Best Videogame Movie Yet?



That's the impression I got after watching the latest trailer of Silent Hill.

Whereas the first teaser spot was kinda... off... the full trailer makes me totally excited in this movie adaptation of the classic survival-horror game series from Konami. In a contrast to the Biohazard/Resident Evil games which basically puts players in the shoes of trained combat professionals on missions, Silent Hill throws in hapless souls out of their daily humdrum lives into a horrifying mystery quest. The frights are more visceral, more twisted and less monster than they are nightmares grabbed from the darkness inside the human mind. At stake are their very souls, and the souls of their loved ones, typically lost and missing in the all-consuming fog.
The new trailer has it all... the innocent victims at the start, the inevitable accident that traps them into the realm of shadows that is Silent Hill. There's the protagonist- a young mother (Radha Mitchell) seeking her missing child (Jodelle Ferland). There's Cybil, the hot lady cop straight from the first game (Laurie Holden), a with-like woman named Dahlia (Deborah Kerr Unger) foretelling doom, and a worried father (Sean Bean, hopefully as a real hero this time) trying his utmost to actually get IN Silent Hill to find his wife and child. Apparently the town's being consumed by something terribly evil, and people are actually being forced to hole up and run from its grasp or be utterly destroyed. The key to it all is the spectre of a young girl (yes, another evil young girl to inspire terror), with which the protagonist must somehow deal with if she is to save her child...

By the latter half of the trailer, the imagery turns to the familiar horrors of the game- ghastly apparitions, dark realms of shadow, rust and blood, bandaged walking and grasping abominations. And the sirens... those evil sirens are blaring by the end, and the familiarly creepy Silent Hill music is playing... They got it. They got it all.

The director of Silent Hill is Christophe Gans, who may not be a popular director but megged the very atmospheric Brotherhood of the Wolf, and that will surely aid in the creepy feel of SH. I can't wait to lose myself in this film. And it looks to work, thanks to the recent craze in creepy films. Silent Hill may just have what it takes to be the most successful and at least, faithful videogame to movie adaptation yet.

Silent Hill sweeps into theaters this April 2006.

To see the awesome trailer, click here.