Alone in the Dark

I'm going to admit something to you. I fell asleep twice watching this movie. I had to watch it three times before I was able to stay awake through the whole thing. This film is not good. To be fair, maybe I just fell asleep because I was tired.

Though I was fully awake the last time I watched it, I am still not sure what happened. It's a jumbled mess of bad ideas, bad dialogue and bad special effects. There's a story here, I think, something about orphans, and monsters, and secret government agencies, and an ancient civilization. I assume the video game on which this was based was better because, you know, you got to shoot at things while playing.

In the film version, a bunch of stuff happens, there's some bad nü-metal on the soundtrack, a sex scene (I fast-forwarded through it), and lots and lots of bullets. There are monsters too, which you can't really see, they're blackish, and tend to keep themselves to the shadows, making them hard to get a good look at. A bunch of marine-types try to kill them in a museum, and a loft and a mine shaft.

All through this, Tara Reid fumbles her dialogue. As Bunny Lebowski, she was fairly convincing as she offered "I'll suck your cock for a thousand dollars." But here, playing a scientist, she has trouble with big words like "radius" and "Newfoundland" and "how many?"

Stephen Dorff blusters his way around, swearing and generally being a prick for no reason. He constantly insults our hero, despite his barbs making little sense in the context of this film. He is so transparently "bad" that I think we're supposed to be surprised by his sacrifice at the film's end. Unfortunately, it's a gimmick that's been used in roughly 9000 movies already. But, he does get the film's best line of dialogue: "This doesn't make any sense." No shit.

And Christian Slater? His career never really recovered from his drug bust in the late Nineties, and the subsequent string of shitty film roles soon after. Which is why he's forced to do crap like this. Then again, he's not really a great actor, he never was, and maybe crap like this is the best we can expect from him.

Directed by Uwe Boll • R • 2005 • 96 minutes