Silent Hill was an inventive and engaging horror videogame released by Konami for the Sony PlayStation in 1999. It was a commercial hit, and its success led to the production of an identically named 2006 feature film helmed by French director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf). The film did an outstanding job of replicating the game’s iconic visuals, but struggled to develop a sufficiently accomplished screenplay. It wound up suggesting a great movie rather than actually being one.

Despite the film earning a healthy profit, it took six years for a sequel to eventuate. By this point Gans was otherwise engaged on a prospective film adaptation of Konami’s Onimusha and writer Roger Avary was sidelined by a vehicular homicide case. Enter British director M.J. Bassett, whose previous films Deathwatch (2002) and Solomon Kane (2009) suggested an appropriately stylish and unsettling sequel.

In practice Silent Hill: Revelation is a colossal misfire. If anything, its screenplay – the core problem with the previous film – is a sloppier and more confusing affair. Picking up 12 years later, it sees Sharon da Silva (Adelaide Clemens) on the run with her father Christopher (Sean Bean) from a religious cult based in the town of Silent Hill. Original protagonist Rose (Radha Mitchell) is nowhere to be seen.

Once again, the film cannot be faulted over its casting. Joining returnees Bean and Deborah Kara Unger are Malcolm McDowell, Martin Donovan, Carrie Ann Moss, and Kit Harington – all of whom are capable of excellent performances. Sadly Bassett’s script and direction force them into histrionic bouts of excess, loudly shouting and mugging their way through the scenery. It is par for the course for McDowell, of course, who tends to moderate his work based on the quality of the script he is given. The quality of this script seems low enough that he engages in unbridled, eye-bulging insanity.

The film was produced with a 3D presentation in mind, which means that for anyone coming to the film more than a decade on there are a lot of incongruous computer-generated objects hurled at the viewer. It looks deeply tacky and unconvincing – as stereoscopic 3D almost always does – and does the film no favours. If Silent Hill was a mediocre script boosted by excellent design, then Revelation is an actively bad film made near-unwatchable by ugly visual effects.  It is not the sort of film that one simply dislikes: with films like these I find myself lying awake at night trying to work out what everyone involved was possibly thinking. In future, when people start complaining about the latest Hollywood genre film being ‘the worst film ever’, it is easy to point to Silent Hill: Revelation as something much, much worse.  If you are a horror film and you are not even remotely creepy, then you have essentially failed the most basic requirement for being one. One cannot even watch the film as some sort of ‘so bad it’s good’ farce, but its aggressive mediocrity stimulates boredom more than amusement.

A third Silent Hill film is purportedly due some time in 2025, this time with Gans back in the driver’s seat and with a narrative inspired by the second videogame. It gives me a little hope – with a better story than Gans’ last attempt, it could be quite something. Worst case scenario? It is almost impossible for it to be worse than Revelation.