Written by: Susan Granger
www.susangranger.com

"A lot of what gets called entertainment today is actually dumpster-diving for the mind." I found this quote on the Internet and it certainly applies to "Silent Hill."

This supernatural thriller begins in the middle of the night with Rose and Christopher Da Silva (Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean) chasing after their sleepwalking daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland). The child is adopted and suffers from recurring nightmares, mumbling "Silent Hill" over and over again. That impels Rose to take the troubled girl to a ghost town with that name in West Virginia, where a mine fire has been burning underground for 30 years and the sky is perpetually snowing ashes. After Rose recklessly crashes her Jeep through a series of chain-link fences, while being pursued on a motorcycle by a tough, leather-clad police officer (Laurie Holden), Sharon disappears and very weird things start to happen. Screaming, burned corpses of children appear and disappear through a "portal." There's a barbed-wire monster, witch-burning and a secret cult. It's all quite morbid and sadistic, reminiscent of "Hellraiser."

French director Christophe Gans ("The Brotherhood of the Wolf") helmed this creepy horror story, which is based on a popular video game and adapted for the screen by Roger Avary, who co-wrote "Pulp Fiction" with Quentin Tarantino but obviously has no experience with dialogue. Big on demons and grisly gore yet short on logic, it's filled with deranged, nightmarish CGI effects which are atmospheric but signify very little, except the final realization that "The Sixth Sense" did the alive/dead concept much better. As for character clarification and development, forget about it.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Silent Hill" is an incoherent, incomprehensible 2. Once again, it's surreal style over substance.