'Silent Hill: Revelation 3D' review: Scary bad

If you've played a few rounds of the Konami video game that inspired "Silent Hill: Revelation 3D," you might understand what's happening on screen. If not, I guarantee that you will have no idea.

Horror flicks aren't exactly famous for their airtight plots, but "Revelation" -- a sequel to 2006's "Silent Hill" -- is in a league of its own. Our heroine is Heather Mason (Adelaide Clemens), a teenager plagued by nightmares about a dark burg called Silent Hill. It's an otherworldly place (though it once had a coal industry) and it's accessible only through a supernatural portal (or by car). Its amusement park is now used mainly for torture.

Heather and her dad, Harry (Sean Bean, reprising a thankless role), are on the run from shadowy forces, but the moment they arrive in their new Anytown, strange things begin to happen. Faceless monsters appear on the street, little kids giggle ghoulishly and Heather's high school suddenly transforms into the set of a Slipknot video. Only her cute classmate Vincent (Kit Harington) seems to sympathize. Soon, they'll both enter Silent Hill.

What ghastly creatures dwell there? For starters, far-fallen actors Malcolm McDowell, as a gashed-up mental patient, and Carrie-Anne Moss, playing a demonic matriarch. Mostly, though, Silent Hill is filled with horror-fantasy figures from a schoolboy's sketchbook: cleaver-wielding nurses, an armored bodybuilder, a naked lady.

What makes this movie so wretched isn't the dopey effects or the bottom-barrel acting but Michael J. Bassett's incoherent script and plodding direction. "Revelation" is incredibly boring as well as totally baffling. If anyone can explain why this movie ends with a shot of speeding police cars, please let me know.

PLOT A teenage girl hunted by shadowy figures must confront her mysterious past. RATING R (nudity, violence, gore, language)

CAST Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss

SEE PHOTOSOur critic's top movies of all time countdown

LENGTH 1:34

PLAYING AT Area theaters, some in 3-D

BOTTOM LINE This wretched screen version of a survival video game is hampered less by its bottom- barrel acting than by its completely witless script. It's an insult to bad horror movies.