Silent Hill

[Miss Muffet]

Based on the hugely successful video game of the same name, Silent Hill is a plodding ghost story set in parallel universes, in which the only think likely to go 'Boo!' is someone in the cinema, voicing their disapproval of director Christophe Gans's shambolic efforts. Visually, the film is quite impressive. Production designer Carol Spier creates a spooky ghost town, shrouded in mist, where ash falls continuously from the sky.

When the living Darkness descends, transforming everything it touches, computer special effects and Patrick Tatopoulos's creature designs bring to life monstrous denizens of the godforsaken realm. Isolated set pieces are polished like the heroine's encounter with a legion of hideously deformed killer nurses, or a close encounter with a sword-wielding killer known as Red Pyramid and his carnivorous cockroaches.

However bizarre the film may be, it is never truly unsettling or scary, constantly hampered by the illogical, fractured narrative.

When her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) almost dies during one of her sleepwalking episodes, mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) embarks on a secret journey, against the wishes of her husband Christopher (Sean Bean), to the long forgotten town of Silent Hill.

En route, mother and daughter unknowingly pass through a portal into a nightmarish fantasy realm, shortly before Rose crashes her car swerving to avoid a figure on the road. When she regains consciousness, Rose is distraught to find that Sharon has disappeared.

Running through the fog-laden landscape, Rose meets ballsy female cop Sybil (Laurie Holden) and a deranged mother called Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger), who claims to have lost her daughter too. Sirens sound and suddenly Silent Hill is plunged into blackness, from which hideous mutants emerge, intent on devouring Rose's soul.

Caught between the worlds of light and dark, Rose races around this otherworldly place, desperately searching for her daughter so they can both return to the land of the living.

Stumbling and wheezing to a whimper over two hours, Silent Hill is far too long and could do with being disemboweled, losing at least 30 minutes. However, the film is already horribly disjointed; judicious pruning might render it completely incomprehensible. Screenwriter Roger Avary's decision to clutter the final ten minutes with great swathes of flashbacks is another fatal error.

Mitchell's performance is restricted to shouting Sharon's name in dark corridors and twisting her face into a howl of parental anguish. Supporting performances, like Holden's peroxide blonde cop and Alice Krige's demented high priestess of a witch-obsessed cult teeter on the precipices of laughably camp.

During the final showdown, when the Gates To Hell open and spew forth demonic tentacles of razor-sharp barbed wire, Rose cradles Sharon in her arms and whispers: 'Shut your eyes baby - it's all just a bad dream!' We get the distinct impression the character is talking to everyone in the cinema.