At Home with John and Debbie

We managed to fit in a lot of films this weekend: Silent Hill, Cry Wolf, Zombie Honeymoon

I enjoyed the Playstation game of Silent Hill, at least until I ran out of ammo and was unprepared to revert to an old save to work through a gruelling section conserving bullets. I enjoyed PS2 Silent Hill 2 — which Debbie watched me playing, from behind the sofa — until I found myself at a save point in a hospital, and the prospect of going through the next door filled me with so much dread that I moved on to a more cheerful game.

Yes, Silent Hill is that scary.

The recent film, Silent Hill, does well at recreating the haunting and unsettling atmosphere of the games. Visually, it works beautifully, and the slightly below par acting fits well with that surreal atmosphere (this happens a lot in David Lynch films. See also Pulse/Kairo, although I’m not certain of my ability to detect stilted acting in Japanese).

It’s astonishing then, that the script (by Pulp Fiction’s Roger Avery!) and the plot could let things down so badly that I came away thinking the film was absolute drivel. What a shame.

Cry Wolf is a teen slasher film of above average intelligence. When a local is found murdered, some precocious young “adults” in one of those fancy American boarding schools decide that it would be a jolly jape to fabricate rumours of a serial killer with a distinctive M.O. — to kill a local as a warning shot, then move on to the rich kids in the boarding school.

But their creation “The Wolf” begins to manifest himself. Was their invention so vivid as to come true?

The film portrays the way kids communicate today very well: text messages, emails and instant messaging all play an important part in the plot without feeling unrealistic or forced. The story rolls along nicely, the characters are engaging, and it’s good fun. However, it’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is.

Oh, and Jon Bon Jovi is in it…

Zombie Honeymoon is an odd one alright. Shaun Of The Dead was billed as a “Rom-Zom-Com”, but turned out to be mostly zombies and comedy, with romance taking a back seat. From the trailer, we expected another shot at Rom-Zom-Com: newlywed husband gets bitten by a zombie and suffers insatiable hunger for raw human flesh (Man-shushi, or “mushi”!), with hilarious results.

It turns out otherwise. This is not a romantic comedy with a zombie. It’s a romance with a zombie. Essentially it’s a study of a young love so strong that rapidly deteriorating zombie Danny resists the urge to feast on his wife (other folks aren’t so lucky) and she cleans up after him when there’s blood and half-chewed body all over the bathroom. Laughs are (I assume deliberately) few.

Of course there is gore, but it’s not an all-out grossness fiesta.

It’s very nicely done, and I liked it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 10:15 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.