I was excited this past weekend to go see this movie on opening night, the sequel to the first “Silent Hill.” Strangely, only about a dozen other people showed up that night to see a horror flick on Halloween weekend. My unmet expectations continued as the movie began and gradually sloped down the scale of mediocrity, but with a few surprises along the way.
As most of my fellow horror movie fanatics already know, sequels are usually never as amazing as their precursors (except our favorite recurring serial killer collections with Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers). “Revelation” is the perfect example of that. It has its moments, even though they’re mostly bad moments. In comparison to the first one, the graphics in this one look about the same, if not worse. Special effects artist Brendan Carmody seems to have gone downhill a bit from his work in the “Resident Evil” series. Some of the creatures look like the result of the extraterrestrial from “Alien” and a Venus fly trap somehow reproducing, but still pretty frightening.
Sharon, the little girl from the first “Silent Hill,” is now a teenager and living under the name Heather Mason. She and her father changed their names in order to protect themselves from the cult that kidnapped Heather/Sharon in the prequel. An alternate reality consistently emerges throughout the movie, an ominous world filled with darkness and my favorite “Silent Hill” character: Pyramid Head. I didn’t get to see as much of Pyramid Head in this film as I would have liked to, but he ends up playing a crucial role in helping Heather. After a lengthy journey of befriending one of the cult members and battling gruesome creatures from the dark dimension, she finally learns her true destiny with the cult. To keep some suspense, I don’t want to say what that destiny is. But I will say that the ending of this movie left the storyline wide open for another sequel to the “Silent Hill” saga. Hopefully the next one won’t be as mundane as this one.
