ALONE IN THE DARK

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Monday, January 31, 2005

The schlock of yore revisited ...

Honestly, there is no law forcing movies based on videogames to be bad. The RESIDENT EVIL films were reasonably fun zombie/monster fests and even the first MORTAL KOMBAT had its goofy charms. (For that matter, there's hope even for movies based on theme park rides PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, anyone?) So there is no reason whatever that ALONE IN THE DARK, based on a series of well-respected '90s games by Atari, needed to be anywhere near as eye-wideningly inept on so many levels as it is.

We know we may be in trouble before the movie proper even starts, as we get an informational crawl at least as long as the one that opens STAR WARS, framing such basic plot points (Native American civilization discovered the doorway to forces of darkness, opened it and promptly vanished; evil scientist experimented on children) that we wonder if the movie is erring on the side of expositional overkill or if none of this is ever going to become clear to us through the action. We immediately get a title "22 years ago," with callous Professor Hudgens (Matthew Walker) snapping at the nun who runs an isolated orphanage, "This isn't about a few children this is about saving our species!"

In the present, Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), the only one of Hudgens' subjects to have escaped his clutches back then, is now a troubled paranormal researcher with a gap in his memory. Carnby realizes something is up when he's attacked by a near-unstoppable assailant. He drops in on Bureau 713, a sort of paranormal paramilitary group under the command of Burke (Stephen Dorff), who for some reason is suspicious of Carnby. Also drawn into the mix is Hudgens' current assistant and Carnby's sometimes girlfriend Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), an archaeologist working at a museum. When all of the other survivors of the orphans' home abruptly get up and leave their homes, Carnby realizes something is up. Meanwhile, somebody gets greedy and opens an ancient relic Hudgens is transporting, releasing the evil within.


Again, nothing wrong with a movie about monsters and zombies mixing it up with a small band of well-armed people. However, the script by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer doesn't know how to set up plot points or create any kind of narrative emphasis, much less characters or dialogue. The speeches are so flat they're not even funny. The heavy story build-up around the now-adult experiment subjects seems downright mystifying when we see what happens with them (we can't even figure out how 19 non-replicating zombies do much to serve the cause of big eldritch evil, never mind the needs of the plot) and director Uwe Boll seldom manages to generate much fear even when big monsters enter the action, though admittedly visual effects supervisors Doug Oddy and Geoff D.E. Scott have crafted some cool-looking creatures. Boll stages perhaps two decent jump scares throughout the entire movie, but mostly stages the action so matter-of-factly that little is allowed to pop out at us. The film is so careless that we get what appear to be misleading subtitle information there's a big difference between "evacuated" and "abandoned" yet it is stubbornly portentous through the end.

Slater actually manages to convey the sense that Carnby is truly alarmed and saddened by what he knows and what he fears. Other performers don't fare as well, but the material is no help.

ALONE IN THE DARK harks back to the era of the late '70s/early '80s, before home video hit big, where sometimes horror movies with lots of blood, a good creature and virtually no other positive attributes would make it to the big screen. It's not even over-the-top enough to be funny most of the time it's just plain poor treatment of a perfectly decent premise.