Uwe Boll is Alone In The Dark about his lack of talent
24 11 2005I watched Alone in the Dark… God Bless TMN onDemand. Didn’t have to pay for it, and when the bad acting bugged me, I could pause it.
Very, very, very low expectations from the guy who created House of the Dead (which didn’t really take place in a house). Surprisingly, the worst performance wasn’t by the director, but by Tara Reid… as low as your expectations would be of her thespianism, she was an absolute disaster to watch.
There’s an opening crawl to the movie, and it’s long… REALLY long… and with a voice over for those in the audience who are too stupid to read, that’s not even done by any of the lead actors. Apparently it was inserted because the test audiences were so confused by the lack of relevant information given during the film.
Christian Slater tries to do the grungy, ex-government operative thing, and winds up being a pale, emotionless Fox Mulder (think about that concept for a second).
The storytelling is horrible. There’s a part where they cut away from the main characters, to the strike team ‘defending the perimeter’. Spends WAY too long on them, since we’ve had no set up for their characters… imagine giving an ensign in a red shirt ten minutes of a Star Trek episode, and that’s the feeling you get at a point in the movie when they’re supposed to be building to the climax.
Stephen Dorff is making a career being in bad, ’scary’ films. Aside from this film, he was in the first Blade, FearDotCom, and Cold Creek Manor (which I’ve trashed on before). If that’s not enough, look at what his first film was. His performance was probably the least irritating of the bunch in this film, but still over-the-top delivery and cursed with bad writing.
It’s possible that my extraordinarily low expectations helped it, but it wasn’t as bad as House of the Dead. I’d say it wasn’t as bad as A Sound Of Thunder, but that would be a lie. Sound of Thunder suffered from being stuck in Post Production Hell when the production company went bankrupt. It had second-rate CG, and the editing was messy, but it’s impossible to blame anyone involved in production of this film for its failure.
Alone in the Dark doesn’t have that excuse. Additionally, the story was critically flawed and plagued with plot holes. The acting was unbelievable at best, and seemingly read right from the script at worst. The filming style seemed to change several times throughout the movie, but not for effect… perhaps because the director was coming up with experimental ideas, tried them, then never removed them.
