Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

By Damien Wilkens
18 June 2014 — At this point, being a Silent Hill fan is kinda like being the fan of a once-great sports team that's been in a slump for years. You try to remember the glory days, all the while holding out hope that a few lineup changes and executive shakeups can somehow salvage things, restoring them to the way they once were. I use that analogy fully acknowledging the fact that my sports knowledge doesn't extend far beyond playing NBA Jam and knowing what it feels like to be hit in the knee with a baseball.

Point being, you will not find a bigger fan of the first four Silent Hill games than this guy. I've memorized lines of dialog that I've often considered tattooing into my skin. I get the obscure references hidden in posters and street names. I know where to find all of the health drinks and ammo. You need some bullets? I know a guy. (Me, by the way. The guy is me.)

All of that said, Silent Hill has sucked for literally a decade, mostly due to rampant sequelization, a complete lack of focus, and no understanding as to what the series is all about. Silent Hill isn't about nurses and Pyramid Head, or tortured souls wandering into the town to face their demons (Silent Hill 2 was a departure that worked once and has been copied ever since). What Silent Hill is really about is a cult, a spiritual energy, and a very special little girl.

I know I'm here to review a movie — and don't worry your little booties, it will be reviewed — but since I'm covering a sequel to an adaptation of a video game, some background is needed. First, here is the story of Silent Hill, the first video game. Spoilers for a 15-year-old game, obviously.

Silent Hill is a tourist town in Maine, home to a demonic cult known as The Order which indoctrinates members into their ranks with a drug known as White Claudia. The goal of The Order is to birth their God into the physical world, and, with it, bring Paradise (or Hell, as it's more commonly known). Dahlia, a high-ranking member of the cult, has a psychic daughter named Alessa, whom she impregnates with the seed of said God in a ritual that didn't go so well. A boiler explosion set the building on fire, burning Alessa to a crisp. She is kept alive only through the magics of the cult, which hope to sustain her until the unholy birth. The birth can't happen, however, because Alessa split her soul during the ritual.

Harry Mason and his wife find the other half of the soul in the form of a baby, naming it Cheryl. Seven years later, the cult beckon Cheryl (and by proxy Harry) back to the town, hoping to reunite her with Alessa. When the two halves reunite, Alessa tries to spread a protective seal (the Seal of Metatron) throughout the town to counteract the birth. The problem is, this spreads her nightmares, which manifest into monsters reflective of her memories.

This is where the game starts. Harry goes into town, loses his daughter, gets caught up in a lot of crazy cult business, gets manipulated by Dahlia, reality warps around him, and then he fights the cult's God with a rifle — because video games. In the end, the God is destroyed and Alessa gives Harry a new baby born from what's left of her soul as she finally dies.

Got all of that? Now here's the story of Silent Hill, the first movie.

Rose Da Silva drives to Silent Hill, West Virginia due to the screaming nightmares her daughter Sharon keeps having. Things are somewhat similar to the game from that point, with some odd modifications. The cult is never named, changed to a sect of extremist Christianity. Alessa was burned not at an impregnation ritual, but because she was born out of wedlock. Dahlia is replaced with a character named Christabella, though Dahlia herself is actually in the movie too, just as a good guy. Yeah, it's weird. The soul split is roughly the same, the Seal of Metatron is never mentioned, and the nightmare is simply due to Alessa making a deal with a demon in her hospital bed. Rose, as the Harry stand-in, saves the day by helping Alessa get her revenge, and they kill the cult with a lot of magical barbed wire. Alessa and Sharon then merge back together, and the movie ends on a cliffhanger. Christopher, the husband, fails in his search for his wife and daughter, and it's revealed they are both trapped in some alternate dimension of Silent Hill.

I know that all sounds horrible, but I loved it at the time. It holds up terribly, but one can still make a case for it being one of the best video game movie adaptations, for what it's worth.

The reason I went through all of this exposition is because Silent Hill: Revelation 3D has a very confusing goal, as it attempts to adapt the story of Silent Hill 3 (the direct sequel to the first game) and be a sequel to the first movie.

Does it work as an adaptation of Silent Hill 3? No.

Does it work as a sequel to the 2006 movie? No.

Does it work as a movie on its own, without any knowledge of the games? No, and you'll only be more confused.

SHR3D — which looks like something a skateboarder just learning how to text would write — starts by introducing us to Heather Mason, our protagonist (?) for this film. She is played by Adelaide Clemens, who at the time of filming was certainly young enough to play the 17-year-old character from Silent Hill 3. Though the question of whether she was talented enough is another matter altogether. She has three emotions throughout: confused, confused with a tinge of stage fright, and confused whilst trying to remember what she forgot to put on the grocery list.

The movie immediately reveals to us that Heather is actually Sharon, and her father, Harry Mason, is actually Christopher. Both are on the run from the cult and have had to keep changing names as part of their cover. No doubt, you're already wondering how the hell Sharon got out of Silent Hillgatory but Rose didn't. This is told to us via a conversation Christopharry has with a mirror. Rose explains to him through the mirror that she found half of a seal that would allow one of them to pass through to the real world, and that "they" were looking for her. Sharon is then delivered to him, minus all memories of her mother or anything that happened in the first movie — an ailment that also appears to have inflicted the writers.

In the first movie, Christopher didn't actually interact with anything from Alessa's dimension. He never saw the monsters, the cult, anything; he was in the real world. So how could he so easily process this information? Who are "they" of which he speaks? Where were Rose and Sharon? Why did they need a seal to get through? What is the seal? How did Rose know how to use the seal? How can she communicate via a mirror, and why only that one time?

The seal, as you can probably guess, is the Seal of Metatron, and is, in the case of this movie, an actual piece of metal McGuffin that changes function frequently and for undefined reasons.

"They" would be The Order of Vailtel, the now-named cult from the first movie that has recovered rather well from having every single one of their members ripped to shr3ds by barbed wire. They also have a completely different set of beliefs and background, as the cult from the first movie didn't even know there was an outside world. Now they not only know of it, but are actively hunting Heather in it.

"Well, maybe it's a different cult" is the natural response, but that explanation is somehow even dumber than there being just one where all of its members were resurrected with long-term memory loss. Are we to honestly believe that there were two competing cults hanging out in a ghost town looking to stop the same demonic girl? It's a cult, not a lemonade stand. None of that matters anyway, since the leader of The Order, Claudia, acknowledges Christabella from the first movie as her sister, and their actions towards Alessa as being the same — albeit with different motivations. We'll get to that.

The primary reason they're on the run is because Harry (for the sake of confusion, that's his name now) straight up murdered a cult member that broke into their house several years ago. The interesting thing to note here is that it took a solid seven years after Sharon's return for the cult to actually show up and do anything. I guess they needed time to toss all of their members into the Lazarus Pit to get them back.

While the movie is trying to explain all of this, Heather is having Movie Nightmares™ that feature Pyramid Head in an amusement park, a monster killing her father, and a gothed-out Alessa telling her not to go back to Silent Hill. That last part seems like a real waste of effort, seeing as she has no memory of Silent Hill, and thus no reason to ever go. Regardless, Harry constantly finds Heather writing the name of the town on pieces of paper in her sleep, and decides to keep them all in a folder for some reason that's never really explained.

Something else that's never explained: Heather is in high school. Ignoring the absolutely cringe-worthy name for the school (All Hallows High, might as well name it Horror Movie High at that point), it begs to reason why Harry would ever let his daughter out of his sight long enough to go to school, let alone the effort it would require to constantly fabricate documents to cover all of the moves and name changes over the years. One could argue the need for Heather to have a social life, but one of the very first school scenes features her speech to the class in which she tells them all to not even bother getting to know her, since she'll be gone in a month or two anyway. She requests they all just forget about her, which begs the question as to why she would then stand up and deliver said speech, insuring that no one would forget about the aggressively anti-social girl with the penchant for monologue.

It's around this point we're introduced to Douglas Cartland, a private investigator who's been hired by the cult to find Heather. In true subtle PI fashion, he walks up to her at a bus stop and asks her name. It's worth noting that Douglas is supposed to be a man in his 50s, hanging out at the bus stop, asking the young girl what her name is. The only way he could be more of a creeper is if he were naked under a trench coat whilst delivering his lines. Heather goes with the "confused with stage fright" reaction and understandably runs off.

How did the cult, trapped in the dimension of the crazy-fog-town, hire a PI? It's revealed later in the movie that cult members can carve seals into their skin to pass into the real world, which explains the guy Harry killed perhaps, but still doesn't explain how they have money, or how Douglas is supposed to contact them once he found her. It also forces one to wonder why Rose didn't just get to cutting on a forearm so she could reunite with her family.

A word on the seals, if I may.

The seal that The Order carves to pass through? It's not the Seal of Metatron. It's the Halo of the Sun, a completely different symbol that literally just serves as a mark of the cult. For some reason, the movie uses them interchangeably in spite of their only similarity being the use of a big circle.

Also, in the games there's a very important detail to note regarding the Seal of Metatron: it doesn't actually do anything. It's a red herring; it doesn't work. Alessa spreads it throughout the town, and the God is born anyway to boss-fight Harry. Even in Silent Hill 3, when the Seal is used on the main villain, she laughs it off as the useless trinket that it is. Keep that in mind as I continue to detail the events of the movie.

Soon after Heather's big speech, we meet Vincent Cooper, another new student that just happened to start on the exact same day and has all of the same classes as Heather. The movie takes way too long before telling you what you've already guessed: he's a member of the cult sent out via magic-carving to befriend Heather and bring her back to Silent Hill.

So the cult knew where Heather was, and enrolled Vincent in this school, all before Douglas, you know, the guy they hired to find her, could even confirm her identity, which would then make a sane person ask why they would need Douglas in the first place, but a sane person would have already shut the movie off at this point.

Heather calls her father to let him know about the creepy old guy and they agree to meet at the mall. Harry is then immediately kidnapped by the cult — because of course he is — giving Douglas plenty of time to find and corner Heather in a basement to give her a bunch of information that he has no way of possibly knowing. He implies that she's not Sharon Da Silva, like she believes she is, which would imply that he knows she merged with Alessa, which is something only the people that watched the first movie (but none of the characters in said movie) would know. He then reveals that Harry's story about her mother dying in a car crash was made up, which is only a story that Harry and Heather would know about. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that Douglas is some sort of meta-aware traveler of the multiverse that quite literally ended up in a universe where he was able to watch the first Silent Hill movie on DVD, as well as the first few minutes of this movie (which he's in) before any of the scenes that required him.

The grand irony here is that the movie didn't require him at all. He shows up to creep, yell at Heather, and then get killed by the monster from her dream — a Cenobite rip-off with bladed hands. When Heather runs out of the building, the police escort her away from the scene, but then immediately wheel out Douglas' corpse, reach into his wallet, and pull out a picture of Heather in which she's wearing the exact same clothes as the girl they just escorted away a second ago. Come to think of it, she had the exact same hairstyle and confused look on her face, too. Nah, it's probably just a coincidence.

Vincent, who just so happened to also be right there, offers to ride the bus with her to make sure she gets home safe, I guess. What follows is a conversation about dreams and reality and a bunch of other stuff I'm not recapping. This all leads to Heather getting home to find her father gone, along with a message telling her to go to Silent Hill. She and Vincent find Harry's secret box full of expositiony goodness, which contains the Seal, all of Heather's drawings, books of research, a gun, and a letter. Vincent, when looking at the collection of drawings, straight up asks Heather if she drew them, which she then confirms.

So she remembers sleep-drawing messages about Silent Hill, but doesn't actually remember anything about Silent Hill? Then why would Harry collect and hide them from her? She also appears to know where he was hiding them, but never bothered to look in the box before now?

As soon as our characters grab literally every plot-important item they'll need, the police arrive at the house. After what was clearly a lengthy investigation, they've pegged Heather as the murder suspect. Somehow, off screen, the two make their escape via Harry's car as the cops kick the door down, guns drawn. They literally check one room in the house before assuming she's gone, and then look at the message on the wall about Silent Hill. Do they follow the obvious clue and go after her to Silent Hill? Do they, perhaps, check upstairs to see if she's hiding in the house? Do they do anything after this scene? Nope. We never see the police again, and the whole murder subplot is dropped.

In the car on the way to Silent Hill, Heather reads the letter from her father telling her specifically not to go to Silent Hill. Harry somehow figured out who "they" are and that they need her, but doesn't actually know why they need her. She then looks through the books, which are full of drawings of monsters (that Harry had no way of ever seeing) and very specific information on The Order (a cult that no one outside of Silent Hill even knows exists). He also somehow knows that the cult needs someone to birth their god, but just a minute ago said he didn't know why they needed her. How did he get any of this information? Rose didn't tell him squat. She didn't even name the damn cult. Is all of this buried in a public library somewhere? In the movie universe, the town is not only abandoned (in the normal dimension) but everything that has ever happened there is actively being covered up by the select few that do know. It's not as if a mastery of the Dewey Decimal system is going to somehow undo that.

After this info dump of divine knowledge, Heather and Vincent stop at a motel. It's important to note that this motel is in Silent Hill, has power, and is somehow in business. It's here that Vincent does the big reveal, tells Heather that he's a child of The Order, and he was tasked with bringing her back to Silent Hill so she could reunite with Alessa, as it's the only way to stop her from torturing them and the town.

Wait, what?

Scroll up. Scroll back up to that part where I recapped the first movie. I swear I... yup, there it is.

"Rose, as the Harry stand-in, saves the day by helping Alessa get her revenge, and they kill the cult with a lot of magical barbed wire. Alessa and Sharon then merge back together, and the movie ends on a cliffhanger."

I don't even know where to begin here.

Up to this point, the movie was constantly teasing Heather with memories of Alessa's childhood, because, for all intents and purposes, she is Alessa. Now, the movie is deciding that she's actually not the merging of Sharon and Alessa, and that she is actually just Sharon, despite the fact that it completely contradicts the entire plot of the first movie, and, in this movie, Douglas flat out told her that she wasn't who she thought she was. Then who is she?

At the end of the first movie, Alessa's goal was achieved; she got her freedom, merged back into one person, and killed the entire cult. Now this movie is not only telling us that the cult still somehow exists, but Alessa is also still in Silent Hill, torturing people that she already killed in the quest for a revenge that she already got, and the cult is somehow planning to merge Alessa back with someone she already merged with so that they can somehow destroy her, despite clearly being completely unable to handle the kinds of shit an un-merged Alessa is throwing at them.

And I've gone cross-eyed.

The most tragic part of this is that literally one scene ago they point out the whole thing about birthing the demon god. If that had been their reasoning for needing Heather, not only would it make more sense, but it would actually be consistent with the plot of the game they're trying to adapt (Silent Hill 3) and it wouldn't completely shit on the movie that came before it.

It begs to reason why they kidnapped Harry instead of Heather, and Vincent explains that she needed to come to Silent Hill of her own free will. Then what was with the guy that Harry killed? How was he planning to convince her to come after killing her father? Was he going to offer her a timeshare there?

I could go on about how the hell Vincent learned to drive a car or got enrolled in school, but considering the fact that literally every scene in this movie brings with it a new plot hole, I'm just going to move on.

He tells Heather that her father is being kept in a sanctuary beneath the town, but she'll need the other half of the Seal from his grandfather because, look, she just does, okay!

You may be wondering why Vincent is telling her all of this, seeing as his entire upbringing has been as part of the cult, and the primary hobbies of the cult are as follows:

01. Fear Alessa.
02. Hate Alessa.
03. Burn things we don't like.

Well, it's because he sees the good in her, apparently, and because he's a romantic interest for Heather, in spite of the horrible implications of said romance. We'll get to that later.

Before they can go hunt down gramps, the other dimension of the town bleeds through and the blade-monster from earlier shows up, knocking Heather out. When she awakens, she's in the fog town, on the corner of Exposition Street and Contradiction Alley. Dahlia shows up to give us even more information about a version of the first movie that only exists in the minds of the writers.

She tells Heather that Alessa was burned by the cult because, due to her psychic powers, she was the only one that could birth the god. That's all nice and consistent with the first game, but that's not what happened in the movie. Alessa was burned in the first movie as an act of purification. She was a normal girl that only achieved any special abilities via the demon that visited her in the hospital. This movie is not only ignoring the reasoning for the ritual, but implies that Alessa is just this crazy evil spectre that's always had powers, and that there is no demon even though the existence of the demon is the only explanation for how the cult was able to hide in a church for the entire duration of that movie. Eliminating the demon from the story also adds a lot more questions about the soul-split, as well as the entire reason for Sharon to exist in the first place.

Dahlia, despite being Alessa's mother, also had no real way of knowing most of the information that she gives to Heather. I guess Douglas, Harry, and Dahlia all had a viewing party of the first movie, but were under the influence of a comically large dose of some narcotic that made them unable to recall any of it correctly.

Heather then asks Dahlia where her father is and demands she tell her what she knows. Vincent already told her the location of her father literally one scene ago, and Dahlia just spent the past five minutes telling her everything she knows, everything she had no way of knowing, and a bunch of things that no one would know because they never happened.

It's at this point that the movie takes a detour and briefly remembers it's supposed to contain horror. Heather heads into a building and encounters a mannequin-monster that looks like something rejected from Toy Story. She also runs into a random girl that explains her group of friends stumbled into the town before getting killed seconds later.

How do a group of teenagers accidentally go to an abandoned ghost town? How did they end up in the nightmare dimension? Why does the monster chase after Heather when Alessa is the one that controls them? Even if she isn't Alessa (she totally is), Sharon is at the very least part of Alessa, and, thus, should never be attacked by any of the monsters in the nightmare world.

We're already in a different scene before any more questions can spring up. Vincent is being chastised by his mother, Claudia, for succeeding in the exact task he was assigned. Actually, her issue appears to be with Vincent changing his mind about Heather and falling in love with her or something, so he's ordered to be sent to the asylum to cure his madness.

It's worth noting at this point that Claudia is played by Carrie-Anne Moss, the first of two Ben Kingsley Paychecks in this film. She's supposed to be Claudia Wolf, the pious and more-than-a-little tragic antagonist from Silent Hill 3. I could go into how they brutally butchered the character here, but they ruined Vincent many times more, considering his status in that game as an unnerving and smug manipulator. The only really important thing to note here is that Claudia looks like a cross between Casper the Friendly Ghost and Vigo the Carpathian.

Good thing both Vincent and his grandfather are at the asylum, because that's exactly where Heather ends up. She sort of just crawls out of a pipe and ends up there, causing one to wonder if she passed up a chance at the Minus World to get there.

It's inside that we get the second and even more depressing Ben Kingsley Paycheck of the film in the form of Malcolm fucking McDowell. He is Leonard Wolf, the blind former leader of the cult. Because this movie is literally just Heather looking confused whilst characters stand nearby and give her information, this is exactly what Leonard does.

So old Leo was the leader of the cult, presumably until Rose swiped the Seal of Metatron from him. How she did this, we don't know, but the even bigger question is why the hell Christabella was the leader in the first movie if her father was clearly around longer and possessed the Seal. Why didn't Christabella have the Seal?

He then tells Heather that it's a key that unlocks the "true nature of things." So it's not a key to get out of the Silent Hill dimension? It's not a mirror-communication device? It's not the thing that the cult needed to birth their god? Nope, shut up, it's a magic key that transforms things, which Leonard then demonstrates by shoving into his chest, because, you see, the other half of the Seal was inside of him.

What?

So did the cult not know the other half was inside him? Clearly, they had to know that there was another half to the thing. Seems like something Leonard would have brought up at some point. When he lost his position, why didn't they rip it out of him? Why doesn't his half seem to grant him any sort of power by itself?

Leonard turns into a monster and declares Heather is a demon. Instead of killing her (something he could easily do in this form), he starts carrying her somewhere, giving her the chance to simply reach into his torso and pull the completed Seal out of him. For some reason, this causes him to disintegrate instead of just turning him back into a normal dude in ripped clothes, Bruce Banner-style. Add melting dudes to one of the 47 different powers the Seal has because the script says so.

Suddenly, a bunch of asylum patients reach out of their rooms and attack Heather. Instead of using the gun she's had with her this entire time, or, you know, the magic circle with +7 melting damage that she just put back together, she just calls for help, prompting Pyramid Head to appear out of nowhere to chop people up.

Let's ignore the very specific function that Pyramid Head serves in the Silent Hill game series, and how the developers of recent games have bastardized him. Strictly talking about the movie canon, Pyramid Head was established in the first movie as a sort of barely controllable force that leaned towards helping Alessa. In this movie, PH is straight up Alessa's guardian. If you want to accept that change, fine, but the movie up to this point has wasted a lot of time telling you that Heather isn't Alessa, so why did he show up to help her, especially considering the movie has already shown that Alessa's monsters can and will attack her?

Heather runs off while Vincent is wheeled into a room by some cult members. Inside said room are a dozen nurses, which the two cult guys seem pretty nonplussed about considering they're stomping around and making noise in a room full of monsters that track via sound. As one would expect, they get torn up by the nurses. Did "curing" Vincent involve him just getting killed by the nurses? Clearly, they knew the room was full of them. Why did they even walk into the room? They could have just pushed the stretcher in and shut the door. I mean, they even had cattle prods, one would assume as preparation for the nurses that they knew would try to attack them in the room.

After what I've proclaimed as two of the dumbest characters in modern cinema get themselves killed, Heather reveals that she was somehow in the room and, instead of wheeling Vincent out of harm's way, decides this is the place to ask him where her dad is, which is the third time she has now asked a question that she's already been told the answer to. They then make as much noise as humanly possible unstrapping him from the gurney while yelling at each other to hurry as the nurses shuffle towards them.

Hey, doesn't Alessa control the nurses? Never mind. I don't care anymore. In spite of the fact that the main character in this movie is so incompetent that I wonder how she's able to dress herself without aneurysming from the confusion that would result, they escape.

Because everything in this movie is roughly a two-minute walk from everything else, Vincent and Heather end up in the amusement park from her dream. They immediately go into hiding from a group known as The Brethren, which are cult members that walk around in gas masks because they believe the air of the nightmare world will "corrupt" them, even though no one else, including the leader of the cult, bothers to do so. Even stranger is that later in the scene, when one of them does lose their mask, they are instantly killed. So do they just have a really shitty immune system in comparison to everyone else in the town?

Vincent offers a distraction to help Heather get away, leading to a very unfortunate kiss between the two.

Okay. Vincent is Claudia's son. Claudia has two sisters: Christabella and Dahlia. Who is Alessa? Dahlia's daughter. Who is Heather? Depending on what moment of what version of what movie you're watching, she is Alessa or part of Alessa.

They're cousins. The primary romantic interest of the main character is her own cousin.

Fuck this movie, by the way.

Heather runs to the nearby carousel and is very quickly surrounded by all of the Brethren. It just so happens that Alessa is also on the same carousel and lights them all on fire. This leads to Alessa then yelling at Heather, proclaiming that she should have stayed away, and that she was Alessa's chance at living a dream — even though she couldn't have really benefited in any way since the movie is trying to tell us they didn't merge. She could, you know, just help her find her dad and escape. Also, isn't she the one responsible for Heather's dreams? You know, the one's constantly talking about Silent Hill? Even so, Alessa is so angry about something that she threatens to destroy Heather, who rightly points out that they're the same person.

What results is easily the dumbest scene in a movie consisting of nothing but dumb scenes. This fucking scene is so bewildering that I'm over 5000 words into this goddamn review and I still doubt my ability to accurately express to you the sheer fuckery involved.

Alessa and Heather fight for control and try to absorb each other, which is exactly the one thing they should not be doing since that's what the cult wants them to do. Both of them know this, but engage in a thrilling battle anyway. How do they go about trying to wrest power from the other?

They hug. They hug each other really hard and make faces on a carousel surrounded by fire. Dramatic music plays.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not creative enough to make this shit up.

So, they merge and turn back into Heather, of all people. Somehow the least powerful half is the one that gets to retain her identity. Even worse, she just strolls into the cult's sanctuary, which is the one place Alessa can't go. You know, Alessa, the evil girl who is seriously for-real-now merged with Heather?

Now it's time to guess what Heather does immediately upon entering the place where her father and incestuous lover are being held:

01. Use the magic McGuffin to melt the face of Casper and every cult member in the joint.
02. Use the powers of the evil psychic girl that she just absorbed to melt said faces.
03. Approach Claudia with a confused look on her face and ask her what she wants with her.

Not only has Heather absorbed all of the memories of Alessa, but has literally done nothing but had the plot of the movie and motive of the villains explained to her in every single scene, but is somehow still acting ignorant to the fact that they wanted her to rejoin the Seal and merge with Alessa, the two things that she did with relative ease considering how goddamn incompetent this cult is.

Claudia, who somehow has magical powers of her own, brings Heather to her knees and asks for the Seal of Metatron. Knowing that its purpose (at least in this scene) is to reveal the true nature of things, Heather simply gives it to her, which causes her to transform into the blade-monster.

So Claudia was the monster the whole time? The same monster that appeared in Heather's dreams and in the outside world, two places that she would have no way of going to, especially considering she didn't have the Seal?

The monster tries to kill Heather, something she never attempted to do before and in direct conflict to what Claudia would want anyway. Pyramid Head once again shows up to save the day and they have a fight. It's at this moment that I want to reiterate that I consider the first four Silent Hill games some of the greatest psychological horror in all of fiction. This movie, which is based upon them, climaxes with hug-fighting and the most iconic antagonist from said series heroically battling a Cenobite. At this point, sure, whatever. Pyramid Head chops Claudia's head off and goes back to operating the amusement parks rides, I guess.

Heather frees Vincent and Harry, who are ready to leave, and celebrate the fact that it's all over. Except for all of the cult members they left alive. Halfway out of the town, Harry stops and decides he needs to look for Rose, telling Vincent, the cultist he just met minutes ago, to look after his daughter. He then takes the Seal and disappears into the other dimension, which shouldn't exist anymore because Alessa is gone. Even by the very twisted logic of this movie, the otherworld only existed because of her. Rose should be in the real world along with everyone else now. They can literally just yell "Marco" throughout the town to see if she answers "Polo!"

The only reason this scene transpires is to tease a sequel, which happens twice more before the credits roll and involves characters from the lesser games in the franchise. Vincent and Heather get picked up by Travis from Silent Hill: Origins and head somewhere to start a new life, with no money or anything. Also, one of them is a cult member that's never lived in the outside world, the other is wanted for murder, and they're cousins.

Really, none of them thought this through, which can be said for just about everything with this movie. I can live with the blatant sequel-teasing secure in the fact that they'll likely never make another Silent Hill movie. This thing bombed, and for good reason. I'm someone that spends more time than is healthy watching terrible movies, and this one still found a way to surprise me. Sure, the fact that I'm a die-hard Silent Hill fan can explain some of my fury, but the damn thing doesn't even make sense on its own, free of any ties to the previous film or the source material. It's a lazily thrown-together insult full of characters that don't even attempt to resemble their namesakes. This is what happens when you ask stupid people to retell a smart story.

My final word?

There are no words. Even if there were words, I wouldn't want to say them, because then I'd be forced to remember this movie and would forever associate those words, and perhaps the remainder of the language and all other languages, with the pain of enduring it. I would be forced to become mute, just on the off chance that it would spare me from ever having to experience this again.

Stop ruining Silent Hill. Konami is doing a good enough job of that on its own.

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