I don't know why this took so long, honestly. This really should have been among my first blog postings, or certainly reworkings when it came time to recycle older content... errrr, celebrate films of yesteryear! Yes, let's take a look back at director Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark, in a slightly redacted reworking of my original theatrical review. You will desperately need, in my estimation, the following items for survival:

• One or more friends with barbed wit and a proclivity for awful genre tripe

• Cash for anonymous purchase, plus hats and/or sunglasses to disguise identity (you won't want to have this rental credited to your account)
  

• A considerable amount of alcohol

• Kleenex to wipe away tears of laughter

• The gene blocking the impulse of shame

From frame one, Alone in the Dark announces itself as awful with such a manic, drunken fervor that you have to on some level step back and tip your hat in awe to its audacity. Helmed by Boll (Blackwoods, The House of the Dead), there is no subtext in Alone in the Dark, only capital-T text — writ large, bold and obvious. Every line, every moment seethes with a brazen stupidness, from the nonsensically edited action and on-screen flubs (I’ll give them a stay of execution on the spelling of “analysing,” though I don’t think this is a British production and it doesn’t jibe with the American characters) to the body armor apparently picked up at a Starship Troopers 2 yard sale and the riotously appalling dialogue (one suggested drinking game: a swig for every time a character says, “The readings are off the charts!”). The film is a masterwork of awfulness, a literal and veritable bad movie blueprint, from start (which features a comically long narrated preamble) to merciful conclusion.

The plot, as it were, details a bunch of folks as they try to rustle up the last of a few artifacts relating to the ancient Abkani tribe. Of course, a shampoo-needing knucklehead at the beginning of the film has opened a precious golden arc, meaning… aw, crap, who really knows or cares? There’s monsters. And zombie-esque human marauders. On the other side, Christian Slater squints and shoots as Edward Carnby, a paranormal investigator and erstwhile orphan who used to run with a shadowy government organization known as 713, but now wears a swashbuckling leather duster and plays by his own rules. That leaves Stephen Dorff’s equally stubbled and glowering Burke Richards in charge of the 713 posse; along to fulfill the cleavage quota is Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid). Pow! Bam! Zing!

Adapted from an Atari videogame by two debut screenwriters and the writer of MVP2: Most Vertical Primate, Alone in the Dark makes many choices, every single one of them poor, but chief amongst the blunders is trying to sell us a bespectacled Reid as a brilliant anthropologist. She is the most utterly lost of a cast that phones in every crappy line with an automaton-like indifference. They say that even ugly babies have faces their mothers love, but this is truly a film that not even hardcore, braindead genre fans could appreciate in straightforward fashion. As a slice of camp comedy, on the other hand...

        

 

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