Dir - Michael J. Bassett
Overall: WOOF
Ever wonder what Batman V Superman would be like if it was a horror movie? OK, well the Silent Hill: Revelation is not THAT terrible, but it is certainly ridiculous. British filmmaker Michael J. Bassett steps in for Christophe Gans who helmed the original, Bassett adapting the video game series strongest, Silent Hill 3 here. Well, "attempting"to adapt one could more fairly say. All the ingredients are visually here to satisfy the fan boy sure enough, but something else went horribly awry along the way. That is to say that this could have the worst script in the history of cinema. The plot points are nonsensical, the performances are stiff or campy, and as was the overwhelming issue with the first film, the dialog is consistently wretched. The fact that everything is played remarkably straight either makes the film that much more awful or that much more awful and hilarious. Basically what we have here is an unintentionally enjoyable dumpster fire of a horror movie. The kind MST3K would have a field day with. The results were enough to kill the franchise dead in its tracks and any potential promise to be had with the exceptionally atmospheric and creepy source material officially falls on deaf ears in such a botched cinematic form as this.
THE BAY
Environmental horror lends itself to the found footage sub-genre in lukewarm fashion with Barry Levinson's The Bay. This is Levinson's first horror film in his long career and thankfully it does not come off as a bandwagon jumper even if that is probably what it is. If we were talking about those trendy zombies, maybe this would seem a bit more pandering, but the story Levinson and screenwriter Michael Wallach have chosen to tell would have probably failed entirely if filmed conventionally. As a faux-documentary with "footage" pulled from various sources, (and of course scary music in tow), The Bay hits home a little bit better than say what an Outbreak remake would have for comparison. This is one of those horror movies where the premise is scary on its own yet the film itself is hardly terrifying. Levinson lays the Eco-preaching on fairly thick which might turn off some and once we know what is going on, it never gets either frightening or interesting. Instead, it rather plods along and the only take away is that viewers might second guess the next opportunity they have to eat any seafood.
Dir - Peter Strickland
Overall: WOOF
An experiment was made here by British filmmaker Peter Strickland to make rather a horror version of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and the results could not have failed more. No real point in comparing the two drastically different movies besides the fact that they both pose a film-itself-within-a-film, philosophical merging, but Berberian Sound Studio is an utter debacle. The concept of showing the behind the scenes of the sound design on a 1970s giallo film set in Italy is interesting. Keeping the images of said giallo 100% off screen and making the subject of it begin to morph into the real world is also interesting. Yet the bewilderment of its presentation is quite crippling. Both increasingly futile to follow, (which seemed premeditated), and hypnotically tedious, (which was probably only part-premeditated), it is a disaster stylistically. Every scene in the film grows progressively random and monotonous, to the point where you are very much dreading the next one. The end credits hit out of nowhere with no climax or resolution of any kind and sadly, this is not the kind of movie that such a ploy benefits from. It is a pity really that Strickland willingly walked a tightrope to make his mindfuck of a film work on a deliberate level, only to have him plummet miles down the void, falling completely off that very tightrope.
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