Uwe Boll, the director who brought us the timeless classic House of The Dead in 2003, is back again to deliver more video game inspired crap. If your not familiar with his adaptation of House of the Dead then consider yourself lucky and if you have yet to see Alone in the Dark consider yourself incredibly lucky. It's amazing that this guy keeps getting hired and that movie companies still find it so extraordinarily difficult to adapt a video game to the big screen.
Alone in the Dark follows Edward Carnby (Slater) who plays a paranormal detective who as a child lost his memory at the age of 10, after something happened to him and the other children at his orphanage. As an adult he is now trying to piece together what happened to him and the other children so long ago. Now all the other children are also grown up and have gone missing; they mysteriously walked out during the night, controlled by some inner force. Carnby with the help of his museum curator girlfriend Aline (Reid) put together some clues that point the blame on an ancient Indian culture. This culture has locked up some sort of demons and now these demons have been set free and are hunting down people.
713, a paranormal military task force, which Carnby use to be a member of, has been tracking and hunting these demons and track them to their origin in an abandoned gold mine.
That's basically the storyline in nutshell; I probably made it sound better than it actually is which is sad. The problem with this movie is basically everything. The plot is barely developed and very dry and predictable. The characters are pretty much given a name and basic info and set on their way. You really don't connect or feel the realism of any of the characters. On a side note, tossing black framed classes onto Tara Reid and calling her a museum curator, although an attempt, does not accomplish the task of making her look smart. Perhaps she was the only one willing to do the movie though, so they had to work with what they had.
In terms of direction, like I said Uwe Boll directed and does another terrible job. The worst part is he's already been signed to direct another video game inspired movie BloodRayne. I'll be sure to steer clear of that one; I've learned my lesson. The problem with Boll is he uses such cliched and played out camera styles. Every chance he gets he makes the scene slow motion and every time a gun is fired he makes sure to use some bullet-time photography. The best part is the awesome metal tracks he uses during gun battles. ROCK ON! NOT!
The story doesn't make this movie any better either. Like I said the characters are poorly developed and the story doesn't even make a whole lot of sense. Apparently these creatures from 10,000 years ago wiped out this advanced Indian civilization. These monsters create electrical disturbances wherever they go and can become slightly invisible when they want. I doubt there was a big issue with electrical disturbances 10,000 years ago, but whatever.
The alien/creature character is also quite lame. I wouldn't be surprised if they had to pay royalties to whoever designed and created the alien from Alien, the movie. It's a pretty close replica in this movie and even has a lot of the same scenes. Come on now, we have millions of dollars in computer equipment and software and you can't come up with something original?
So basically Alone in the Dark boils down to another awesomely bad video game adaptation and should probably be locked away in a vault somewhere just like they did with the creatures in the movie. If you liked House of the Dead then you need counseling and if you want to see an extremely bad movie that can best be described as a mix of Starship Troopers and Alien then well go ahead and rent the movie, but don't let anyone see you do it.
"Alone in the Dark" opens January 28, 2005 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Uwe Boll. Written by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch. Starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff.
