Alone in the Dark

Game on: Part movie, part game, Alone in the Dark is a total mess

Jeannette Catsoulis

When a movie begins by casting Tara Reid as an archaeologist, there's really not much left to say. Personally, I blame the Coen brothers; if they hadn't scooped her from TV and set her down in The Big Lebowski, this vapid, talentless tabloid regular--who can scarcely set foot outside her door without experiencing a wardrobe malfunction--would still be selling Jell-O during Saturday morning cartoons.

Which she may be forced to return to if Alone in the Dark is any indication of her thespian development. Tarted up in horn-rimmed glasses and belly-baring jodhpurs, Reid plays Aline Cedrac, hottie intellectual and girlfriend of Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a "paranormal investigator" on the trail of 10,000-year-old human/alien hybrids known as the Abkani. Or something like that; all I can tell you is they disrupt electricity, hate daylight and look like something we might face if the creature from Alien were to get lucky with one of the raptors from Jurassic Park.

Bloody, brutal and with a pile-driver soundtrack, Alone in the Dark is supposedly based on the popular Atari video game, but I am reliably informed by the prevailing Internet chatter that the connection is tenuous at best. (The litmus test of a real dud has to be 12-year-old boys bitching about lack of character development.) German director Uwe Boll--who gave us the 2003 zombie stinker, House of the Dead--employs no fewer than three writers to help him stuff the film with abducted orphans, pseudo-mythology, and a direct crib from David Cronenberg's classic parasite movie, Shivers. And this is from a director with a Ph.D. in literature, no less.

Alone in the Dark is the kind of film where every cabbie drives like a stunt man and every line is delivered with portentous glee. "Just because you can't see things doesn't mean they can't kill you," drones Edward in tones as stiff as his facial muscles, after which my friend leaned over to whisper, "I've seen porn movies with better acting." And, incidentally, much better climaxes.