The eponymous Silent Hill is a land of gray and black, a ghost town adrift in a haze of floating ash (from buried coal fires) that casts a dreamy gauze over the terrain: burnt-out buildings and empty streets. Except when night falls (which is early and often), the landscape is brightly lit, but the brightness is without color - a washed-out haze that suggests an alternate reality, an inescapable limbo where dark and terrible things lurk in shadows.

As a film, SILENT HILL works best in the early scenes that emphasize this ethereal but vaguely disturbing landscape. The production design - both interiors and exteriors, for both natural and artificial settings - is easily the highlight, a sort of big-screen journey into the Twilight Zone, enhanced by dreamy photography and some subtle CGI effects that make the whole thing seem seamlessly believable and yet somehow unreal.

The problem, unfortunately, is that once you have the setting, you need to have something happen in it. Plenty happens in SILENT HILL - so much so that the film runs an intolerable 2 hours and five minutes. The running time is rendered unforgivable by the fact that the scenario barely attempts to tie incidents together with any kind of story. Takings its cue from its videogame origins, the script simply sets up the situation and lets its lead character run through it, room by room, level by level, encountering new and different beasties at every turn. Some of them are frightening, even alarming, but the effect is a little bit like spending an evening in a strip club: after you've seen the first act, you might as well leave, because you're just going to see the same things over and over again.

The story, such as it is, goes like this: little adopted Sharon DaSilva (Jodelle Ferland) has sleepwalking episodes, in which she mentions Silent Hill. Her father Christopher (Sean Bean) wants her to stay on her meds, but mommy Rose (Radha Mitchell), lifting a page from the Tom Cruise School of Psychiatry, thinks the meds are part of the problem and decides the solution is to sneak away from her husband and take Sharon to Silent Hill. (Exactly why is not clear. Rose seems to think that a confrontation with the reality of Silent Hill will somehow jog Sharon's mental processes.)

While trying to evade a female motorcycle cop who wears high-gloss lipstick on duty and looks like the runner up in a Village People look-alike contest (not only has Christopher cancelled Rose's credit card; apparently he has reported the family vehicle stolen), Rose crashes and wakes up, sans her daughter. She spends most of the rest of the film wandering through buildings and basements, where she encounters enough monstrosities to fill a Grand Guignol-style vaudeville review. Meanwhile, her husband also searches through the environs of Silent Hill, even invisibly crossing paths with his wife at one point, confirming what we suspected all along: Rose is trapped in an alternate dimension version of the town - a nightmarish limbo-land where anything might happen. She finds a conveniently placed clue here or there and, with the leather-clad lady cop (Cybil Bennet), finally discovers a cult of religious worshippers who think they are keeping the devil at bay - but who are truly responsible for the existence of evil in town, which resulted from their persecution of an innocent girl whom they branded as witch. This girl, Alessa, looks like the exact twin of Sharon, but the reasons for this are too strained to bother explaining - it's clear the script feels the need to tie things together, even if the pieces fit awkwardly at best.

During the final half-hour, the script gets around to telling something like a story, revealing the origin of the horror in Silent Hill and offering Rose a way of trying to save her daughter. The battle lines are a bit muddled, with Rose aligning herself with the malignant Alessa and assisting her vengeance against the townsfolk. (Yes, Alessa has a legitimate grip against her victims, but can't the same be said of Freddy Kruger? I don't remember Nancy hooking up and joining forces with him.)

In any case, the brief boost generated by the plot revelations is squandered by the hackneyed witch-hunting scenes: as the local population - trapped in limbo but refusing to realize their situation, and acting under the self-righteous guidance of their leader (Alice Krige) - continually threaten to burn witches, you sense that director Chrisotphe Gans wants to evoke THE CRUCIBLE, but unwitting thoughts of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL come to mind in stead.

As if that were not bad enough, Gans lifts a visual gross-out gag from WITCHFINDER GENERAL (the condemned "witch" is tied atop a ladder and slowly lowered face first into the flames) and makes the mistake of "improving" the scene with computer-generated effects. What begins as a scary situation focusing on a helpless victim wrongfully condemned, turns into a simple special effects show: you no longer think, "Oh my god, that poor woman"; instead you say, "Oh cool - look at the effects!"

After that, the film erupts into a CARRIE-style revenge fantasy, which is actually one of the more effective sequences in the film. There is a nice all-hell-breaks-loose feel as Alessa finally settles the score with those who turned her into a bed-ridden shell of burned-up flesh. But even here, Gans misplays his hand, throwing down his trump card first by having Krige's character trussed up, impaled and bisected by supernaturally super-charged barbed wire. After that, there's nothing left to do but more or less repeat the image with her church-full of fanatical followers. Instead of building to a climax, the scene winds down from attrition.

Despite the weak script, the actors give it their all, trying to convince us this is a real movie, not just a sop for fans of the videogame. Alas, their effort is doomed by dialogue that's deader than Alessa's victims. "You don't have to do this," one character intones solemnly to another as they are about to face some new threat. After surviving a close call, you almost expect someone to say, "That was too close for comfort."

All of this might have been tolerable if the film had been lively and fast-paced, with a self-awareness of its own goofiness (like EVIL DEAD 2), but too often SILENT HILL is ponderous and pompous. Gans encourages little Ferland to ham it up as Alessa/Sharon; her scary child act, with mock-threatening tone and lots of allegedly sinister sidelong glances, might have worked as camp but not as genuine horror. Unfortunately, Gans seems to love the clichés too much to discard them. He even lets the soundtrack blare out ominous church organ music as the finale kicks into gear; instead of a shudder, the scene sends ripples of laughter through the audience, who must feel as if they have stumbled into an old movie that belongs on a TV matinee screening of SCTV's old "Monster Chiller Horror Theatre."