Reviewed Here! Ben Wheatley's Horror-Comedy "Sightseers" + The Attempt at a Sequel to "Silent Hill"

[philosoraptor42]

Sightseers (2012)
My main focus when deciding whether to watch a movie or not is the director. Here the director is Ben Wheatley. Before this the only thing I'd seen from Wheatley was "Kill List" a movie that had a really interesting bizarre build-up leading to an utterly ridiculous conclusion. I was completely non-plussed by the ending which meant that I was pretty unimpressed by the movie as a whole, but I couldn't help but feel that Wheatley was capable of something better.

So then I hear that "Sightseers" is Wheatley's next movie and not only do I see it getting high praise, but also that it is a horror comedy. YAY! Before I had a chance to check it out, I heard that Wheatley had yet another movie with high praise called "A Field In England" which he made the news by releasing at the cinema, on DVD and -um what else is there "pay per view" or something?- all at once!



Anyway, the idea of Sightseers is that it is about a fairly boring couple who have decided to go on a caravan trip. However, part way through the trip one of them begins killing anyone that upsets them. They feel like they are doing a public service really by removing obnoxious people from the area.

The problem with "Sightseers" is simple. It's not funny. There's dark stuff happening here and the characters are acted very well and things are certainly played on the quirky side, but I must say I didn't find myself laughing at anything here. I loved the performances and the actors Alice Lowe and Steve Oram are great, but in not really finding anything funny I was clearly missing out on the main point of the film.



I'm probably still going to see "A Field In England" eventually and at least that isn't trying to be funny, so maybe I'll love it. But I'm going to sceptical of anything from Wheatley in the future. He's had two strikes against him so far.

D-



Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

I wasn't a massive fan of the first Silent Hill movie, but I thought it had a lot of potential to be better. The whole "the darkness is coming" thing (which, I'll go into more detail on in a moment) was really impressive and Pyramid Head (who I'll also explain in more detail later) was a really iconic horror figure. However, the background mythology surrounding the child Alessa was not terribly well explained, with all the information suddenly coming out during an information dump at the end. The information dump comes just before the filmmakers ripped off a scene from "Witchfinder General". Basically I think the first half of the original "Silent Hill" was a great deal more inspiring than the second half.

The first footage I saw of "Silent Hill: Revelation" was a scene of a man tied to a table while blind monster nuses carrying knives stood motionless around him. They only move when they hear a noise. It was a wonderful idea and looked great and I thought this was a sign that this new sequel would be wonderfully creative. But watching the actual movie it turns out that sequences like this were actually few and far between.


As it turns out, we don't start in "Silent Hill" at all. In between the two movies, Radha Mitchell's character has managed to get their daughter Sharon out of the evil Silent Hill realm. She is now known as Hannah because they are keen to ensure that no one can ever connect her to the whole "Silent Hill" kerfuffle.

In fact, it seems that there are certain figures who want to get to go back to Silent Hill. They are desperate to get her back there. And this is where the movie makes a decision which I think is one improvement over the previous movie. It decides to start providing us with information early. It's a little rushed still, but both we and the characters are piecing things together and the central message seems to be that there's a cult in "Silent Hill" who want to perform some kind of Lovecraftian ritual. In fact, it seems that the creation of Alessa, Sharon/Heather's rage-filled alter-ego, was directly intended to thwart plans to use her to birth a demon/deity into the world.



So finally we have some explanation as to how the religious freaks were able to keep 'the darkness' out of the Church. They aren't just using the power of Jesus to keep it out, but rather they are an opposing cult merely making use of the Church.

Eventually Sharon/Heather goes back to Silent Hill but before that we have some time with her somehow experiencing "the darkness is coming" moments outside of Silent Hill. When I say "the darkness is coming" I'm talking about moments where the entire world around the characters starts altering itself into a darker version. In the orignal movie it looked like the paint being stripped off the walls and floating into the air. The world around them starts altering into a darker version of itself and then the monsters come out. But in this early part we keep seeing signs that the world is not right, but it isn't as impressive and even in Silent Hill itself the effect just isn't as good as it was before. I get the impression that they had less budget to work with here and its a real pity.

The best moment in the film is definitely (and I have a tough time working out how best to describe this) the mannequin spider. We see a woman lying down and watch her become turned into a mannequin. Then a spider that injects people with venom to make them change into mannequins comes along and takes her head. The creepiest thing of all is that the mannequins aren't dead. When the mannequin head becomes part of the spider it screams before it becomes subsumed into the spider. The spider is entirely made up of mannequin parts and switches over from one head to another. It's seriously twisted.



Unfortunately, as with all scenes like this, it's great while it lasts but they don't appear to have the budget to make it last long enough.

And the big exciting part of the whole film is clearly meant to be a fight between Pyramid Head and a demon towards the end. The camera keeps cutting away, the amount of time spent showing us the effects is limited, there's no decent chreography and the whole thing doesn't take long enough.

There were some really creative moments in this film, the plot was made a lot clearer than in the last movie and I felt like the central character was written as a proper person rather than someone wandering around and gasping. And so that was all good.

However, the effects work was not good enough to provide the vision the director wanted. And it's a real pity because I think if they'd had as big a budget as the previous movie I'd be praising this as a wonderfully enjoyable piece of silly fun at very least. What is more, the movie seems to be relying on spectacle all too much considering how badly realised the effects work ended up being. Now that's not to say the effects work people haven't done their jobs well. The effects are wonderful. But any visual effects scene stops short too quick.



We needed the mannequin spider to return. We needed the Pyramid Head fight to be clearly filmed and exciting. We needed any effects work to be something with weight, rather than just a showcase of one interesting effects idea after another. It felt like this movie was teasing a better one that they didn't have the budget to provide.

At one point we are introduced to an evil family, where the husband (played by Malcolm McDowell) is going mad in the Silent Hill mental hospital while the wife (played by Carrie Anne Moss) is the big bad of the film. The whole 'evil religion' trope is one that appeals to me a lot so I had plenty to get my teeth into here even if I didn't think the payoff was quite what I'd been promised.

Adelaide Clemens's Sharon/Heather is a blander central figure than Radha Mitchell's Rose was in the last movie. I don't think that's her acting ability. I think that's more likely to be the quality of the direction (and heck, maybe the effects scenes are disatisfying because of poor direction too), but I often feel like I'm more pulled in by what happens around her rather than getting to know her as a central character. Of course, you can have bland leads in horror movies sometimes without it mattering so much but, as I've said above, the stuff happening around her isn't entirely satisfying either.

I still think someone could come up with a really good "Silent Hill" movie some day, but sadly the trend is most likely to be that the next one will have had its budget slashed lower than ever. It's a real pity. This wasn't better than the last "Silent Hill", but I don't think it was worse either. I think they both have different strengths and weaknesses and if someone could take the best of both, we could get something really special.

C-