Alone in the Dark

MOVIE REVIEW Video game adaption falters on screen

BY JAMEELA T. ABDULLAH

For the Titan

“Alone in the Dark,” is a chaotic piece of handiwork with horrible acting and sloppily stitched together thematic cliches.

Newbie director Uwe Boll, whose 2003 effort, the marginally less bad, “The House of the Dead,” also took its cue from the game industry.

That’s 0 for 2.

Wouldn’t you think he would get a clue and stop making bad game to movie adaptation fl ops?

The movie starts with an impenetrable back story that is slowly scrolled across the screen while a solemn narrator reads the portentous text that establishes a mood of instant confusion.

Much of it babbles on about the ill fate of an ancient culture called Abskani, who foolishly opened the portal to another dimension, letting in some very evil creatures.

Once freed, the creatures destroy the Abskani race completely.

The movie’s opening scene fl ashes back 22 years to a sinister mad scientist, Professor Hudgens’ (Mathew Walker) terrible experiments on a group of orphan children, merging them into mon

CHRIS HELCERMANAS-BENGE/Lions Gate Christian Slater stars as Edward Carnby in “Alone in the Dark.”

sters.

The next scene fast forwards to the present day. The orphans have all grown up and remain sleepers waiting to be reawakened by the return of the evil creatures.

Christian Slater plays Edward Carnby, a paranormal investigator with a sordid past. It turns out that Carnby is one of twenty orphans who disappeared after being implanted with a spinal-shaped parasite two decades earlier.

He’s also is a former agent for the mysterious paranormal inves

tigation Bureau 713; all of the agents have been contaminated with the alien life-form.

Lucky for Carnby, a childhood brush with near electrocution has neutralized the alien within, leaving him free to save the world from the fate that befell the Abskani Culture.

For answers, Carnby turns to ex-girlfriend, Aline Cedrac, (Tara Reid) an accomplished (she has a hair bun and brainy glasses to prove it) anthropologist specializing in Abskani artifacts. Unfortunately, Reid doesn’t play smart very well. Eventually, the two join forces with Stephen Dorff’s over heated, tough guy government agent Richard Burke, solving the mystery of an ancient artifact, fending off nasty, superimposed creatures and keeping the world (or at least Vancouver) safe from evil.

“Alone in the Dark” does have an original plot, a completely incomprehensible grab bag of tricks from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Dawn of the Dead” and “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.”

At one point, Boll gives up on telling the story and lunches along into a bloody music-video sequence in which Slater, Reid and a posse of cops blow away monsters to the sound of weird crunching heavy metal.

I was really looking forward to seeing a Christian Slater movie again, but this was less than a triumphant return.

He runs through most of the fi lm in 80’s retro gear: a black ribbed tank top and brown leather trench coat, frequently uttering cryptic lines about his fear of the dark.

Being afraid of the dark is what keeps must of us alive. The plot struggles to unfold on several levels.

Thanks to the magic of Hollywood, the script uses every possible device to keep its audience informed.

In addition to its exposition of off-screen events through dialogue, voiceovers offer background information on the baffl ing scenes being played out before our bewildered eyes.

Sadly, it’s all done in vain, as no amount of explanation can givecoherence to such a disorganized mess. There’s nothing exciting or particularly scary about this movie, except the conceptual horror of the acting.

What can you honestly expect from a movie based on the Atari video game? This one should have gone straight to video.