Alone in the Dark

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.

Let’s face it: if you watch enough movies, every once in a while you run across one that is really bad. Most of them, you can switch your brain off, sit back, and enjoy the flickering lights. Others are even worse, and they required the creation of shows like “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” to actually make these films palatable. And yet there is still a tier just below those films: movies so bad, you can’t help but watch them, if only to please the same part of your brain that loves rubbernecking to see horrific accidents. “Alone in the Dark” is a movie so horrible, so god awful, that it should be avoided by everyone; even after two days, I still can’t wipe out the impression it left on my skull.

“Alone in the Dark” opens with a narrated story about the Abkani, a Native American tribe who were wiped off the face of the planet by a race of dark creatures called Zenos. When gold miners uncovered some artifacts from this culture, the government started Bureau 713, an organization dedicated to investigating the paranormal and supernatural phenomena surrounding these artifacts. Leading the investigation into the Abkani is Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a former Bureau 713 agent and orphan who is missing several years of life as a result of a failed Zeno symbiote implantation. Assisting Carnby is Commander Burke (Stephen Dorff), leader of Bureau 713, and Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid) a “genius archeologist”. Carnby’s investigations lead him to “Shadow Island” and the machinations of former Bureau 713 leader Lionel Hudgins and his attempts to do something with the Zenos that is never fully described.

If the title sounds familiar, that’s because “Alone in the Dark” is based on a video game series of the same title, and if it doesn’t sound familiar, that’s okay, because only a small handful of people ever actually played the game. All I remember of it was that it was like a cheap “Myst” and it refused to uninstall off my computer. Director Uwe Boll’s last venture “House of the Dead” (also based on a video game) made only slightly more sense than this catastrophe. Watching this movie is like hanging out with your best friend’s younger brother: all he wants to do is make you think he’s “cool”. As a result, the movie is a horrible amalgamation of gunfights, bad synthesizer background music, horrible, over-clichéd dialogue, and bad “Matrix”-ized fight scenes. “Alone in the Dark’s” “scariest” moment amounts to little more than a production assistant flipping some light switches on and off. Most of the movie doesn’t even make sense, with a huge collection of short little occurences that have no bearing on the story, which are never explained and welded together with slipshod editing.

The Bureau is perhaps the most entertaining part of the movie: they wear reject “Power Rangers” outfits and act with less prowess than the ensigns on “Star Trek”. The Zenos aren’t much better: they are the creation of really bad CGI and look like a combination of the xenomorphs from “Alien” and the insects from “Starship Troopers”. Fortunately Slater and Dorff are at the very least tolerable, but unfortunately Reid is at an all career low for her ability, and her “genius” character isn’t done much justice by every other line being “hey guys, check this out”.

Of course, this movie might have been pretty awesome if Boll hadn’t directed this movie, permanently infusing his ultimate lack of talent with the film forever. With the absolute abundance of plot holes in this movie, I’m surprised one of the characters didn’t actually see them and walk right through it into a good movie.