Video Game Movie Week: Silent Hill

Welcome back you console paddle nerdlings for Day 2 of Video Game Movie Week and yeah this film was a bit out there from 2006 and I simply avoided it due to the love of the game.    Yes our next film adapts itself from a rather disturbingly brilliant horror game franchise where strange happenings occur, life and death can be one and the same and vengeance is swift and merciless. For what appears to be deserted is actually damned and ruined to the end of days.  No I am not talking about Villisca Iowa.  This is Silent Hill.

Stripper-grams are so detailed anymore.

Rose: What do you want?
Dark Alessa: All we ask for is spoiler.
Rose: Satisfaction?
Dark Alessa: Revenge.







With their child Sharon (Jodelle Ferland of Kingdom Hospital, Stargate SG-1, BloodRayne: Deliverance, Stargate: Atlantis and The Cabin in the Woods) sleepwalking and attempting to hurl herself over cliffs and to the jagged rocks below. Her mother Rose (Radha Mitchell of Neighbours, High Art, Pitch Black, Cowboys and Angels,  Dead Heat, Phone Booth and Man on Fire) narrowly catching her before her child plummeted to the depths keeps muttering Silent Hill over and over in her unconscious state.    She decides against her husband's wishes she will take young Sharon to this Silent Hill town in order to purge or improve the child's mind.  Yeah and later you can let her juggle throwing knives that are acid edged.   Her husband Christopher (Sean Bean of Patriot Games, GoldenEye, Airborne, Ronin, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Troy and Game of Thrones) frantically calling and attempt to locate them both violates the sacred couples computer rules...  as she left it on power save and all the information of this Silent Hill in West Virginia is at his fingertips and he immediately lets out a breath and we cut to the open road.

The darker side of the Land of Oz.

Filling up for gas Rose notices the pleasant collection of colored pencil works his daughter has done and what she has been drawing on the road is full of pain,  twisted people and some guy with a pyramid for a head.  Sharon doesn't remember doing that at all in the car ride. Kooky?  Well yes it is but one would think to see about a child psychologist rather than an abandoned ghost town filled with more than a few freak accidents and fires but hey I am not a parent.  With the typical Camp Blood routine Rose is getting the feeling that the town might be a bit odd there.

Having an accidental car crash due to a run-in with a police cyclist Cybil (Laurie Holden of TekWar: TekLab, The Magnificent Seven, The X-Files, Fantastic Four and The Walking Dead) the two get jumped by some strange humanoid creature as Cybil arrests Rose and Cybil ventilates the creature.  The town seems to be covered in soot and ash as if after a fire, Cybil and Rose try to find any other residents or help to find Sharon and get out of town.

A few comments to make at this time.  Writer Roger Avary (True Romance, Killing Zoe, Pulp Fiction, RPM, The Rules of Attraction and Beowulf) adapted the overall theme of the game rather than just lift the storyline from the 1999 original video game by reading about a real-life town in Pennsylvania being completely deserted due to a mine fire burning the mines directly under the town for 40 years and that was the basis of his Silent Hill.

Director Christopher Gans (Silver Slime, Necronomicon: Book of Dead, Crying Freeman, Brotherhood of the Wolf and Beauty and the Beast) spent fiver years trying to obtain the rights to make the film.  He even cut a short film on his own money and overlayed it with music from the games.   Dance choreographer and actor Roberto Campanella (Year of the Lion, From Time to Time, Shadow Pleasures, Roxana, Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D), the dark nurses and roaming undead are all dancers needed to be able to be flexible enough for the erratic movements of the creatures.  Aside from "Ring of Fire" coined by Johnny Cash every piece of music is directly from the game series.   With a bit of reverse videography the creepy motions of the Dark Nurses was just the actors walking backwards.  

There are little hints and homage to the film as you could see the director really wanted to do this movie.  An extreme close-up on metal pipes as that was the first weapon you get in the game, Rose finding Alessa scribbling insanely on a desk the cult symbol from the games is on the wall behind her, Sharon's pictures a left as a clue of what direction she went and my personal favorite, the theme song from Silent Hill 3 is played on the car radio exactly as it did in a cut-scene for Silent Hill 3
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Okay game boys and girls, the bottom line is while this is not a shot for shot replication of the original point and click, puzzle solving, first person shooter horror game, be grateful.  Think how rushed that whole game felt like and imagine trying to put that on the big screen without people just laughing at it or being so bizarre it is on the video nasty list.  With expansive crane shots, hand held work, tight zooms and a pretty damn fine editor this film was creepy, gory and a terrifying ride.

This county is hell on the jaywalkers!

Western Week: Django

Howdy all!  Welcome back for Day 2 of Western Week and boy you know how I seem predicated to the more obscure movies.  Well an Italian director fella by the name of Sergio Corbucci (Castle of Blood, Navajo Joe, The Great Silence and Companeros) puts us in a wonder with this film with a gunslinger caught in the eye of the storm.  So mosey on out in the street, clear the women and children and get ready to slap leather.  This is Django.

Eastwood? bah this is Django baybee.

Yella belled spoiler!  Draw!

Our opening scene of this Spaghetti Western;  we see a lone man with tattered union blues walking through the desert with a saddle strapped to his back and dragging…a coffin behind him?  That’s right folks; he has a pine box behind him as he moves through the scene.  Django (Franco Nero of  The War of the Planets, Force 10 from Navarone, Goodbye Texas, Camelot, Mafia, Die Hard 2, Django Unchained) comes over a hill to see a woman lashed to a few poles and then whipped by this filth and mud ridden Mexican bandits.  Next thing you know they are all blown away by five men each wearing red scarves, Django is just about to move on when he sees the woman’s saviors are playing to host a barbeque in the lady’s honor…as she will be the charcoal.  What the hell??  Oh these good ole boys aren’t so good after all. 

Maybelline: for all your saloon girl needs.

After a rather brief chat with these fine southern gentlemen, Django drops all five of them.  Top that Eastwood!  Oh I said it.   The lady in question, Maria (Loredana Nusciak of Gladiators 7, Seven from Thebes, 10,000 Dollars for a Massacre, God Will Forgive My Pistol and Now Way Out) who has been spun from Banditos to KKK to a Yankee of all things reluctantly trusts in Django and follows him to town with a great exterior shot via dolly track we see the town is not looking so good.  One would dare say it has been pillaged and plundered me mateys!!  Arrrgghh!!!   Um yeah, sorry about that.  I was watching Pirates the other day.  

Okay where were we?   Ah yes the town holds an acrid scent and blackened buildings with no signs of life to be found. If this was a one horse town, well brother he skedaddled on out.  The saloon is about all that is standing I am thinking, “Wow, not the second place after the bank was hit?”    As Django and Maria take up residence at the saloon/ motel the owner and the saloon girls call this town neutral territory between the Mexican rebels and the remaining Confederates under the command of one Major Jackson leading his boys in the timed honored tradition of the KKK as they feud over one another they can always take shelter from the chaos here at a pretty penny.  

All the comforts of home during a bloody siege so what could anyone ask for.    The Mexicans are simply trying to rebuild after the Civil War but the South isn’t taking kind to it and both sides are composed of some of the more disturbing desperadoes putting our Yankee protagonist right smack in the middle of it all.  What can one man possibly hope to accomplish against two forces of so many driven men?  What indeed.   At 91 minutes a lot unfolds for the viewing pleasure.  Alas lady readers there are the slapping around of women, the thuggish mentality of man and in general the saloon owner is a spineless coward that will not lift a finger against so many men.  Just felt you deserved the heads up.

Have Coffin, Will Travel.

Yes I am going to give a few technical tidbits about the film now.  B.R.C. Produzione S.r.l. is a rival of Dino de Laurentiis Productions nabbed the rights first.  Sorry Dino.  The film stock is 35mm but shot via Eastman spherical lens scope giving the view less wide but almost as encompassing as Panavision with its anamorphic lens.  The difference is the foreground is better defined than anamorphic.  Personally if I were shooting a film I would love a nice hybrid of both.    My copy sadly was English dubbed and had a limited number of voice actors but telle est la vie…  Luis Bacalov (Composer of A Bullet for the General, We Still Kill the Old Way, Halleuja for Django, The Protagonists, and Assassination Tango) and countless of his pieces lifted from Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Django Unchained including the English translated opening song.   Sheesh Tarantino swipes much?     Seriously though, I want to download this soundtrack to my cell just to play as I enter a room, convenience store or restaurant because it is catchy to many levels.   This is no Fistful of Dollars but honestly I am rather glad it is not.  It is separate and on its own.  Not unlike our hero or should I say anti-hero? For you fast draw nuts, you will completely dig this flick for the awesome that is Django. 

Western Week

Hello all.  This week I thought we would do something different.  I have explored Drama, Science Fiction and Horror films galore and have not explored the realm of Westerns outside of my own entertainment.  So this week we will burrow through various works of the wild west.  I hope you enjoy!

You lookin' at me, boy?