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.