Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

Some horror movies want to scare you witless, but Silent Hill: Revelation 3D just wants to beat you senseless. An ugly, assaultive collection of jump-scares, the sequel picks up the convoluted story of Silent Hill, a ghost town that occasionally transforms into a rusty corrugated wasteland populated by fleshy grotesqueries straight out of Clive Barker’s dream journal. It feels like a Nine Inch Nails music video could break out at any moment.

The creepy girl from the first film is now a teenager (Adelaide Clemens), but she’s still pursued by forces of darkness too evil to make any sense. When her father (Sean Bean) is kidnapped, she must return to Silent Hill to rescue him and stop the mysterious Order of Valtiel by combining the two halves of the Seal of Metatron and wading through a whole lot of similarly meaningless mythology. As it stands, there?s plenty of exposition, but not much explanation. The dialogue is clunkier than Pyramid Head?s enormous polygonal noggin, and the frights don?t ever get more complex than the fake-out snake-in-a-peanut-canister variety. (In one scene, pop-tarts explode out of a toaster like a car backfiring.) Bean and Malcolm McDowell slum it enjoyably in their brief roles, although they spend most of their scenes in chains, which makes it seem as if they were forced into the movie against their will. Admittedly, there?s not much here that should have attracted them. This sequel is very grim pickings. D+