In 2003, Artisan Pictures unleashed a property of staggering incompetence, the video game-based House of the Dead. Featuring a cast of neophytes desperate for some screentime, the release was accompanied by choruses of catcalls from those aware it was a terrible film, the likes of which American screens had rarely seen. And now, to start off 2005, we have House’s director Uwe Boll’s latest, the video game-inspired Alone in the Dark.
With the premise that an ancient race was on the verge of discovering some sort of “shadow world” where demons lie, Alone sinks quickly into action territory. Audiences are immediately greeted with the sight of down-and-out brooder Edward Carnby (a burnt-out Christian Slater), an unshaven paranormal investigator living in an abandoned warehouse. It appears people are after him, as evidenced by an early, random superpowered brawl on the empty and lawless Toronto streets.
After his fight with a possessed thug, Carnby heads to see his museum curator honey (Tara Reid, in some sort of stunt casting). What her mentor Professor Hudgens has failed to tell her, however, is the artifacts she’s cataloguing for him, and the subsequent findings of Carnby, will only assist in opening the “shadow world” and unleashing a series of Lovecraftian ghoulies (that will systematically eat humanity, one bad actor at a time, from what I can surmise).
Some effort is made to connect the mysterious, violent happenings with Carnby’s youth, where the 20 kids at his orphanage were all implanted with slimy bug creatures to later assist the creatures in their world domination. This gives the world domination-driven beasts an army of 20 people. I repeat, 20 whole people.
For anyone who’s seen the cinematic accident that is House of the Dead, let it be known that Alone in the Dark is a step up. Nevertheless, it’s a massive staircase, and Uwe Boll remains at the bottom, wistfully staring up. His direction consists of drifting crane shots that capture the maximum amount of extras acting as bad guys, standing around, waiting to be shot by Stephen Dorff’s (Blade, Deuces Wild) puzzling paranormal SWAT team. The only question this raises is, why did the five-foot-nothing Dorff get cast as a tough guy?
Most action sequences feature a number of shots or even whole sequences stolen from better movies, including a bullet-time shot that actually seems to be referencing a similar moment in House of the Dead. The whole thing’s made worse by a soundtrack more suitable to an aerobics class.
Still, for all Boll’s faults, the film’s weakest point is its screenplay. Penned by three monkeys named Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheer, it’s packed with these bon mots: When asked to retrieve a deadly file, one character responds, “They’ll kill me if they find out … but let me check.” After the characters descend into a darkened cave complete with booby traps, ancient scrawls written on the wall and secret chambers, one character sees a corner and exclaims, “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.” A few moments later, another responds, “Something tells me we’re not the first ones down here.”
At least there’s something bittersweet and telling about the mentality of a terrible filmmaker when eagle-eyed audience members spot the entire, untalented cast of House of the Dead as soldiers in this film. There’s also something to be said about a film that spends a good 10 minutes of screen time occasionally cutting over to a soldier ineptly working on a lights system only to die an unearned death as the lights are apparently destroyed. Alone in the Dark is an old-fashioned, god-awful mistake of a film, a horrible mess in which the top secret heroes’ mission is to shoot everything and the bad guys’ plan is to kill everything. Logic, reasoning and intelligence go out the window.
It closes with a coda familiar to anyone who’s seen the likeminded but far superior Resident Evil. What this really signifies is that Uwe Boll is a terrible filmmaker with a serious dearth of ideas. It’s up to audiences to realize that if they support this worthless rag, the ending will only signify a potential sequel.
