Alone In The Dark Is Like Having Uwe Boll Sneak Into Your House At Night And Beat You
These situations--watching the film and being victimized by a slavering Uwe Boll--share three important similarities:
1.) Both events are physically painful and emotionally distressing;
2.) Both leave you at a loss for words to explain what just happened and why, and
3.) The blame for both can be attributed directly to the infamously talentless Uwe Boll.
When I say that Alone in the Dark is terrible, there's something you have to understand first. This film is terrible in direct comparison to the other movies my deeply troubling filmic masochism has driven me to watch over the past few days, Dave Meyers' awful The Hitcher and Joel Schumacher's reviled The Number 23.
Let me restate that for clarity's sake: Alone in the Dark is terrible compared to two films that got a 28 and a 24 on Metacritic. Comparing The Hitcher to Alone in the Dark is, to me, like comparing Battlefield Earth to an hourlong series of commercials played in reverse with the volume turned off. Yes, the former is a supremely stupid movie, but the latter isn't even a movie. It's so bad it's something else entirely.
A headline from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer simply calls this film "a baffling monstrosity," and that's as effective a phrase as any I can think of.
I firmly believe, however, that everyone should be forced to see any film that's this mind-bogglingly terrible. Critics often hand out zeroes or Fs to whatever stupid tripe they're watching, forgetting that as stupid as that particular tripe may be, at least it's directed by someone who can direct movies.
Granted, stuff like Saw 3 or whatever has its share of mistakes, but watching this film it's impossible to believe that Uwe Boll has even the slightest idea how to direct a movie. Not just that he doesn't know how to do it well; he doesn't understand even the most basic concepts of editing and shots and dialogue. He's directed 14 films and he's currently directing six more. It's not just that he's not learning. It's not just that nobody's stopping him. It's that by all appearences, he's getting worse and gaining velocity. He's like some kind of bewildering theoretical physics problem, a mechanical impossibiility of awfulness. He's like plummeting terrified into the sun.
Oh, and Tara Reid in this thing literally has to be seen to be believed.
