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Back Shelf Beauties
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Alone in the Dark Sure, alone in the dark sounds like a fun way to spend time with party girl/accidental flasher Tara Reid, but she remains fully clothed and sober throughout the movie, so what's the point of giving her a leading role? Certainly, it isn't her acting ability. After this review, I won't be able to get a date with Reid no matter how drunk she might be at the time. Based on the video game (prophetic words of warning to anyone who loves movies, story, and plot development), Christian Slater stars as Edward Canby - a defrocked, former government paranormal investigator who has come into possession of a rare artifact that might be key to understanding an ancient battle between good and evil. He brings it back to his estranged girlfriend and archeologist, Aline (Tara Reid), for examination, but Edward's mysterious past has come back to haunt him, and, possibly, result in evil taking over the world. Can Edward and Aline save the world before it is too late? Just remember, when a movie is based on a video game because the game had, "a good story to it," that just means they named the characters before the players got to blow stuff up (which is the true point to video games, and why we love them). Sure, director Uwe Boll takes time at the beginning of the film to tell us the complicated story and background for Alone in the Dark via a Star Wars-like scroll (simultaneously spoken to us by a narrator because Boll doesn't think the people who buy tickets to Alone in the Dark can read), but it is the last time in the movie when story will matter because Boll proceeds to blow stuff up for the next 90 minutes with little regard for character development or plot. What the audience learns at the beginning is still true at the end, which makes for a boring, loud, grotesquely-obsessed-with-the-macabre movie punctuated with inane dialogue recited by actors who don't know what they are doing, or just don't care. Reid falls into the category of not knowing what she is doing (surprise! surprise!). Just because you tie her hair up, place some glasses on her face and put big words in her mouth doesn't make the character smart. Sadly, you need an actor who can make the words SOUND smart, and Reid won't be winning a Nobel Prize anytime soon (she's proof that alcohol kills brain cells … with a vengeance). Her archeologist character has no life when reciting some of the movie's worst lines, and Reid fails to give Aline any discernable or believable emotion at any time in the film. She doesn't even show us some skin during the gratuitous sex scene, which makes it even more meaningless and unnecessary than usual. Co-stars Stephen Dorff and Slater seem along for the ride, willing to collect a paycheck with hopes that Alone in the Dark might become an unlikely box office hit with a sequel, but Reid shows us her best talent is attending parties and pretending she is a star. The story stinks. The script stinks. The acting stinks. The special effects stink. 0 Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2005 - WaffleMovies.com
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