Film 23: Alone in the Dark (2005)

Up until now, I haven't reviewed any truly terrible movies. I've done some bad movies like The Ridiculous 6 and Super Mario Bros., but as bad as they were, movies have gone so much worse.

Enter Alone in the Dark. 'Based on the video game' is a sentence that rarely inspires confidence. 'Directed by Uwe Boll' is another. put the two together, and in this case you end up with a movie that is an unmitigated disaster of storytelling.

The 'plot' if you can call it that, is centered around paranormal detective Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), who unravels mysteries with supernatural phenomena.

This movie manages to find every movie-making pitfall and dive right in. Heck, right from the start, we get a slow crawl of text, with someone narrating the very text we are reading, then it cuts to a piece of story that only matters about half-way into the movie, then cuts to Carnby on a plane, and then it's Carnby who starts narrating. That's five minutes of movie and it's already horrendous. Then we have the camera work, which is so blurry any action fails to register. Even when it slows down we realise that it's better that we didn't see it, because the acting is so fake that a scene where Carnby is getting 'strangled' drew a laugh out of me. The acting is terrible all-round; people singled out Tara Reid when the film was first released, but everyone here is incredibly stiff, and it isn't helped by the fact that every piece of dialogue is forced and unnatural. They used the opening text crawl to explain about some ancient civilisation, but then they go ahead and awkwardly insert dialogue about it into a scene that renders the opening crawl completely unnecessary. Every plot point is complete nonsense, and half the time manage to weigh down the movie until a 90-minute feature feels three hours long. This movie is an absolute trial to get through.

The Verdict: Don't watch it. If you want to watch it because you love 'so bad it's good' movies, I challenge you to try. I doubt there's anyone who could legitimately enjoy this movie, because everything from the acting to the story to the editing to the, well, everything, is just plain bad.

Rating: 1/10. I'd go lower if my rating system allowed for it.

Published July 13th, 2016