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ALONE IN THE DARK (2005)
Uwe Boll...say no more! No, this isn't the 1982 Straw Dogs homage which had possibly my favorite horror movie poster ever. This is the latest film from Uwe Boll, a director who in a very short amount of time (just two movies that anyone over here saw) has racked up the kind of bilious disdain Joel Shumacher and Michael Bay have worked their entire careers to amass. A reputation like that inspires a morbid curiosity; that's why I watched House Of The Dead, and that's why I watched this one. Alone In The Dark is not as terrible as House Of The Dead. There is no footage from the video game spliced into the action scenes, and any movie that casts Tara Reid as a museum curator has to be channelling a perverse kind of inspiration. It is a very bad movie though, and while it does mark a very slight improvement in Boll's directing skills, he's so far off from being a good filmmaker that I doubt he will become one in my lifetime. His name has become synonymous with abyssically low expectations; that the imdb lists him as scheduled to direct six movies (all of them video game adaptations) extending into the next few years boggles the mind. Alone In The Dark is nothing but intros for a while, starting with the longest "crawl" I've ever seen (narrated too for the easily bored) which tells us a convoluted story of experiments on orphans, gateways to terrible dimensions, lost Indian tribes, and magic artefacts. Then we see one of the orphans escape by hiding in a power box. Then we meet Christian Slater as the grown-up version of him, starting things off with a drum-accompanied car chase, and some really awful wire-fu jumping in what is otherwise not a bad fight scene. Then we get to the high seas and meet a crusty sea captain who hauls up a gold box containing something awful. Then, we meet Steven Dorff, exploiting his superficial resemblance to Keither Sutherland for all it's worth; his and Slater's characters are acquainted and carry on an old feud that is never explained. Dorff is the head of Bureau 713, who are like the X-Files people. They recite Trek-style tech babble in an approximation of a Trek bridge set while the guy in charge looks apprehensively at the big screen and mutters "Jesus Christ" with concerned awe. His next line: "I want a full security sweep of the area!" All this comes together when a bunch of monsters start running loose in the museum, where we meet Tara Reid as that (assistant) curator. She does her best to look intellectual by putting on glasses and peering over them when she's trying to concentrate. These monsters, apparently, can only be seen in the dark and turn invisible when they have light shone on them. Great idea for a video game, and no surprise that this is based on one (haven't played it). They seem to materialize out of nothing, and explode into ash when killed, an unnecessary conceit for an R-rated movie. I wanna see some splat! These monsters cause electrical equipment to fail if it's too far from its power source; so a flashlight will keep working, but anything that has to be plugged in probably won't. Since Bureau 713 knows this, why is it that they use one generator for the network of lights they set up? This decision predictably comes back to haunt them, as teams of armed men and women descend on ropes from smashed skylights, set up weapons and shoot at things, and the words "Come on, this way!" are heard as often as you heard "The clock is ticking!" in Armageddon. Meanwhile the other grown-up kids from the orphanage turn into zombies because they have parasitic monster larvae biting their spines, or something, but I still don't understand what these experiments were for. Was there even a scene were somebody was alone in the dark? The only people alone in the dark will be the people watching it, because nobody renting this one will be able to convince their friends to watch it with them. There's an expensive 2CD soundtrack of heavy metal songs out there; only three of which appear in the movie, two in the closing credits, though there is some sort of foreign-language love ballad during the love scene. The DVD comes with a number of videos from Hypocrisy, Dimmu Borgir, Nightwish (directed by Boll himself!) and others. Appropriately enough, the In Flames vid shows Anders Friden falling asleep in a movie theatre. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |