Screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) and director Christophe Gans would have it that their adaptation of dark video game Silent Hill is a meditation on dreams, reality, faith and motherhood.

But gamers don't dwell on that stuff - they just want to see things die.

So this disorientating yet strangely watchable mess is mostly about people being stabbed, slashed, burned, crushed, maimed, beaten, eaten, eviscerated and pulled to bits.

The game's afoot when young Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) - who has a life-threatening sleepwalking condition - starts muttering about the not-on-any-map town of Silent Hill.

Desperate to find a cure, her adoptive mother Rose (Mitchell) ignores husband Chris (a bewildered Bean), shakes off policewoman Bennett (Holden, looking like the dominatrix out of Police Academy) and promptly loses Sharon in the godforsaken burgh.

Abandoned 30 years ago because of subterranean fires, its streets are covered by the constant rain of ash. Save the odd walking torso, it's eerily quiet...

... until darkness descends, when sirens blare and the place becomes the domain of charred zombie children, flesh-eating cockroaches, faceless nurses and a fiend with a butcher's apron and a whopping great blade.

Rose and dogged Officer Bennett have a bloody nightmare, dodging murderous freaks in the hellish bowels of the town's hospital, school and church.

As ghost towns often do, Silent Hill has a proud history of religious zealotry and witch-hunting which nutty old bag Cristabella (Alice Krige) upholds and instils in the Monty Pythoneque townsfolk with spinsterish fury ("A witch! A witch! Burn 'er!").

The hysteria all has something to do with Sharon's evil doppelganger - another one of those vengeful girl-spirits with a Grudge (and possibly a Ring) and black hair hanging malevolently over one eye.

What Silent Hill lacks in coherence, it more than makes up for in nastiness; not since Hellraiser have so many bodies been so gleefully torn apart.

Which is exactly why some will enjoy their two-hour stay and those with a weak stomach, low tolerance for game-based fantasy, and/or expectations of a plot will wish they'd made a detour.

Elliott Noble