Talk about ripping the hell out of a movie. This review is from the NY Post. It's really funny though.
"FORGET creepy demons, shadowy conspiracies and ancient evils. The only real mystery about the in competent and unscary new horror movie "Alone in the Dark" is why Tara Reid doesn't show her boobs.
Yes, we've seen them before, but if you're going to hire Reid — a truly awful actress — for your B-movie, isn't half the point to show some skin?
But "Alone in the Dark" director Uwe Boll apparently couldn't convince Tara to show her goodies in the movie's obligatory sex scene — even though he already had an R rating for the film's almost continual violence.
And that shows you just how limp this "X-Files" wannabe is. It doesn't even qualify as "so bad it's good," although by that standard it does have its moments.
At a recent screening, the audience hooted in derision during a ridiculously long voice-over prologue, as a narrator droned on and on about a gate into the world of darkness, a 10,000-year-old Native-American civilization that had mysteriously vanished and a secret government agency doing dreadful experiments on orphaned children.
The giggles just kept coming when paranormal investigator Christian Slater showed up to lay some heavy dialogue on us. ("Fear of the dark," he opines, "is what keeps most of us alive.")
Slater's nemesis (played by Pamela Anderson's new boyfriend, Stephen Dorff) also earned snorts and mock applause when he started emoting like he was gunning for an Oscar. ("My guys up there are dying for nothing, f - - -ing nothing," Dorff yells at one point, and then tips over a table.)
But the hilarity reached its peak once Reid finally arrived onscreen, playing Slater's ex-girlfriend, a brainy(!) anthropologist in glasses and enormous diamond earrings.
Unfortunately, Reid doesn't play smart very well.
For one thing, she doesn't know how to pronounce the name of the Canadian province Newfoundland. (It sounds like "Newfundlund," not "New-FOUND-land.")
For another, she spends the whole movie with the same expression on her face — it's supposed to convey awe and blood-curdling fear, but mostly suggests constipation.
It's easy to pick on Reid, but, sorry, she really is a bad actress — although the lame script doesn't do her any favors. ("You all right?" Slater asks at one point, to which she replies, "The hairs on the back of my neck just stood up.")
"Alone in the Dark" does have a plot — a completely incomprehensible grab bag of tricks from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Dawn of the Dead" and "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan."
It also features lots of gunfire, which is appropriate for a movie based on a popular video game (like Boll's last effort, 2003's "House of the Dead.")
At one point, Boll gives up on telling the story and launches into a long and bloody music-video sequence in which Slater, Reid and a posse of cops (most of whom look like Victoria's Secret models) blow away monsters to the sound of crunching German heavy metal.
As it turns out, that's the most original part of the movie — totally unrelated to the rest, but at least it has a pulse.
The rest of the time, you'll wish the monsters would just eat Tara and get it over with."
|