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…

He’s flippin’ crazy, that irascible Vincent Gallo (sample rant from his eponymous web site: “The only impact Harmony Korine will have will be on the lives of the girls he slipped drugs to, got stoned and raped while they were passed out — an autobiographical scenario he chose to include in his average screenplay Kids…”), but one thing’s for certain: he’s committed to following his own myriad artistic instincts, down whatever rabbit holes they may lead him. I was thinking about this again when I was talking with a friend about Gallo’s uncommonly tender The Brown Bunny, so I thought I’d re-post elements of my original theatrical review.

The film is a rarity in modern American cinema — a movie about masculine neediness. This isn’t to say that the movie is an easy, pleasurable watch. Far from it, in fact. The Brown Bunny‘s pace is punishingly, defiantly slow, and it’s still generally the kind of thing that you admire more than actively enjoy, so modest are its at-arm’s-length rewards. The film stars producer-editor-director-cinematographer Gallo (who else?) as Bud Clay, a haunted shell of a man who, after a motocross race, winds his way slowly west toward Los Angeles and a damaged relationship with his waiting girlfriend, Daisy (Chloë Sevigny). Along the way he grapples, in often abstract ways, with both fidelity and loneliness.

Caring as little as Gallo does for conventional structure and pacing, The Brown Bunny is designed as much to elicit mood as anything else; de facto mini-musical videos of open road (Gordon Lightfoot, Jackson Frank) alternate and share the screen with a few loose story strands that find Bud awkwardly, casually and/or silently picking up a trio of women (Anna Vareschi, Cheryl Tiegs and Elizabeth Blake), all named for flowers, only to then just as quickly abandon them.

Much of the movie’s notoriety stems from its sexually explicit ending, and for the life of me I can’t decide whether this is bold, envelope-pushing, exhibitionistic folly or Gallo’s radical, deadpan, completely unspoken attempt to give The Brown Bunny — inarguably one of the most baldly uncommercial American movies of the past five years — an overtly sensational “hook” or selling point. The scene in question is shocking, yes, and even titillating, but also wholly inessential to the movie’s basic twist and, more importantly, emotional validation. As such it comes off as tangential sensationalism at a point when the characters’ raw emotionalism (“I wish you liked me again, like before… when you liked me the most,” says one, heartrendingly) should be ripping you in half.

Gallo, who previously directed Buffalo ’66, places a fetishistic premium on setting and place that touches rewarding and then frequently sprints right past it into tedium’s waiting bosom. With long, loooooong establishing shots and a good many passages that lack disciplined pruning, the look of the movie summons comparisons of an even fuzzier, further off-center Miller High Life commercial. Taken in sum, the preceding are evidence of Gallo’s brutal — and, in some respects, dazzlingly audacious — disregard for audience sympathy or even reaction. I’d be intrigued to see this material paired with a like-minded yet stronger directorial hand; as is, The Brown Bunny too frequently comes across as a series of accumulated mundanities rather than the racked-focus character portrait it should be. And yet there’s still a quiet, unassuming integrity and untainted throughline to the picture. The Brown Bunny certainly isn’t for the casual moviegoer, and maybe not even for most devoted film fans. Its sad, lonely portrayal of romantic resignation and arrested development, though — most hauntingly captured in Bud’s keening, high-pitched mutterings at film’s end — is something that clings to your memory like a form-fitting psychological trauma. (Wellspring, unrated, 93 minutes)