Alone in the Dark



Right off the bat I’ve got to give the new film Alone in the Dark credit for having a very accurate title. When I went to go see it I really was alone in the dark. Sure, I went to see it on a Monday afternoon, but considering the pathetic weekend gross the film had I’m going to assume my experience of seeing it in an empty theater was not unique.

Michalangelo once said that he could look at a block of stone and see the statue inside, and it was his job to remove the unnecessary bits. Alone in the Dark is like taking a sledgehammer to that block and crushing it to pieces, then trying to see the statue inside. There are all the elements of a story here, but they're all broken up and the parts never connect. Alone in the Dark is the newest film from Uwe Boll (director of Sanctimony and House of the Dead), so it isn't surprising that the film sucks. It's also supposed to be based on an old video game franchise (from back in 1994!), though only the main character's name survives the translation.


"Boy, each review of House of the Dead is worse than the last. Let's be in this guy's next movie!"

Edward Carnby (Christian Slater... wasn't this guy supposed to be the new Jack Nicholson?) is a paranormal investigator, though in the universe of this film the only paranormal thing appears to be the "Abkani," a mysterious Native American civilization that disappeared 10,000 years ago after opening a portal to "the dark side." Now Abkani artifacts have been spread all over the world, and Carnby is looking for them. Also looking for the artifacts is Dr. Hudgens, and his assistant Aline, played by Tara Reid.


"Don't hate me because I can catalog an entire collection of Etruscan snoods."

Yes, that Tara Reid. She's a museum curator, you see.

Please continue reading after you finish laughing.

Obviously the story of the "Abkani" is based loosely on the real history of the Anasazi pueblo builders. I wonder if they didn't change the name just to make it easier for Reid to pronounce. She seems to have enough trouble with English words, like "Newfoundland" and "wild goose."

Carnby is attacked by a mysterious assailant who won't die, then finds out that all the people he grew up with at a certain orphanage have disappeared. Years earlier when he was kid all those same children disappeared, though he was found later. Presumably the other kids were found too, but the movie never quite explains how that worked.


"Tara, you've officially had one too many plastic surgeries."

Hudgens meanwhile has found a Big Box O' Evil(TM), which when opened releases a bunch of armor-plated wolf things that apparently Hudgens can control. The wolf things attack Carnby and Aline in a museum, but they are saved by Bureau 713, a secret paramilitary organization that kills supernatural creatures. Then the wolf creatures attack Carnby and Aline at Carnby's apartment, and Bureau 713 shows up. The movie goes on like this for a while, until everybody ends up in the abandoned gold mine where Hudgen experimented on the orphans all those years ago. Then there's a really big shootout between the soldiers and the wolf things, just in case we hadn't got enough lame Aliens rip-off action. The special effects and the stunts aren't bad, but they are in service of a nonsensical story.

By the end of this film I had no freakin' idea what was going on. Why did Hudgens experiment on the orphans? He supposedly convinced the nun that ran the orphanage that it was necessary for the survival of the human race, but I still don't understand what he did. It apparently had to do with grafting some sort of organism to their spine, which caused them to become "sleepers" when the Big Box O' Evil(TM) is opened, but so what? Some of them act like zombies, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. The wolf things can turn invisible, but why do they choose not to so the soldiers can shoot them? Why is the concept of a light that can hurt the wolf things introduced, then never used? And at the very end our heroes appear to close the door to the dark world, yet when they get to the nearest city everyone has disappeared. A subtitle explains the city has been evacuated, but I wonder if that isn't some lame attempt to make it seem like the movie has a happy ending.

This movie took a box office header into an empty pool this weekend, failing to crack the top ten despite opening in 2000+ theaters. Uwe Boll is bucking to be the new the Albert Pyun, churning out lame action movies based around his own personal obsessions (cyborgs and female body builders for Pyun, zombies and washed-up leading men for Boll), and he's probably hit the "straight to video" phase of his career. Next up for Boll: an adaption of the Bloodrayne video game starring the chick with the inflatable boobs from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2004) and Ben Kingsley.

Posted: Tue - February 1, 2005 at      

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