For every Alfred Hitchcock, there is an Ed Wood. There are many talented directors working in the film industry today, but there are just as many infamously terrible directors churning out worthless trash on a regular basis. Uwe Boll, arguably the worst of the worst, has garnered a legion of haters since his earliest days in film making, and for many good reasons. “Doctor” Boll has no idea how tell a story visually, how to get good performances from actors, how to compose an interesting shot, or how to make a movie enjoyable in any way. After the cinematic train wreck that was House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, his second film to be released in American theaters, cemented the popular opinion of Boll as the king of schlock. The film opens with what is possibly the longest text crawl in movie history that flat out tells the audience this complicated back story about an ancient civilization and a dark world that they accidentally opened up and then some secret government agency or some crap. This thing seriously eats up the first minute and a half of run time and tells only the broadest bits of the back story in the most boring manner imaginable. This thing fails right out of the gate. The next part gives us a flash back about some kids in an orphanage that were experimented on by the evil Professor Hudgens. (Matthew Walker) One of these children escaped from Hudgens’ experiments and grew-up to become Christian Slater, or Edward Carnby as he calls himself. Carnby is a freelance paranormal investigator who spends most of his time hunting down ancient Abkani artifacts, the ones made by the civilization that decided it was a great idea to open a portal to a place they called the DARK WORLD!
Both Hudgens and Carnby are racing to collect all the little gold puzzle pieces that will reopen the portal, Hudgens so that he can ally himself with the dark world monsters, and Carnby so he can keep that portal closed. Carnby links up with his ex-girlfriend Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid) who is supposed to be a scientist of some kind, but for whatever reason, I just don’t buy Tara Reid as the scientist type. One of the dark monsters is released by a pirate (don’t ask) and tracks Carnby and Cedrac to the museum where she works to attack them. The monster is kind of a boney-looking dog that is sometimes invisible and sometimes not. While running from the CG dog creature, the agents of a secret government paranormal paramilitary group called 7-13 (not 7-11) storm the museum to shoot the monster a few times before it escapes. Commander Burke (Sephen Dorff) leads the team, and he is not happy to see Carnby at the scene. Carnby used to work for 7-13 after he escaped from the orphanage, but wait, Hudgens also work for 7-13 in an advisory capacity, and he works at the museum with Aline Cedrac. So why is it that none of these people know that Professor Hudgens is an evil douche bag that is putting dark world centipedes into people’s spines to turn them evil, and has been doing this for twenty years? The fact that this malformed story is supposedly based on a popular survival horror game that relied on quite, subtle atmosphere and legitimately scary situations makes the final product all the more disappointing. This movie is so bad, so disgustingly bad on every level that it’s hard to express in words alone. Stay far, far away from this twisted mockery of a film, unless you have a few friends around, a ready supply of alcohol, and a high tolerance for pain.
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