Movie Gazette

If crap movies are your thing, then it’s highly-possible that German poo-peddlar Uwe Boll is your God. Sadly, for the rest of us, the man represents little more than a cinematic pain in the botty, curling out a seemingly endless log of smellsome celluloid into the Hollywood latrine. ‘Alone in the Dark’ might not be the Bollmeister’s worst film to date – anyone who’s seen 2003’s ‘House of the Dead’ will probably see where I’m coming from on that one – but, given the improved cast and increased resources at his disposal this time, it’s got to be one of his most unforgivable.

Like House of the Dead, this is another ill-advised attempt at turning a video game into a convincing movie project. You’d think Herr Boll might have learned his lesson last time, but apparently not, for this is a film laden with ridiculous characters, laughable dialogue, silly-looking monsters and a cast who each look so embarrassed to be there that they stop just short of wearing t-shirts bearing the message “We needed the money, okay?”.

Lead player is Christian Slater, a guy who’s a decent enough actor (not a description I can straight-facedly attribute to co-star Tara Reid, by the way), but who lets himself down badly by getting involved in this tripe. He plays Edward Carnby, who 22 years earlier escaped the clutches of a mad scientist (Matthew Walker) Hell-bent on using orphans as bait for a bunch of 10,000-year-old demons. Now haunted by shabbily-edited flashbacks, our Eddie spends his days trying to get to the bottom of what exactly went on when he was a kid. That’s unlike the screenwriters, who are simply trying to get to the bottom of that barrel so they can scrape it for a little longer.

‘Alone in the Dark’ masquerades as some sort of horror but – even if it was in any way possible to comprehend what’s actually going on with the plot – it’s just far too amateurish in every conceivable department to be taken even remotely seriously. It starts off a bit like it’s trying to pass for a particularly turgid episode of ‘The X-Files’, but by the second half has turned into something vaguely comparable to ‘Aliens’ minus tension, excitement or credibility.

By the time the whole thing has abandoned any semblance of story-building and turned into a jumbled, impenetrable shoot-em-up (with atrocious rock music in accompaniment), you’ll really wish you WERE “alone in the dark”. That is, alone to spare your embarrassment at watching such a rubbish flick, and in a brand of darkness SO dark that you can’t actually see the screen.