking to rent a motel room for the night, no questions asked, come on down to Jack’s Inn! Free HBO, wi-fi, and portals to the Otherworld! = +7pts 
• Plot twist! Jon Snow is a member of the spooky cult, complete with a save point etched into his chest! No wonder they didn’t need to save their game before they left. = -3pts 
• The Disc of Plot Significance needs to be blah blah blah blah blah. = -5pts 
• Reality sloughs away like melting flesh as the dingy motel crumbles into a rusted nightmare. = +10 pts 
• Heather makes her way to Silent Hill, or shall we call it what it actually is – a green screen stage with fog effects that look worse than the original movie made six years prior. = -6pts 
• If the filmmakers were going to give the viewers a sixty-second recap of the first movie, couldn’t they have just gone the traditional route and done it with bunnies? The movie already had bunnies, so it wouldn’t have been that far of a stretch. = -8pts 
• No matter how insipid the movie has been up until this point, hearing the air raid siren and watching the world crumble away into darkness made it all(most) worth it. = +15pts 
• We’ve seen haunted houses with more atmosphere than the scenes of Heather running around in, what, an apartment building we guess? = -8pts 
• A nude woman is flash-fried into a mannequin by an unseen force for no discernible reason other than to show three seconds of nips. = -3pts 
• In a scene that could have been truly terrifying if the room wasn’t as brightly lit as a Toys ‘R’ Us, a tremendously CGI-looking orgy of tangled mannequin parts and monstrous flesh clatters after Heather. = -20pts 
• Rather than shave off her eyebrows to appear as the albino cult leader Claudia, Carrie Anne-Moss instead opts to have the film’s make-up crew do a poor job of covering them up. = -7pts 
• Interjecting a twenty-second zombie fight into five minutes of Heather stumbling around in a hospital doesn’t make the film any more exciting. = -8pts 
• Malcom McDowell, you showed up too late to save this trainwreck with your crazy acting. = -4pts 
• Give the scary man chained up in a monster-filled insane asylum the Disc of Plot Significance – Y/N? = -5pts 
• Though the plot disc is called the Seal of Metatron, we’re pretty sure that Malcom McDowell called it the Seal of Megatron and refused to do another take. = +7pts 
• After stabbing himself in the chest with the blunt Seal of Megatron, Malcom McDowell becomes Malcom McSuperdowell and busts out of his cell. = +5pts 
• Heather effortlessly pulls the completed Plot Disc out from Monster McDowell’s chest, killing him instantly. = -6pts 
• Pyramid Head shows up long enough to dismember the grope-y inmates of the hell asylum with his Buster Sword. = +6pts 
• The gasmask-wearing henchmen who strap Jon Snow to a gurney and wheel him into a room full of stab-happy nurses act surprised when they get attacked and subsequently stabbed to death. = -5pts 
• After Heather sneaks into the stabby nurse room and creeps up to Jon Snow, rather than free him and escape she instead loudly asks him, “How can I find my dad?” = -8pts 
• The Otherworld economy is on the downturn, for even the mighty Pyramid Head moonlights as a carnie who turns the carousel. = -6pts 
• Heather experiences the bad touch on the merry-go-round with her evil twin sister-mom. = -4pts 
• Just when we’re glad to see Sean Bean reunited with Heather again, he ruins it by grunting, “You don’t touch her!” at the bad guys. = -3pts 
• Carrie-Anne Moss reveals her true form as the reject Cenobite and does battle with Pyramid Head. = +13pts 
• Realizing how easy it is to imagine the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers theme song during the boss battle. = -5pts 
• After killing Cenobite-Anne Moss, Pyramid Head strolls off like a boss. = +4pts (Mostly for letting us bust a rhyme for real.) 
• Sean Bean dropped his wallet somewhere in Silent Hill and decides to leave Heather in the care of a crazy ex-cultist while he goes off in search of it. Or maybe he’s looking for his dead wife? We wish that we cared. = -3pts 
• Cameo appearance by Travis Grady, the monster-punchin’ truck driver from Silent Hill: Origins, as the guy who thinks that it’s totally fine to pick up hitchhikers in Silent Hill. He even somehow nets middle billing in the credits. = +5pts 
• The movie ends with a nod to Silent Hill: Downpour simply so that people can point at the screen and say, “Hey, look! This is how Silent Hill: Downpour started!” = +3pts (Even ham-fisted fan service is better than nothing.) 
• The images of the mannequin fuck-spider battling the stabbity nurses that show throughout the credits. = +20pts (Despite being better than anything else that happened throughout the entire movie.)

Total Score = -94 pts
Available on Netflix and befouling the fond memories of Silent Hill 3 fans nationwide

Just as the game series has devolved from psychological horror to third-person combat action, so too did Silent Hill: Revelation follow up an atmospheric and gory film with a well-lit jump-scare-o-rama. Though it isn’t the worst movie inspired by a video game, the ruined potential certainly makes this a chore to watch. If you like strolling through a barely-passable haunted house with boring people, then Silent Hill: Revelation is the film for you. If you want an actually scary Silent Hill experience, dust off your PlayStation 2 and pick up Silent Hill 3.