Originally published 2/3/2005
Alone in the Dark
Director: Uwe Boll
Writers: Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer
Producers: Shawn Williamson
Stars: Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Frank C. Turner, Mathew Walker
I’m going to blow the lid off a major secret of movie critic-dom. Most critics, all rhetoric to the contrary, love movies like Alone in the Dark. We’re generally a petty and back-biting lot of junior Mr. Blackwells, and believe that no one ever really remembers how well you described a great movie, so it’s your slamming zingers which will make your legacy.
Maybe once or twice a year, a movie comes along which practically dares critics to pile on the abuse. It creates a desperate race to the bottom, and we reach into our mental thesauruses for ever-more vicious metaphors to cattily put it in its grave. Surely this is the worst movie ever made by Hollywood. Surely, never have more amateurish writing, directing and acting made such an unholy marriage. Surely, I now have a chance to compare this director’s work to worst-director-of-all-time Ed Wood! The reviews generally read like Mad Libs – “The effects are so bad, they’re like ______. Christian Slater’s acting is so bad, it’s like ________.”
The knives are out for Alone in the Dark, and the movie deserves it. It’s bad; awesomely, howlingly bad in that way that leaves a scar. But I would never claim that it’s the worst movie ever made. Someone will find a way to top it even before the calendar year’s out, I’m certain. In fact, let me turn convention on its ear, and find some nice things to say.
Gorehounds will appreciate two or three particularly bloody makeup effects. Fans of Atari’s landmark horror videogame franchise, upon which the movie is based, will note that not only is the title spelled the same, but several of the characters’ names are used, and the genre is in fact, vaguely similar. And hundreds of people worked on the movie, after all, and they have families who must be very proud of them.
But I suppose I must tell you something about the story. I’ll give it my best, although the movie does make a mighty effort to conceal the actual workings of its plot.
A terribly long opening narrative crawl tells us about an ancient but very very advanced civilization of Native Americans called the Abskani, who opened a doorway to the world of darkness and were wiped from the face of the earth by the beasts they unleashed. To make sure this didn’t happen again, they split the key to the door to the world of darkness into several pieces and scattered them around the world, which must have taken awhile on foot.
If you’re wondering how they managed this after being wiped off the face of the earth by the beasts of darkness, you are not ready for this movie.
Anyway, twenty years ago, a mad scientist named Dr. Hudgens (Mathew Walker) dragged twenty orphans down into an abandoned gold mine to perform hideous experiments on them. The supervising nun’s half-hearted objection is priceless: “I don’t know about all this…”
One of the orphans escaped, and grows up to be Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a freelance “paranormal investigator” who used to work for the super-secret government paranormal investigative unit known as Bureau 713. This unit, led by Commander Richards (Stephen Dorff, who looks like he missed nap time) is so super-secret that they can launch a military raid on a museum in the middle of a major city, using helicopters and automatic weapons, and no one finds out about it.
Carnby’s on-again-off-again flame is Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), an assistant curator at said museum, and an expert in Abskani artifacts. We know, because every time someone shows her an etched doodad provided by the prop department, she points at it and says “That’s Abskani”.
We also know she’s brainy, because she wears glasses for at least two scenes, and needs no instructions on how to use a gun. And when she sees people running into Edward’s apartment, she just opens fire, knowing somehow that they are not enthusiastic visitors, but zombies.
Yes there are zombies. And people who have been given super strength by strange larvae fused to their spine – or is that what made them zombies? Carnby shoots a superstrong guy in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses with a pistol he stole from a cop, after which he nonchalantly walks home and is never questioned by authorities about it.
Badly computer-animated creatures dubbed “The Xeno” are running around as well, eviscerating people and occasionally becoming invisible. Roger Rabbit had the power to escape from handcuffs, but only when it was funny. The Xeno can apparently become invisible, but only when it would be scary. Were they in the solid gold trunk Dr. Hudgens found at the bottom of the ocean? But the soldiers of Bureau 713, whose combat gear looks like it came from the BMX store, claim they have been hunting Xeno for years now; very secretly it would seem.
Dr. Hudgens wants to open the door to the world of darkness for some reason. There are lots and lots of Xeno on the other side of that door. Although apparently there are lots and lots of Xeno already here, which begs the question: have they just been lounging around for the 10,000 years since the last time the door was opened?
I give up. I surrender. I’m out of space and I haven’t even scratched the surface of this movie’s head-spinning paradoxes. At one point Carnby shouts “Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?” A soldier responds “We’re picking up massive readings!” Carnby replies, “That’s not what I’m asking, I want to know what’s going on!” If you can handle 90 minutes of that, 90 minutes of murky photography, voice-over designed to clear things up but which ends up creating even more questions, actors staring off camera for their cue; if you can handle Tara Reid trying to show her smarts by pronouncing it “New-FOUND-Land” and being brought along to the climactic battle for no better reason than that she’s pretty, maybe you can handle this movie. But why would you want to? We movie critics have our excuse. What’s yours?