'Silent Hill' is creepy but pointless

The film is based on a video-game series.
By CHRIS VOGNAR
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
"Silent Hill" is the latest horror movie to use occult mumbo jumbo as an avenue to gory terror. Too long by about a half hour, very much in love with its own excessive style, it still manages to be kind of creepy, at least when it stops taking its metaphysics too seriously.
What you have here is your basic ghost town/witch hunting/lost child/mine fire story, layered with fog and glaring, bleached-out light and populated by slimy, shimmying creatures and a trail of grotesquely crucified corpses. Silent Hill is where Rose (Radha Mitchell) has the misfortune of losing her young daughter, who has been crying out the town's name during her frenzied sleepwalking episodes.
Wondering what the heck a silent hill is, Rose does the modern thing. She Googles the name, gets directions, puts the kid in her Jeep and drives on over, much to the objection of her hubby (Sean Bean, playing the definition of an unnecessary character).
No narrative
You could say that "Silent Hill" has trouble with narrative logic, but this would imply that it has a narrative. A good chunk of the film is taken up by Rose wandering around the mostly deserted town and stumbling into a dark school, a dark hotel and, climactically, a dark church, where nasty doings are going down.
Accompanied by an ominous industrial soundtrack and a tough-but-cute motorcycle cop (Laurie Holden), Rose is a determined mother who keeps running into swarms of giant, computer-generated cockroach-like critters and a hulking figure with a large pyramid-shaped blade for a head. She doesn't know what's going on, and neither will you. After a while, you might not care.
At its best, "Silent Hill" conjures a Bosch-like world of surreal, apocalyptic nightmares that's at least fun to look at. The movie is based on a horror video-game series, which is probably plotted with more skill than the big-screen adaptation.
Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.