Seeing the article title, you might wonder why someone spends their time watching a 20-year-old film adaptation by Uwe Boll. Well, I had already made up my mind to watch some game movie, but it was hard to pick which one. It’s especially hard knowing how bad most of them are, so I thought, I might as well pick something extra bad. Both are mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records, the game, and the movie: Game for being the first survival horror game and the movie because it’s so bad. If you are aware of Uwe Boll’s track record this shouldn’t be surprising – he’s specialized in it: he has either written, produced or directed almost 15 straight-to-video game movies. I watch a lot of weird and trashy films but I can usually find films that are so bad and campy they are entertaining. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them.

I have a very little history with the Alone in the Dark game franchise. I’ve only played the first game, ages ago. I remember there being some hype about the game’s 3D polygon graphics and atmospheric, Lovecraft-influenced game world. I hated the controls and fixed camera angles though so I ditched the game quick. Even with my limited play hours, I could say what the main themes of the film version should be: atmospheric, Lovecraftian, survival horror. Not that hard, right? It’s not exactly the same as the main character doing roundhouse kicks and shooting shadow creatures with an assault rifle, while metal music is blasting in the background. According to what I’ve read the film script has very similar themes as the game, but the director took some liberties to tweak it “a bit”.

To elaborate more about the plot, Christian Slater plays a paranormal detective studying the ways of an ancient tribe and then there’s an evil scientist who wants to use the same knowledge to open a portal to another dimension. A dimension filled with these shadowy monsters. A lot of badly edited fighting and shooting is involved, some car chases, explosions, awfully dumb dialogue, and bad acting.

After all this bashing and various movie critics claiming it is one of the worst movies ever made, I don’t think it’s that bad. Surely, it’s a terrible film but it was also one of the first Boll’s mainstream movies and it caught a lot of attention. Maybe people thought his career wouldn’t last more than a couple of years. Why and how he’s been able to continue in the movie business is because of some loopholes in the German tax system. It has been fixed since, but in short, the investors had to pay taxes only on returns the movie make, investments being fully deductible. Some other bonuses included being able to delay and reduce the tax weight in general.

So, I’ve seen worse movies, and Alone in the Dark might even be better than a common Asylum movie (the Asylum is a movie studio producing cheap straight-to-video mockups of well-known blockbusters). I’m also thankful that after watching Alone in the Dark, the action scenes of the latest Matrix movie look much better.

Released: 28. 1. 2005

Director: Uwe Boll

Writers: Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer

Genre: Horror

Available: DVD and Blu-ray, Amazon.com

Pictures: Screenshots from the movie, taken by the author.