I was waiting for this movie for a long time. Funny enough, I never played the video game. My youngest brother had it and I used to watch him play. (I wasn't coordinated enough to handle PS controls.) So I remember the whole freakiness and all. And man was it freaky.
We decided to see a late show, hoping most of the hooligans would have come and gone. It didn't work. But the hooligans didn't come in the form of teens or youths. It was in the form of a man in his 30s. He was "Lame Guy". You know Lame Guy. He's the one who, when amongst a group of friends, decides to make horrible jokes and lame ass observations for a laugh. Unfortunately for this Lame Guy, he was only getting 1 out of his approximately 10 friends to laugh, so it was really pathetic. At one point, I almost screamed at him to shut his cocksucker (a term I oddly picked up at work), but I managed to be restrained. Without medication. Holy shit, I must be maturing.
Lame Guy aside, I did enjoy this movie. I think I missed a lot due to not remembering the game a lot, but I was delightfully creeped out. You most likely know the whole story to it, so I won't go into it all. There's definitely a parallel universe thing going on here as we see 2 stories- Rose (the lovely Radha Mitchell) looking for her daughter, and her husband (played by the always ass-kicking Sean Bean) looking for them both. It can get confusing at times if you don't think "Oooh...parallel universes an' shit!" The creepies in this one were wonderfully done. I particularly loved the nurses and Pyramid Head. Not only did the costume/makeup combo help, but just the choreography of movement on these characters added to the "oh shit" factor.
Sure, there were cheesy lines, but that's a given. I was ultimately more creeped out than scared with this film, but it didn't affect my overall liking of the film.