Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 28, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
At the screening of Alone in the Dark I attended, the projectionist twice misjudged a reel change, which meant that the audience was treated to an onscreen countdown before the picture came back up. I suspect that might have been an attempt to remind the audience that they were watching a big-screen feature, because everything else about Alone in the Dark—like director Uwe Boll’s previous horror game adaptation, House of the Dead—suggests a direct-to-video movie that somehow escaped into theatrical play.
Actually, that comparison isn’t quite fair, considering that such fine indie chillers as Dead End and My Little Eye went the straight-to-video route in the past year. Similarly, to call Boll’s direction strictly pedestrian would be an insult to all the fine citizens who walk the city streets every day, and to say that Alone’s characters and dialogue are cardboard would demean that fine material that allows us to store and ship our consumer goods.
Alone in the Dark doesn’t even make good on the promise of its title. No one in the film ever winds up solo in an unlit place, though there is a shootout setpiece set in a pitch-black room lit only by muzzle flashes, which would have been cool had it been shot and edited in such a way that it was possible to tell what’s happening. Later, characters venture down into subterranean chambers that are so well-lit (with no visible source), you wonder why the people invading them need their flashlights. Never once does the movie evoke the primal terror one might feel being stuck by oneself in a place where you can’t see what’s around you.
What Alone in the Dark does offer is a story so hopelessly muddled that a ridiculously long, narrated pre-credits crawl has been tacked onto the movie in an attempt to explain it. There’s also a great deal of voiceover given to Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a paranormal researcher to whom something terrible happened when he was a child in an orphanage. He was one of 20 kids earmarked for a horrific experiment; he got away, but two decades later, all the other grown-up subjects have wandered away from their lives and are reappearing as homicidal zombies. Beastly reptilian creatures that can appear and disappear at will also emerge, as part of a sinister plot whose purpose is never clear, and whose participants never bother to adequately explain it.
All that stands in the way of darkness overtaking Earth (or something) is Carnby, who continues to question what’s going on even after pages of exposition have been devoted to it; a squad of heavily armed monsterbusters led by a one-dimensional Stephen Dorff; and an assistant museum curator played by Tara Reid. In the great tradition of gorgeous actresses playing smart women, she sports glasses and wears her hair in a bun in an attempt to convey intelligence—a losing battle given the lines she’s been given to speak. She’s also on hand to take part in a sex scene with Slater that’s so abrupt and out-of-nowhere that she forgets to take off her underwear for it.
Needless to say, none of this is remotely scary or exciting, and the dialogue is too banal to elicit the sort of campy laughs that can make a movie like this tolerable. And getting back to the film’s title: What a shame that it has to impugn the memory of the terrific, same-named 1982 satirical slasher movie, which is at least getting a special-edition DVD later this year that’ll help salvage its rep. As far as the movie at hand is concerned, Alone in the Dark does seem accurate in one respect: It’s likely to describe the experience of anyone who goes to see it after the opening weekend.
