"No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition...."

OK, where'd that line come from??

Normally, I am a great fan of the horror genre. Nobody gets more out of a good horror movie than I. “Good,” however, is something of a subjective term when it comes to horror. I hate pure gore in a movie. That grosses me out. It's not scary; grossed-out and scared are two different visceral reactions altogether.

I had the misfortune to watch SILENT HILL earlier today. I left WAY less than impressed, to say the least.

SILENT HILL tells the story of a young mother who has adopted a child who sleepwalks, draws strange and disturbing pictures, and cries about a place called SILENT HILL in her dreams. Mom figures the only way to deal with this problem is to take her back to Silent Hill. Real smart, in my opinion. The place was obviously bad enough to cause all sorts of trauma to this girl. Mom does some research, and finds out the place is a big ghost town, rumored to be haunted, which is usually another helpful hint that maybe this might be a nice place to stay the heck away from.

These things would be good hints, for anyone with the brain of processed tuna. But Mom apparently doesn’t have that much mental acuity. She sure didn’t pack for a supernatural adventure. Mom sets off with not even a flashlight, much less good stuff like a handy-dandy Glock with about 50 extra rounds of ammunition, fire, high explosives, and the A-Team. Mom doesn’t even have a backpack with water, or anything else one might find handy in dealing with supernatural monsters. To top it off, everything she’s read indicates the town is full of poison fumes, and Mom doesn’t even back along a gas mask.

Mom, in short, is an idiot. She flees the cops for no apparent reason, then proceeds to get her daughter lost in the ghost town. Hilarity ensues.

One critical comment is that the script was horrible. Mom does some really stupid stuff, that just doesn’t make any sense. For another, the and major plot points are pretty awful. I’m smart enough to see what they were trying to do with the so-called twists, but I don’t think they were well-done at all in the script.

This was also poorly directed. There were very few parts in the movie that made you jump. It was a horror movie with no scares in it. I’ve griped before about the lack of suspense in horror movies. Hollywood goes for the gross-out, as opposed to actually scaring you any more. The exception would be M. Night Shmalyan, of course. That guy is in a class by himself, deserving a full post and dissertation some other time.

There was a small bit with a Sig-Sauer that was actually used correctly in the movie. That’s a small plus, I suppose.

For those of you who actually want to see the movie: read no further. I am about to attack a major plot point of the movie and ruin it for you. Ok, you were warned.

This movie attacks Christianity in a big way. It’s not even all that subtle of an attack. Here’s where I am pretty bothered. Basically, the evil that was inflicted on this town is the result of a fanatical Christian cult that seriously injured a young girl. Her pain was so great it attracted a demon, who enabled her to exact her revenge on the townspeople, who could avoid her wrath only by hiding in a church. Mom actually allows herself to be possessed by the demon so it can exact its revenge. In other words, the DEMON IS THE GOOD GUY IN THIS MOVIE. Anybody else have a problem with that?

The so-called Christians in this movie perform human sacrifices, dress weird, and are the cause of all the problems this town has faced. They’re very cultishly portrayed. It appears to be that Hollywood has an image in their mind as to what a Christian is supposed to be like. Intolerant, bigoted, cruel, ignorant, practitioners of human sacrifice. I could go on. Personally, I haven’t performed a human sacrifice in church for YEARS.

Every negative thing one could say about Christianity got worked into this movie somehow. By far the most troubling portion of the movie was making the demon out to be the aggrieved party in this deal. The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing people that he doesn’t exist. The second one is convincing people that he’s not the bad guy in the whole deal. Whoever wrote this movie sure seems convinced of that.

I’m not going to rant and rave, or tell you not to see this movie. I’m just not like that. I’m not going to preach to you, or try and convert you if you don’t happen to believe what I believe. Just understand this movie has a very negative portrayal of Christianity. Understand that if you feel this movie is on target in its portrayal of faith, I think you’ve been misled. Something probably convinced you that the whole Christ thing is a crock. You either went to a bad church, you got really burned by a professed “Christian” and your stomach turned at the hypocrisy of it all, somebody tried to force-feed you some weird, un-truthful stuff, or something along those lines. If you feel that way about a church that you went to, you have good reasons for feeling negative about it. Trust those feelings, because that’s not what it’s all supposed to be about.

Hollywood is the bastion of the Left. The Left can’t pass themselves off as people of faith, because Christian faith is the antithesis of everything they believe in. So they try and convince those who might be on the fence that Christianity is intolerant, stupid, and dangerous. They do this through movies that portray religion in as poor a light as possible. This is just another example of it. So anyway, I’m not going to tell you to boycott the movie or anything. I’m simply observing and commenting on a few things, here. Christians may have messed up the whole religion thing quite nicely, but the devil is STILL the bad guy in the whole grand scheme of things.