What the "Hill"?!

A quick note to horror film screenwriters: in a post-"The Osbournes" world, please refrain from naming the missing little girl in your script "Sharon". It tends to bring to mind Ozzy's uniquely incomprehensible warble when your protagonist is desperately running around screaming for her daughter. Not exactly the kind of feeling you want to evoke during a horror film like "Silent Hill", the latest, most ambitious and perhaps least comprehensible video game adaptation in recent memory.

Which brings me to a quick note to Hollywood: throwing a big budget at a video game adaptation don't make it good. Though the cinematography by Dan Laustsen and the production design by Carol Spier feel like something out of the Nine Inch Nails video library, "Silent Hill" is no better or worse than "Doom", "Resident Evil" or the rest of their ilk. At least those movies had the good sense to keep the reckless spending at bay.

One last quick note, this time to Moms: if your daughter sleepwalks and, worse yet, draws disturbing pictures while chanting "Silent Hill", don't feel compelled to run to MapQuest and take her on a road trip to that titular West Virginia town. If the stories of underground coalmine fires and witch burning don't keep you away, the incessant ash-rain should.

Not so for our heroine Rose, played by the lovely and resilient Radha Mitchell. Ignoring the pleas of her soon-to-be- estranged husband (Sean Bean, of all people), Rose sets off in her SUV pausing only for a moment to run afoul of a skintight leather clad motorcycle cop ("The X-Files'" Marita Covarrubias, Laurie Holden). Rose is knocked unconscious when she runs off the road, one dark and stormy night, and when she wakes up, daughter Sharon is gone. And so is any chance of making sense of the film.

What follows is Rose chasing a perpetually out of range little girl around corners, down staircases, and into all manner of peril that anyone who's ever seen a horror movie never would. Poor Ms. Mitchell, who's been effective in films like "Pitch Black" and "Melinda and Melinda" tries to hold the film together strictly on fiery maternal instinct, but the script gives her nothing to say other than "Sharon" and, worse, "it's okay, we're going to be okay". The latter is said startlingly often, and at times when they are clearly not going to be okay.

The screenplay is, amazingly, credited to Roger Avary, who's been attached to such dialogue-heavy films as "The Rules of Attraction", "True Romance" and "Reservoir Dogs". You'd think Mr. Avary would either (a) throw some interesting lines into the mouths of his characters; or (b) at least give the movie a satisfying narrative. Instead, Rose, conducting the most unstructured search I've ever seen, runs willy-nilly from one horrifically gory nightmare to another until finally uncovering an underwhelming plot that's part "The Omen", part "Salem's Lot" and part "Friday the 13th" (though I can't remember which part of that series).

It comes as no surprise that the film was directed by the French filmmaker Christophe Gans, whose similarly good-looking but disappointing "Brotherhood of the Wolf" was the highest grossing French film ever and was, like "Hill", also too long for its own good. I don't know Mr. Gans, but I can see he's a talented filmmaker with a gift for visual style. The only thing that helps me sleep at night is that I have to believe he wants to, one day, make a film that actually makes sense. If he doesn't, well, now that would be truly scary.