REVIEW: Alone in the Dark

There are times when I may forget a movie that I had watched.  It isn't very often, but it does happen. I can quickly recover by looking at the movie's IMDB page.  That jogs the memory.  Last year, however, I saw a film that I had completely forgotten by year end.  The IMDB page didn't jog my memory.  Reading the entire plot synopsis on Wikipedia didn't work.  I even re-watched the first twenty minutes and nothing could make me recall the film that I know I had seen.  This was a first.  But it just got outdone.

Three days ago, I decided that I should finally watch an Uwe Boll movie.  For people who don't know, Boll is a director who is completely unapologetic about the quality of his movies, ready to insult and get into a boxing ring with his detractors.  Not that Rotten Tomatoes means everything, but his highest scored movie is at 25%, and he has five films that scored less than five percent.  It is one of those films, Alone in the Dark (1% on Rotten Tomatoes) that I decided to dig into.

The film starts off with a narrative scrawl of text to explain the setup for the movie.  It is quite long.  Not only do we get to read all of this, but it is also spoken.  After a number of minutes of that, we jump to narration by Christian Slater, who plays Edward Carnby.  That's a total of three devices to deliver expository dialogue right off the bat, and it doesn't end there.  Everything is overly explained. And yet, somehow, a miracle happened.  Even with being told everything along the way, I completely lost track of what was happening.

This film was watched over three different sittings, but that's not what caused me to feel like I was forgetting what was happening.  In all honesty, there were so many times that I completely blanked out while watching.  I ended up getting trapped into thinking about grocery lists, what was going to be for dinner, what chores I needed to do, and so on.  All matter of mundane found its way into my mind while I should have been paying attention to this film.  Seriously, I cannot give you a coherent outline of what happened.  As hard as I tried, I just couldn't pay attention to this hack job of cinema, this duel-seated, century old, full to the brim, outhouse of a film.

(Alone in the Dark kind of outright stole from Alien, even to the point where monsters were called Xenos)

This is the story, at least what I can remember of it.  There is an ancient native tribe.  They made something out of gold, perhaps?  And then an orphanage had a Christian Slater, and a nun stood outside.  Then the Christian Slater found an artifact, and Tara Reid hasn't been in anything of note since 2005 other than Sharknado.  Bunny Lebowski is looking at artifacts, and then is completely useless and doesn't add anything to the plot, outside of suddenly having sex with the Christian Slater.  Some old guy has a boat, and I think he didn't know what was in a box.  Then an animal got loose.  Another old guy liked artifacts, and I think he liked the animals that got loose.  Suddenly a tippity top notch squad of soldiers show up.  They look like they are on their way to roller derby.  Rock music blares, and people are shot.  There's a gold mine, and a bobby trap pit has a ladder built into the side of it.  Then an old man yells at the Christian Slater, and a knife kills him, but he opens an ancient closet door.  And then I think something happened, and Stephen Dorff runs through a mine tunnel that has a lot of natural light.  Then there is a vacant city, and seven minutes and forty six seconds of credits.

Actually, I think that was a pretty concise summary of the film.

There is a huge part of me that enjoys watching awful movies, but that part of me was not satiated with Alone in the Dark.  It was just boring as anything you could ever imagine.  There were some awful special effects that lightened things up a little, but nothing was a proper cure for the comatose state that Uwe Boll put me in.  This is the first movie, ever, that I forgot about while I was watching it.  It would be getting zero stars, except the Christian Slater did some sort of flip via way of MacBook Pro.

That is all.

Rating - 0.5 out of 4 stars