Fighting Off Zombies and Insults From TV Hosts
By Charles Herold
November 1, 2001

Two scary video games — Silent Hill 2 and The Weakest Link — come just in time for the holidays

I've been playing Silent Hill 2 on the PlayStation2, and my nerves are frayed every time I try to advance from one save point to the other. This survival horror title is built around the concept of atmosphere. A friend of mine rented it once and gave up on it quickly, calling it "too slow." But that's the whole point in this game. In something like Doom you get constantly jolted by demons jumping around the next corner at you, but once you dispatch them the adrenaline wears off. In Silent Hill, you may find yourself walking a dark corridor as something bangs loudly ahead, and reach a closed door as the soundtrack beats ominously, and when you open the door you find... nothing. But by this time your skin is crawling and you've had no release, and now you are dreading the next time the game pulls this on you again; the next time, you know there must be something at the other side of the door. And what's that scratching you just heard inside your own home?

Whereas in other games you play as some Rambo-like, trigger-happy meathead who happily runs guns a-blazing through level after level stacked to the roof with ravenous monsters, in Silent Hill you play as an ordinary fellow who gets terribly tired after dashing a few feet and who gets clumsier as his weapons get deadlier. (Sure, you can take a quick shot with a gun, but shoot a deer-hunting rifle and it takes a pair of seconds to reload and aim again!) This is no frag-fest: there's no getting off on the repeated blasting of fireguns; only the uneasiness that the next time you get on a one-on-one with a nasty, you may find yourself outpowered.

Taken In
By Jason Snell
December 9, 2002

Leslie Bohem Presents Taken just doesn't have the same ring.

Let's try this again: Steven Spielberg Presents Taken, the miniseries that ended yesterday on Sci Fi, was the network's shot at an epic storyline. I guess that, in some way, it attempted to be the Underwold of alien abductions, beginning with WWII foo fighters and the Roswell event, and finding its way up to current times (where, if we accept the miniseries' outlook, the whole abductee movement is still going strong... in a fringe kind of way).

But... well, let me crib a phrase from James Wood's review of Underworld: "it is at once distractingly centrifugal and dogmatically centripetal: its many characters dissolve an intensity that the [story] insists on repeating and repeating": though the whole arc is supposed to offer an explanation for why aliens would have come to this mudball Earth and begun beaming up credulous twits, in the end it all comes back to family; specifically, the three families who are to blame for 60 years of UFO crypto-history.

I could go back to the Sci Fi website and check the names of the characters but, why bother? What you need to know is as follows:

1. The patriarch of one of these families is in the military and is responsible for involving the government in this whole deal; everyone in his family is so bent on learning the truth about the flying saucers that the unit goes disfunctional: a lot of crying about "dad didn't care for me."
2. The patriarch of the second family is the beginning of the whole thing. He's a WWII veteran and frequent abductee whose lid flips due to the recurring intrusion of the little gray men. As it turns out, that's a hereditary malady, and every generation undergoes the same thing: a lot of crying about "dad was a disturbed person and it rubbed on me."
3. The matriarch of the third family gives some nookie to an alien (kinky!) and gives birth to a half-breed. Of course, being the child of an alien brings a lot of unwanted attention from creepy types, so the kid must be hid far from his family for everyone's sake: a lot of crying about "I want my mommy."

Bleah. The only times Taken hit the right notes was when it aimed to X-Files-type eerienes. That's what the fourth episode had going for it, with a mystery set in Alaska involving an Eskimo-tomb dig, a mummy that seems to walk away after being left alone, and a limping hermit in the woods the whole town seems to know about but keeps quiet.

And that may be whole thing's greatest weakness: it's derivative of something that has been done better before. This time, I'm with the skeptics.