Silent Hill 2

The first film wasn’t exactly brilliant, but this one has been even more cruelly panned. Which is fair – this version had its moments, but its main flaw was that it was very, very boring. It dragged and dragged, and when it finally got interesting, it got disappointing.

The way the Silent Hill worlds work means just about anything can happen. Any monstrosity can appear and creep after you. You can find the world shifting to something truly horrific. The first film had some pretty harrowing scenes, like the one in the bathroom, but this one unfortunately gets past the silly jump-scare phase and straight into stupidity. Whose decision it was to make the first significant monster a dumb waxwork dummy-making spider thing that screamed at the screen in daft attempts to use 3D effects was sorely misled on what was going to be scary.

And the trouble is that there just aren’t enough monstrous creatures here. There’s the silly wobbly thing with no arms, that spider, the nurses – whose bit makes them look good but is very ill-conceived – the main baddie and Pyramid Head, who they really awkwardly try to make some kind of antihero. Bunnies with blood on their mouths aren’t terrifying. Silly heads under the grills of the floor aren’t terrifying. Nothing here is terrifying, though Malcolm McDowell gets close a couple of times before he’s turned into a daft monster whose mortal weakness is that someone can daintily remove a magic artefact from a gaping hole in his body. Eventually the main girl gets to the chamber where the final showdown will happen and various Game of Thrones actors are strewn around helplessly, and then basically it turns out that nothing mattered after Malcolm McDowell’s scene, because the same ending would have happened if the girl went there directly.

Short on scares, short on humanity and crucially short on any sort of action or tension that could have kept things interesting, this was a definite dud.