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# ‘Alone in the Dark’ a waste of time
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/alone-in-the-dark-a-waste-of-time/
- Published: 2005-01-28T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T06:02:53.000Z
- Author: Dan Dunn
- Tags: Entertainment, Santa Monica, #archive-import

Back in the days when quality was a determining factor in deciding on which films moviegoers spent their hard-earned dough, it’s a safe bet that ushers and projectionists would be alone in the theater during showings of “Alone in the Dark.” Ah, but these are the days of high-powered marketing campaigns and tech-geek manufactured chicanery that hordes of impressionable youngsters and gray matter-less adults find nearly impossible to resist. So the seats at the multiplex will have butts in them for this laughably bad film adaptation of yet another apocalyptic-Goth video game. I pity those butts and the eyes attached to them, for what they’ll see is a deliriously-edited special-effects cannonade featuring a once-semi-respectable movie star (Christian Slater) slogging through a morass of detritus left over from seemingly every bad sci-fi flick ever committed to celluloid. During the precious few moments when everything in sight isn’t being blown to smithereens to the bone-rattling beat of a soundtrack only a 15-year-old death metal fan could love, Slater gets to engage in some atrocious dialogue and fight one overblown battle after another with a surgically-enhanced punch-line (Tara Reid) and a scruffy little D-lister (Stephen Dorff) who chews up the crud with such gusto, it’s a wonder he didn’t contract trench mouth. There are far better things to do while alone in the dark, and most of those don’t cost anything.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 28, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/012805.pdf?ref=smdp.com)