ALONE IN THE DARK (R) ½*

 

Directed by Uwe Boll. 90 minutes.

Starring Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff and Tara Reid. Released by Lions Gate Films.

 

At one point during Alone in the Dark, Christian Slater’s character says something along the lines of “this is finally falling into place,” concerning the many odd phenomena that take place during the course of the film. I wish he would give me a cheat sheet. I would label this movie with a word such as ‘inane’ or ‘moronic,’ if I could honestly say that I understood what exactly is going on in it. It is, however, ridiculous; that much I know. Take, for example, the oddly placed and completely uncalled for sex scene to some offbeat Caribbean sounding song halfway through the movie. Or, perhaps, the fight scene several minutes into the film, which rivals the fight scene in They Live for length (though, I admit, that scene in John Carpenter’s movie borders on brilliance) and really serves no purpose. Or, for that matter, the plot, which, in this case, I am using that word liberally. All of the scenes play out like the cliff notes of a movie.

 

The story is about…what? Christian Slater plays an agent of the paranormal, a demon-buster if you will. We are told in flashback that something bad happened to him when he was a child, along with 19 other children, though I am not sure what exactly that bad thing was. It seems that the children were used as experiments and had small, worm-like creatures placed in their spinal columns. For what purpose, I am still trying to figure out. These projects were undertaken by a doctor that now serves as a head scientist at a large museum. Tara Reid plays Slater’s long lost girlfriend. Long lost, that is, in the sense, that she punches him when seeing him for the first time in the movie. Apparently, Slater ran off to Chile for some reason, though director Uwe Boll does not see it fit to fully explain why he was there, what the artifact he brings back with him or how that artifact fits into the world domination plan of the good doctor. Let me take a breather for a moment… thanks, I’m back. While watching the film, I asked myself how Tara Reid’s curator character happens to work for the doctor that experimented on Slater when he was a child and how Slater does not seem to realize this.

 

Stephen Dorff and his team of paranormal agents enter the picture, only to be routinely dispatched throughout the film, including a good-looking woman whose face gets sliced in half, which we are shown not once, but twice for no apparent reason. Slater once worked with Dorff, but now no longer does. Their slinging of profanities at one another hints at a falling out somewhere along the road, but no good explanation is given for that either. Dorff is given the thankless job of marching around, machine gun in hand with an entourage following closely behind, and barking out orders. A lot of people mutter, in accordance to the events of the movie, that ‘it is happening again.’ What ‘it’ is, I am not quite sure.

 

Eventually, the other 19 children that were experimented on go nuts and attack Christian Slater. They are mowed down by the machine guns of the paranormal agents. Then, the agents are killed off by large monsters that move very quickly and resemble the aliens in the Alien movies. These creatures thrive in the dark, but their purposes and origins are not very well drawn out. Apparently, they originate from an ancient Indian tribe, who fortunately all died off and are not here to witness this movie. The story of these Indians later makes for a strange ending, in which mankind faces a similar conundrum. Boll obviously got, at least, part of the idea and ambience for his ending from 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, which represent the highs and lows of the inspiration spectrum, respectively.  

 

The film is based on a video game of the same name. I’m sure that game is fun, but director Boll is playing the game for us here and the movie ends up being like a video game that you can never get to the end of or figure out its objective. Boll’s previous film, House of the Dead, was also based on a video game and was not much better. I’d advise him to look for new inspirations in the future. This isn’t the worst horror movie that I will see all year- it is harmless. It is more The Grudge than it is Saw- it confuses me rather than sickens me. There are about a dozen horror films being released in the first third of the New Year, so let’s hope that they get better as they go. As for this one, it is a movie that deserves to stay alone in the dark of the theater.