Silent Hill: Restless Dreams

Review by havok1977 — July 21, 2010 @ 3:56 pm

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

Review by Hrumpff — July 18, 2010 @ 7:26 pm

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

Review by DwightFry78 — July 14, 2010 @ 5:19 am

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

Review by akeserns — July 18, 2010 @ 7:18 pm

Awesome! Great fanedit!

Review by MonsterCow — July 17, 2010 @ 12:31 pm

Silent Hill: Restless Dreams An Aztek643 Fanedit Review

“This film contains scenes of explicit violence and gore that may be considered disturbing and cruel.”

With that as the introduction of the DVD, Aztek makes it clear quickly that he is a fan of the original games, and may be a subtle way of him letting you know that he is going to try his best to serve you a fanedit of Silent Hill that will be closer to the games. He succeeds, whether that opening was his intention or not.

The original Silent Hill movie was written by Roger Avery (Rules of Attraction) and directed by Christopher Gans (Brotherhood of The Wolf). While being lauded as possibly the best videogame adaptation to film yet, it missed quite a few marks with the core fans of Silent Hill. Being a huge Silent Hill fan myself, I left the movie when it opened feeling satisfied and cheated at the same time. While Avery did a good job adapting the theme of Silent Hill, his dialogue felt like leftovers from Pulp Fiction (which he helped to write) and his style of character development was kind of weak. Gans’ direction was fabulous, he did an excellent job of creating the feel of Silent Hill, but ultimately Gans was under the direction of a script that really wasn’t written for his style of directing.

What Aztek has done here is nothing short of amazing. The editor completely took out the entire subplot of the main character’s (Rose) husband (Chris) looking for her in the town. With this gone, the movie becomes SO much more coherent and fluid. It’s amazing how easy this was to follow (although I’m sure it wasn’t easy on Aztek). Without the confusion of Chris adding to the subtext, the story unfolded almost in real-time, allowing the viewer to follow the main plot without having to jump back and forth in between scenes. Very well done.

The movie starts with Rose waking from a car wreck to find her daughter, Sharon, missing. Moving on to the town to find her, we watch in black-and-white flashback form of why Rose brought her to Silent Hill in the first place. In the original, this was done linearly, and with much more unnecessary dialogue and painful-to-watch scenes. The new execution is brilliant. Not only is it shorter, but it also excises the bad acting that came with the original. The whole movie is littered with nice edits here and there. The fabulously ridiculous line “Fuck you, stupid cop” is gone, along with most of the original’s bad dialogue. My only gripe is the Johnny Cash song is still there. However, it’s very forgivable because as I understand it, audio editing is a bitch, and the scene that song is in is necessary to the continuance of events.

So, not only did Aztek provide us with a film that actually feels Silent Hill-y, he also took the time to give us TWO endings! Both of which are amazing, and far, far better than the concocted original. Since both endings differ from the original, I can’t tell you exactly what they are. One ending, called ‘The Blue Ending’, was a completely original idea from the mind of Aztek in which he constructed still frames from the movie and used seperate audio to assemble an ending that any film maker would enjoy and respect. The other ending, called “The Grey Ending”, is a superior edit to the original. Outstanding work.

So my final judgment? This version is the version I will go to when I want to watch this movie again. It’s that good. Gone is the incoherence that was Sean Bean’s character and that never-aged cop. Gone is the overly ridiculous dialogue that plagued the original. In is a refreshing and faster paced Silent Hill that will appeal to fans that wanted to like this movie but couldn’t. I want to personally thank Aztek for this edit, as the way this was done couldn’t have been easy. Thank you.