Silent Hill: Revelation - Blu-ray Review

'There's a focus on Kit Harington, here sporting a non-ironic bouffant Patrick Swayze would be ashamed of. If the plan was to bring his fanbase along for the ride then there's clearly been a mistake. Someone forgot to build the ride.'

The only possible excuse for a film as monumentally terrible as Silent Hill: Revelation is that somehow, in some bizarre twist, no-one involved with it has ever seen what a good movie looks like. The ineptitude level here is really that high.

That potential excuse is arrived at in a number of ways, not least the fact that, against all odds and despite being a videogame adaptation, Revelation actually had a half-solid base to build on. The original Silent Hill, whilst by no means a genre classic, is at least a pleasantly dirty grind, through a well-realised world of terrible deeds and horrible people. It has a bravely pessimistic ending, it's occasionally extremely atmospheric and it holds the dubious honour of potentially being the best videogame adaptation to date.

What a shame then that this sequel buggers the franchise beyond saving. Everything here is, at best, poor, at worst horribly, horribly misjudged. Witness the finale, which sees Sean Bean unceremoniously strapped to a terribly cheap statue, conceivably pilfered from the window of a local Poundstretcher. It's not just un-classy, it's really comically awful production design, paired with Carrie-Anne Moss' make-up, the film suddenly veering into Hellboy 2 territory, for no discernible reason.

The lack of presence by Moss, Radha Mitchell, Malcolm McDowell and Deborah Kara Unger, when at the project's announcement they seemed to be core components, hints at some level of script disruption or poor planning. Perhaps some of this was to benefit the Vincent character, played by new-found Game Of Thrones star, Kit Harington, here sporting a non-ironic bouffant Patrick Swayze would be ashamed of. If the plan was to bring his fanbase along for the ride then there's clearly been a mistake. Someone forgot to build the ride.

When the assembled core of 'names' do show up they appear to be travelling along some sort of comedy conveyor belt, obligated to speak lines so awful, Bruce Forsyth must have had something to do with their inception. 'Goodbye my love', whispers an awkward looking ghostly visage of Mitchell, early on. Gone so soon? Don't blame you. Sean Bean, unconvincing as anything but Yorkshire, sports the worst US accent in recent film memory.

In the lead, Adelaide Clemens (who recently had a part in The Great Gatsby and has a much better US accent) takes on the role occupied by Jodelle Ferland from the first film and the position of protagonist from Radha Mitchell in the same. In fairness, she would perhaps manage to achieve 'O.K.' if anything around her was even slightly better, but in a 2012 Horror film that seriously includes the line, 'never build on an Indian burial ground', there's just no hope.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.