VGMRP: ALONE IN THE DARK

Some say Uwe Boll is the new Ed Wood, Jr. I say... Yes!

Top Ten Moments from Alone In The Dark:

10) The Cabbie Assassin
Minutes into the movie, the lead bad guy picks up his phone and barks "Kill him!" We find out shortly that he is speaking to a bald assassin, who awaits Carnby (Christian Slater)'s arrival at the airport... in a yellow cab. Yes. The deadly killer awaits in a yellow cab, so he can be easily spotted while trying to kill Christian Slater with his death-cab. A crappy car chase ensues, and the incredulity increases when the evil taxi rams Carnby's taxi and the fender is dented, but seconds later when they turn a corner, the taxi is undamaged. After the inept car chase, Christan Slater throws the Cabbie Assassin through a window. Not to be outdone, Cabbie Assasin bursts through a door, Hulk-style, and punches an old man on general principle. Logic: 0, Ridiculously awful awesome fight scene: 1

9) Christian Slater is... Edward Carnby!
Ah, sweet, career destroyed Christian Slater. First, he tells a small child on a plane to basically go to hell, and then says in a narration "I bet you think I was an asshole to that kid back there!" Then he gets to say "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. " He also wears the same costume throughout the entire movie, a trenchcoat and a black tank top. I'd say he needs a shave, but what he really needs is some whiskey. Or maybe I do.

8) Continuity Be Damned
You have to be paying a little bit of attention to catch the cab smash up continuity error. That would be when Cabbie Assassin's cab smashes into Christian Slater's Cab, only to be repaired second later. But it's hard to miss the giant hole of credibility at the end. Picture this: we see fields of slaughtered good guys in the dead of night, a walkie-talkie blaring messages to nobody. We see Christian Slater and Tara Reid climbing up to safety while Stephen Doriff is sacrificing himself to kill the monsters. Cut back to the empty field at night. Cut to the bomb going off. Cut to Slater and Reid coming out of a hole just in time- in BROAD FREAKING DAYLIGHT. We go from midnight to noon in seconds, and all it took was Stephen Dorrif's corpse.

7) The Random Ice Factory
Because Uwe Boll saw THE MATRIX that one time, he decided to use bullet time to show when he gets shot. It's probably the most expensive shot in the movie. Carnby fires two bullets, and we track them in slow motion. Why two bullets? So the first bullet can smash a block of ice, and the second bullet can travel through the ice particles. Why the Ice? Because it looks cool, damn it. Don't mess with Uwe Boll.

7.5) The Bullets Dont Actually Kill The Cabbie Assassin
That's right! We use bullet time to see the bullets hit the guy and then it doesn't do anything! The evil cabbie assassin and ends up skewered on spikes.

6) Tara Reid Sucks
No one's very good in this movie- Stephen Doriff looks disgusted with the material, and Slater's barely sober throughout-but Tara Reid wins the prize for trying hard and achieving so little. She has many bad moments, but the worst is when she mispronounces "Newfoundland" as "New Found Land." Not since Denise Richards was Dr. Christmas Jones, nuclear physicist, has science been so mistreated.
She also gets to hug Christian Slater, only to slap him seconds later and scream "I thought you were dead, asshole!" I miss Taradise.

5) The Support Characters from the Ed Wood Playbook

One of the hallmarks of Ed Wood, Jr.'s crapsterpieces are the johnny-on-the-spot supporting characters, awkwardly framed and spouting out backstory to our heroes. Mr. Wood usually had cops saying, "Whats this crazy talk about ghouls coming back from the dead these past few weeks, Sergeant Davis, and congrats on that promotion!" Here, we get four different unimportant characters rushing up and giving us awkward exposition, often in one unbroken shot, while every one else stands around waiting for someone to yell cut. So we have Character C telling Character B in front of Character A, "Why, Character A? She's the best archeologists in these parts!" Keep in mind that Character A is Tara Reid, playing an archelologist. It's a small consolation that soon after Character C talks, he/she/Stephen Doriff is killed.

4) The Dune-Esque Text Crawl.

The movie begins with the following narration, that we also see on screen:

"In 1967, mine workers discovered the first remnants of a long lost Native American civilization - The Abkani. The Abkani believed that there are two worlds on this planet, a world of light and a world of darkness. 10,000 years ago the Abkani opened a gate between these worlds. Before they could close it, something evil slipped through. The Abkani mysteriously vanished from the Earth. Only a few artifacts remained, hidden in the world's most remote places. These artifacts speak of terrifying creatures that thrive in the darkness, waiting for the day when the gate can be opened again. Bureau 713, the government's paranormal research agency, was established to uncover the dark secrets of this lost civilization. Under the direction of archaeologist Lionel Hudgens, Bureau 713 began collecting Abkani artifacts. When the government shut down his controversial research, Hudgens built a laboratory hidden within an abandonded gold mine. There, he conducted savage experiments on orphaned children in an attempt to merge man with creature. Hudgens victims survived as "sleepers" - lost souls awaiting the moment of their calling. "

Yeah.

3) The 'Ambigious' Ending

So, after Steven Doriff's corpse blows up with so much dynamite that it turns night into day (see number 8 above), Uwe Boll decided to get all artsy and end on a downer note- the aliens/ghosts/monsters/whatever have overrun the earth! Or at least the canadian city they got permission to film in! But the awesomely awful thing is, Uwe Boll forgot that his monsters don't kill to eat, they just kill to kill. So there are no bodies. Anywhere. Now that might be explained by the subtitle that says, "8:48 am, city evacuated!" But it doesn't explain all the cars in the middle of the street, left empty, with no bodies around. I think what happened was this- they got permission to shoot the streets early in the morning, with no one around. When someone pointed out that it just looked like a quiet sunday, and not the apocalypse, someone said, "What the hell, let's put an empty truck in the middle of the shot." And Uwe Boll said "I love making movies!"

2) The Villain's Shitty Plan

So you've got this mad professor. And he infects these kids with some kind of evil spirit alien thing. So that he can control them and some undetermined time in the future. And Christian Slater wants to stop that. I'm with you. The problem is, they get 'activated' halfway through the movie, and become weird zombie-esque guys... who get mowed down with machine gun bullets. And killed. And that's the last we see of them. The last 35 minutes doesn't even mention them. Mad professor can appearently control the alien things. If this was the case... what was he doing wasting 25 years with the kids? So that they could get mowed down my semi-automatic rifles? Was his actual plan to just open the door to the evil world? So he could get mauled? If you hold your breath long enough, it starts to make sense.

1) The "Protect the Perimeter!" Guy.

His name is Agent Miles. Right before our three "stars" go to face the evil, in the dark but not so alone, he is told, nay, demanded to PROTECT THE PERIMETER. His jaw tightens. Yes, he will, he says to himself. After getting in a petty lover's quarrel with the guy working on the generator, he bravely tells the other extras wearing paintball armor (seriously: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369226/trivia) to PROTECT THE PERIMETER. This involves having lots of automatic rifles trained in the direction of the computer generated creatures. He has computer generated helicopters at his disposal, but they are no match for the computer generated creatures who have learned to jump into them. He also has a wall of tires at his disposal, and tells his men to wait until they've cleared it. This is so they can set off explosions behind the tires, out of our sight, and we hear the monsters squealing without having to actually animate them. What makes this whole sequence so special is that instead of following our characters who are, you know, Alone In The Dark, Boll keeps cutting back to Protect the Perimeter guy losing lots of troops to vicious pixels, until he is the last one left. The Perimeter is not Protected, but it doesn't impact our heroes in any way. The whole sequence is completely, wonderfully pointless. I guess the strategy was, "we paid for the CG, we're going to USE the CG!"

Listen to me: ALONE IN THE DARK is a real piece of shit. But with a bottle of Jack Daniels, in the right light, she's a star. One star, to be exact. But a star nonetheless.

STAR RATING: * (out of Five)

P.S. ALONE IN THE DARK is based on a creepy but dated video game about a detective locked in a mansion, trying to solve his way out before monsters get him. The gameplay was clunky but the experience got a lot of mileage out of the eery silences, the complex puzzles and the inherent mystery. This movie has no silences, complexity or mystery. But it does have a Perimeter.


PROTECT THE PERIMETER!