Edward Carnby: I was tracking poachers across their lines in the Amazon when I hooked up with some ex-Chilean military trafficking artifacts on the black market.
Need a laugh? Uwe Boll's ALONE IN THE DARK is so far off the scale bad that the only possible reaction is to laugh at it -- and I do mean at it and not with it. It plays like a parody-free remake of ALIENS with a GALAXY QUEST level of intelligence. The producers apparently assume that anyone stupid enough to buy a ticket to it can't read since Christian Slater reads the introductory text to us as it slowly scrolls past.
The movie's preposterous explanations, about a clandestine government agency (Bureau 713) to deal with paranormal events, about a long extinct Native American tribe and about alien-like monsters that live in the bowels of our planet, will leave your shaking your head and wanting a rewind button. There are also sleeper agents who arise with zombie-like movements and monsters who can sometimes be stopped by bullets and sometimes not. Bureau 713, for some reason, doesn't seem to have anything more powerful in its arsenal than bullets.
Speaking of power, the dialog is powerfully awful: "It's not about the children. It's about the survival of the species," "Just because you can't see something, it doesn't mean it can't kill you," and "Some doors are meant to stay shut." The acting manages to be even worse than the cheesy lines. In addition to Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff should also hang their heads in shame for being association with this miserable movie.
ALONE IN THE DARK runs a very long 1:36. It is rated R for "violence and language" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
By : Steve Rhodes (http://www.InternetReviews.com)
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 1
Movies don't get much worse than this wannabe thriller about a rogue private investigator who specializes in supernatural phenomena. It's a total, absolute waste of your time and money.
Christian Slater stars, along with wide-eyed Tara Reid, who is improbably cast as a "brilliant anthropologist," an assistant museum curator who happens to be his former lover. In a bizarre world of stolen artifacts, lost civilizations, shadowy paranormal threats and clandestine government conspiracies involving a crazy scientist's secret experiments on orphaned children, they must battle deadly reptilian demons from the World of Darkness, creepy creatures whose very existence threatens all of humanity. Doom and gloom!
Unable to piece together a coherent story from the formulaic script by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer, German director Uwe Boll launches forth with a ridiculously long voice-over introductory prologue about the mysterious disappearance of the Abkani, an ancient Native American culture. After that, it's all violence. People pop up and get shot down, just like the popular Atari video game on which it's based. Along with the demons from beneath, there are also zombies. The U.S. back-up "troops" are led by Stephen Dorff, who screams inane lines like, "My guys are up there dying - for nothing!" But all the performances are quite incompetent.
Uwe Boll's horror film "House of the Dead" (2003), which was his American debut, was abominable too. While this should have gone direct-to-video, I still would not advise renting it. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Alone in the Dark" is an abysmal 1. Chances are, you'll probably find yourself alone in the theater too.
