SILENT HILL

* (one star)

Burn this.

Running time: 127 minutes. Rated R (gore, disturbing horror images, profanity). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Union Square, others.

THE best thing about most movies that open without screenings is a running time under 90 minutes – these bombs are generally cut to the bone by studios eager to squeeze in as many showings as possible before word of mouth spreads.

Not so with “Silent Hill,” a great-looking but stupefyingly incoherent supernatural thriller adapted from a popular video game that ransacks the entire catalog of horror film tropes for more than two mind-numbing hours.

It’s all there: a missing child, a creepy and possibly dead child, weird drawings, strange writing on the walls, and the usual, vaguely menacing collection of religious slogans and iconography.

Also: ash perpetually falling from the sky, lots of gore and giant cockroaches, plus CGI characters identified in the credits as the Red Pyramid, the Grey Children, the Armless Ones, the Janitor and the Dark Nurses.

Who they are and what they’re doing I have no idea. Ask French director Christophe Gans (“The Brotherhood of the Wolf”) and screenwriter Roger Avary (who shared an Oscar with Quentin Tarantino for writing “Pulp Fiction”).

The movie opens with a certifiably insane mother – whose daughter suffers from nightmares while sleepwalking – crashing her Jeep through a series of chain-link fences in the middle of the night while being pursued by the police.

When mom awakens, the daughter is missing. They’re in Silent Hill, W. Va., where a mine fire has been burning underground for 30 years.

The only bit of intentional humor occurs when Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” turns up on the soundtrack.

Beyond that, you’re on your own. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it – despite reams of expository dialogue. “Silent Hill,” indeed.

The mother is played by Rahda Mitchell, who had the title roles in Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda.” Sean Bean is her not-much-saner estranged husband – while Deborah Kara Unger and Alice Krige portray possibly dead local nut jobs.

There is also a crypto-lesbian motorcycle cop in leather pants played by Laurie Holden, the female lead from the Jim Carrey disaster “The Majestic.” She ends up being burned at the stake as a witch.

When the cries of “Burn her!” arose, I was wishing they had just incinerated the negative of “Silent Hill.”