I’m totally paraphrasing, but the worried and protective dad played by Sean Bean (TV’s Game of Thrones) firmly and completely warns his teen daughter, Heather (Adelaide Clemens, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), “Do not to go to Silent Hill. Never, ever. No matter what occurs, no matter what happens. Dammit, girl, don’t go there. Got it? Don’t. And don’tcha even think it!”

So of course she goes there. I get it; otherwise, Silent Hill: Revelation would be a short. And maybe it should have been.

2006’s Silent Hill is one of the better big-screen adaptations of a video game, mostly because director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) bathed the creeps in ambience, and let mood do most of the legwork. In this belated sequel, writer/director Michael J. Bassett (Solomon Kane) tries to tell a story about the foggy, ash-snowing town’s inhabitants and their shadowy Order of Valtiel.

However, this is all convoluted to a point of making the audience not care. If it makes total sense to you, I suspect you’re a serious student of the games, in which case will you please put down the controller and take a shower? Your mother’s asked you three times already!

Clemens, a Michelle Williams doppelgänger, walks through the movie with her mouth agape in perpetual shock as she encounters the franchise’s various iconic creatures, which look like a mixture of Clive Barker’s Cenobites, recovering plastic-surgery patients and diagrams from your geometry textbook. Bassett introduces some new ones, ranging from a spider composed of mannequin parts to a tapioca-complected Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix trilogy) as the cult’s leader.

Neither Moss nor Clemens were in the first film. That was fronted by Radha Mitchell (The Crazies), who shows up just long enough for a cameo in a mirror. At least someone was wise enough to heed Bean’s advice. —Rod Lott

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A belated sequel to 1994’s hit Interview with the Vampire, the flop follow-up Queen of the Damned is, to me, the more enjoyable work, because it doesn’t try to be an important, arty film like Neil Jordan’s laborious adaptation. Recognizing the source novels of Anne Rice as purely B-level material — Jane Austen she ain’t — Queen sets out to be nothing more than a B movie.

Stuart Townsend (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen‘s Dorian Gray) takes over for Tom Cruise in the role of Lestat, the ancient vampire who has now become a rock star, singing terrible death-metal songs (penned by Jonathan Davis, the guy behind the terrible nu-metal band Korn). By informing his fans of his bloodsucking status, Lestat has raised the ire of the vampire nation, which seeks to silence him permanently. In making his evil music, he’s also raised the titular queen (R&B singer Aaliyah, who eerily perished in a plane crash before the film’s release) from the dead, and she wants to extinguish the human race.

Queen is more campy than anything, especially with the majority of vampire action given silly ghost-trail effects that cheapen the film. The direction by Michael Rymer (In Too Deep) is flashy and showy, befitting of the piffling material, which grows confusing as it heads toward Act 3. But with bloody bosoms and combustible corpses, who’s expecting Shakespeare?

The end seems to be a direct setup for another sequel, unlikely to surface given this chapter’s tepid reception. —Rod Lott

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