Hell Reviews: Silverhide

Synopsis: A group of conspiracy theorists are secretly watching a Top Secret military base in the desolate Welsh mountains. They are looking for experimental and highly classified test aircraft to report about in a magazine, when they suddenly discover a Top Secret and highly lethal creature, first discovered in the 1920's, which the military and Government are testing. The creature's fur has the ability to turn invisible in moonlight.

As the group are stalked by the creature, nicknamed "Silverhide" by the Army, they are also being hunted by the military who will stop at nothing to keep their classified specimen a secret.

 

I love werewolves.

Silverhide looked like a werewolf film.

Silverhide was not a werewolf film.

Silverhide is a terrible film, disguised as a good film with an eye catching cover.

 Thankfully, this is one B-movie I picked up really cheap at the local ASDA and only about £3 was wasted of the very little money I make in the first place.

When I get a selection of DVD’s that are piling up I like the stack them in order of which I’m more excited to watch, the ones I am eager to see the most I put at the bottom.
Silverhide was bought along with Starry Eyes and Fear Clinic and sat right between the two in my building pile of regret.
Now Fear Clinic was no masterpiece, but I still regret watching it before Silverhide. I’m sure with the former having Robert Englund in helped to be honest.

 Pros:

1: The cover -The cover has a definite draw to it, I love the colours it uses even if it is very cliché and simplistic for that kind of cover and the creature on the front really catches the eye. It definitely does its job well to sell the film from the shelf.

2: The…well that’s just it…that’s all there is.

Cons:

 1: The acting - In this kind of film you don’t expect the acting to be Oscar worthy by any means, but anything would have been better than what we got. Over the years I’ve seen some terrible films that at least had some form of decent acting going for it, as surprising as that may be, this one however had nothing.

All the acting was wooden and stilted, if you weren’t looking at the actors when they were talking then I’d pretty much guarantee that you’d believe they were just reading straight from the script. Hell, I still believe they had cue cards held up by the camera.
I can’t even tell if it was an actor/actress problem or a directing problem as I wouldn’t recognise any of these people if I saw them in anything else, so there’s no way I could even compare their performances.

2: The story - The synopsis sure did its job in sounding promising, too bad the execution didn’t live up to it. Nothing seems to lead anywhere, you’re just being dragged along at a painfully slow pace before all of a sudden it just ends and you’re left feeling a little bit betrayed and unsatisfied.
There is nothing note worthy that happens, even the creature’s appearances are lacklustre and scarce despite being the whole point of the film. I’m not one of these people that needs a deep story that I have to unravel to keep me entertained, I don’t exactly shut off when watching these things but I can still enjoy a mindless movie, but all I ask is that you offer me something.
The only way I can sum this up is with this one scene that led to nowhere, for about ten minutes you’re watching these two girls in completely different locations talking via walkie talkie and I, for the life of me, can’t remember a single thing that was said.

3: The creature – By far the thing I am most disappointed with in this film.

Now the creature on the cover isn’t the best looking beast I’ve seen, maybe I’ll make a top ten kind of thing for that one day, but it’s by far not the worst (I’m sure we’ve seen enough asylum films to know what I mean.) The beast is appealing enough to get you hyped up to see this thing in action.
Then you get a shot of a mask with someone’s hand controlling it.
Don’t get me wrong, budget is always a big factor when it comes to these things, but I’ve seen all kinds of short films on Youtube with less budget than this film used and they turned out better than the entire thing.
When going into something like this you don’t expect amazing effects or fantastic CGI, but you expect something. The way they dodge around budget for this is by making the creature invisible by moonlight and then shooting over 90% of the film in the dark, unfortunately very little else is offered for the periods where no creature is visible or even stalking around.
This led to me feeling amazingly cheated.

Would I recommend it?

No.
Unless you wish to admire a lot of grassland and a woman in a tent, then go right ahead.

All in all, it’s not worth throwing any money at.

If you can watch it for free and have nothing better to do then maybe it’d be worth checking out, but don’t expect to be entertained or even awake by the end of it.
Let’s just say that there’s a reason there’s thirteen one star reviews on the UK side of Amazon and a 3.9 on IMDB.