Alone In The Dark DVD > Reviews > Like pain? then watch this film. If not, don't

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Hated it
Story	Very weak
Characters / Performances	Weak
Special Effects	Weak
How does it compare to similar films?	Weak

Advantages:	There are none .  .  .  well, you might laugh once or twice .
Disadvantages:	Everything about this film will cause your brain to melt .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

The original Alone in the Dark video game was released in 1992 and in many ways it was the first real survival horror title, and with what was at the time a unique mix of action and adventuring, it was hailed as somewhat of a classic. As with many games of the genre it relied on many movie like cut scenes, a strong plot and eerie atmosphere that worked wonders into scaring the player stupid. Perfect fodder for a movie script then, well one would think so anyway, yet we have already suffered through two Resident Evil films and they didn't ever really manage to capture any of what made the games so great. ALONE IN THE DARK director Uwe Boll seems to have taken this one step further, he hasn't made a better movie… but one that is perhaps more like a game than the games are themselves and done his best to make it as painful as possible for the viewer to watch at the same time.

The video game was actually inspired by the stories of H.P Lovecraft which meant grotesque mutant creations and plenty of creaky floorboard type atmospherics so you'd think given the movie like quality of its production, it would have translated well into a terrific film, and you know one day it still might, if they make a movie that is anything like that game. ALONE IN THE DARK is not atmospheric and has monsters that look like they came straight out of a first generation PSOne title (which to the uninitiated means the CGI in this movie looks ten years old) yet these are only minor problems compared to the other horrors created here by pretty much everyone involved. The story centres around a Paranormal investigator called Edward Carnby and well… something else about parasitic centipedes and monsters that can go invisible. To be honest I really have no idea what it was about, I had to check the plot summery on IMDB just to figure out how to write one for this review yet when I noticed they mentioned something about a big queen monster (which I don't remember), Shadow Island (which as far as I know isn't in the movie) and something about Carnby losing his sanity (when he doesn't do anything of the sort) I realised that everyone else must have been as confused by this film as me.

Boll's first film, HOUSE OF THE DEAD was actually another movie based on a video game and it is true that ALONE IN THE DARK does probably succeed in bettering that effort, although this is perhaps only true because it couldn't really have been any worse. That movie had some truly nauseating fight sequences where zombies did kung fu and the camera span around them so much you actually got dizzy. Here Boll simply shakes the camera around for 10 minutes during an early fight scene, we still can't see what's going on, and its about as exciting as banging your head into a wall repeatedly, but at least you don't feel sick at the same time. He seems to have also realised that splicing bits of the actual video game in with the movie action every time a bad guy dies is not a good thing so we can be thankful there is none of that crap here either.

Yet that last paragraph is about the only nice thing I can say about ALONE IN THE DARK as this is a horrible, horrible film that actually has three leads who have all previously appeared in good big budget movies but I wouldn't be surprised if they never work again with any director who ever sees them here. Its not so much that they are bad, but that everything else around them is. Christian Slater is good enough at playing hero as Carnby that you still manage to watch him without wincing too much even when his character tells everyone to enter a dark hole and then moments later says "we shouldn't be in here". In fact you kind of feel sorry for the guy because even though he has the most intelligent character in the film, he is still designed to look stupid. It's harder to feel sorry for Tara Reid however, who I think its safe to say is just stupid in general. It is incredibly hard to believe she's playing a genius anthropologist, even harder to believe that when all hell breaks lose she can actually keep her calm, go into action chick mode and fire a weapon straight but when at one point she is looking at a computer screen and then moments later she has different hair and is now wearing glasses the bad editing and pure laziness of it all takes the biscuit and destroys what little believability there is left. Stephen Dorff also makes an appearance as an agent working for a secret agency who gets in Carnby's way for no other reason than you need at least one not very nice person in a movie like this and is extremely annoying yet still probably comes off the best just because he has the least screen time.

ALONE IN THE DARK actually had a budget of 20 million dollars, which makes you wonder where it all actually went. Perhaps it was the slow motion every other second during the first twenty minutes of the film, perhaps it was to pay for the bizarre musical choices such as the seventies TV style track that seems to transform into something from the gladiator soundtrack halfway through what has to be the worst car chase ever filmed, or the heavy metal montage where a team of soldiers seem to just fire guns at a wall for five minutes in a pitch black room while banging their heads. One thing is for certain though, it didn't go into the post production there are several moments when things just don't seem finished, such as one point when a man falling can clearly be seen attached to a wire. The film is also poorly put together to the point of it making very little sense at all. I'm not entirely sure where the movie is suppose to be set ( I'm sure it told you, but I was too god smacked by the onscreen badness to remember), the transitions from scene to scene are awfully disorientating, you just don't know where you are in the story or what is going on, bits from scenes often seem missing and Uwe Boll's idea of stylistic uses of Bullet Time and other modern filming techniques are embarrassing at best.

ALONE IN THE DARK actually features a number of references to other movies, well I say references, in reality Boll is simply ripping off movies that this one should not be allowed mention of in the same sentence. The massacre from the museum in THE RELIC, the gooey saliva dripping from the ceiling in ALIEN and even the closing shot of THE EVIL DEAD are all here and all these scenes do is remind you that you could be having a much better time than you are. ALONE THE DARK isn't just terrible movie making, its pure torture, and I suggest to you that if a loved one ever mentions a plan to view it then you get a hammer and take two nails to their eyeballs to save them from the pain.