Adapting video games to film is a slippery slope. Hollywood is currently chasing all these joystick properties — a great many of which suck, or certainly suck as movie concepts, let’s be honest here — because they think, often erroneously, that their prized, youthful demographic always necessarily wants the same things out of their movie-going experiences as they do their gaming experiences. But a movie based on a video game yet absent some twist or reinterpretation of its source material is heedlessly restrictive and pointless, kind of like 311’s recent cover of The Cure’s “Love Song.”

Part Alice in Wonderland, part Dante’s Inferno, Silent Hill, then, at least attempts to do some different and interesting things, and succeeds in conjuring up an impressive litany of technical, art and production design credits. Adapted by Killing Zöe’s Roger Avary, it’s the story of a couple, Rose and Christopher Da Silva (Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean, respectively), whose daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is wracked by violent nightmares in which she invokes the titular name of a small, abandoned, West Virginia nmining town. Against her husband’s wishes, Rose takes Sharon there, but she then disappears and Rose gets trapped.

As Rose tries desperately to track down her daughter, she stumbles across a cop (Laurie Holden) that at first suspects her of foul play, but relents when an air-raid siren gives way to hellish attack by undulating, fleshy masses. Seeking untangled answers, Rose soon finds herself caught between spooky, dreadlocked pariah Dahlia Gillespie (Deborah Kara Unger) and a group of repentant “others,” if you will, led by the frizzy-haired Christabella (Alice Krige). Yes, conditioner is sparse in Silent Hill.

Director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) brings a partly pragmatic, partly fever-dream, Michel Gondry-like touch to the proceedings, and it’s this woozy abundance of style that carries the picture early on. Eventually, though, you yearn for more substantial back story, and when it comes in the form of microfiche investigation and you realize you’re watching another damned-from-beyond-the-grave movie, it’s true that there’s a bit of a sinking feeling. What dings Silent Hill is its bloated running time. My girlfriend and sister were at one point both separately interested in the film — drawn in, in large measure, by its evocative, mouth-less poster and, one supposes, its maternal warrior premise — but their curiosity and attention flagged the more bogged down in atmospherics the movie became.

That said, Sony’s dressed up a quite nice single-disc DVD release for the movie, anchored by a fantastic, hour-long, six-part making-of featurette that touches on all aspects of the movie’s production, from script to screen. Interviews with Gans (who confesses to being scared to tears by the video game when he first played it) and Avary are among the more interesting tidbits, but it’s also rather amazing to see how the movie’s vast and eerie Silent Hill exteriors were actually constructed indoors in Vancouver. C+ (Movie) A- (Disc)