Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Of the many fine and noble reasons to take on this Unwatchable project (a paycheck, an outlet for repressed hostility, an excuse to put off watching Berlin Alexanderplatz), the chance to familiarize myself with the oeuvre of Uwe Boll certainly ranks…somewhere. We pick on him a lot here, so it seems only fair that I ensure it’s justified. The first Boll work we encountered was BloodRayne 2: Deliverance back at #77, and this was my conclusion: “I have to assume this is not close to Uwe Boll’s worst work, because it’s pretty much indistinguishable from any other straight-to-video genre junk.”

Alone in the Dark is probably a step closer to Boll’s worst work. Like BloodRayne 2 and most of the Boll filmography, its origins lie in the ancient Japanese art of the “videogame.” The movie begins with the longest expository crawl I have ever encountered. You could combine all the opening crawls from every episode of Star Wars, including the ones about galactic trade routes, and they wouldn’t add up to the length of this thing. So much back story, so little need for it. It has something to do with an ancient advanced race of Indians called the Abnaki, who opened the portal to the world of darkness and let all the booga-boogas out.

Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a former agent for Bureau 713, the government agency of paranormal investigations (Your tax dollars at work under the Bush administration!), is haunted by these whatsihoosies, both in his dreams and in his real life, where they have taken over the bodies of people who grew up in the same orphanage as he did. Along with his girlfriend, the brilliant anthropologist and museum curator Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), and the forces of Bureau 713, headed up by hothead Burke (Stephen Dorff), he must defeat these computer generated beasties before they do all the terrible, terrible things.

It’s basically a cross between a zombie movie and an Aliens ripoff, with a little dash of Indiana Jones, but it would all be instantly forgettable if not for the deranged casting. Much has been made of poor Tara Reid in her thick glasses and hair-in-a-bun, trying to act all smart and stuff. And it’s true, one does have difficulty maintaining a straight face when she talks about “decoding the pictograms” or mispronounces “New-FOUND-land.” It’s like watching a Sarah Palin interview, which is not an experience I’ve been anxious to relive quite yet. But let’s not be sexist here. Can we not agree that Slater makes an equally implausible genius investigator, and that Dorff is perhaps a little out of his depth as a leader of men? It’s as if the bus carrying the entire drama club plunged over an embankment, and the drama coach was forced to recast the school play with the head cheerleader, the backup quarterback and the guy who makes bongs in wood shop.

All things considered, though, Alone in the Dark is a mighty tedious cacaphony of automatic gunfire and bad special effects. I'm still waiting for Dr. Boll to impress me with some Ed Wood-grade lunacy. Don't let me down.



Previously on Unwatchable:
64. Angels’ Brigade
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam