Screenhead

Well, despite a whole lot of stops and starts, and the arrest of the original series’ writer, it seems that Silent Hill 2 may not be completely dead.  In fact, it’s so alive that they’re projecting a release date…in 2010.

Dig the word from the series’ designer:

“I was working on storyboards for that around the same time last year…It’s going to be pretty crazy. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there. Roger (Avary) has some awesome ideas and hopefully we’re going to bring that to fruition sometime next year.”

Yeah…too bad Roger (Avary)’s in lockdown, buddy.  But hey, if Roman Polanski can engineer his movie from prison then maybe Roger Avary can drop some notes down or something.  Stranger things have happened, and many of them have happened to us.

I have to admit, I’d kind of like to see where they go with it.  After the miserable ending the last one had, I have no idea what they’re planning to do.  There’s not even much of anything they CAN do.  I mean, two of the three mains are ghosts of some kind and the third is sort of, well, still around.

So what can they do?  I don’t know. And that intrigues me.

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Bad news for folks hoping for a Silent Hill sequel--its writer, Roger Avary, has just gotten convicted on a DUI related manslaughter charge and sentenced to one year in prison with five years probation.

Avary pled guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving back in August, when he crashed his Mercedes going a hundred miles an hour into a telephone pole, severely injuring his wife and killing another passenger.

You can rail all you want about the evils of drunk driving–go ahead, I totally won’t stop you–but I feel a lot more sad than I do angry at this point.  Lives lost, families shattered, and yes, Silent Hill 2 delayed (oh, don’t pretend that’s NOT part of this.  A very small part, granted, but part nonetheless.)–no good comes of driving drunk.  This is an excellent opportunity for those of you with families out there to talk about this, especially if you’ve got a kid that’s coming up on driving age.  Having these discussions can often prevent the behavior itself down the road.

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Despite the fact that the first installment of Silent Hill was widely regarded as  a huge embarrassing failure, the rumors have been confirmed true–there will be a sequel.  Writer Roger Avary will be heading up work on the script,  which will hopefully manage to be, you know, GOOD, this time.

Okay, I’m being unfair, not to mention grossly oversimplifying things.  It’s not that Silent Hill was BAD, really, it’s more like the last fifteen or twenty minutes or so were a horrendous wreck.  The rest of it was at least passable, so I confess that I’m kind of looking forward to see what they do with Silent Hill 2 just to see if maybe this time they can fix some of the problems they had before. Oh, and the whole “it’s already well underway” line turned out to be a load.  By all available reports the script doesn’t even technically exist yet.

And they definitely had a lot of problems.  In fact, the problems from the last one were so big that, as of right now, no one can be a hundred percent sure if any of the original actors are coming back.  No one’s even really sure as to what the storyline is, either.

But hopefully things will improve and we don’t need to be afraid of how horrendously this one will turn out.

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While the Silent Hill movie is panned almost universally, I personally found it quite interesting, with the underlying message being subtle and open to several interpretations. However, the screenwriter of the original movie – Roger Avary – won’t be behind the sequel. Avary is credited with Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe and Rules of Attraction.

In an interview, Avary revealed that "I’m not gonna do Silent Hill 2," noting the absence of Christophe Gans (the first one’s director). It’s not that the film is not going to happen without the pair, in fact it just might go forward with a new director and scriptwriter, but it just won’t be the same.

Personally, I find both the director’s and scriptwriter’s moves sad, because I felt the original movie hit the feel and atmosphere of the Silent Hill games. What do you guys think?

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