Alone in the Dark

Rated-R

____

By Todd Karella
January 28, 2005

While investigating the murder of a friend's death, a detective specializing in the paranormal finds a cult of devil worshippers is trying to unleash demons back into the world.

Any film with Christian Slater and Tara Reid as the stars should give any filmgoer a sense of ambivalence. While the premise is interesting, it's probably best to play wait and see until some reviews come out.

Original Story Synopsis:

Movie-Pix Best Guess:

Movie-Pix Hit or Miss

Best Guess Results:

Not nearly as interesting as the premise sounded.

The acting was as bad as suspected and the plot was all over the map.

Even the special effects had that B-rated quality to it.

~Not as scary as it sounds~

After having seen this film in an empty theatre, the title describes the audience's viewing perspective better than it does the film.
For a Straight-To-DVD film it's pretty good. Unfortunately, it was a major studio release.
After a long oral introduction, the story

begins at an orphanage where 20 children have mysteriously disappeared. One child remains behind but has no memory of what happened to the others.
Twenty years later we catch up with the same young boy Edward Carnby (Christian Slater) who is now a paranormal detective.
He has been hunting down Abskani relics in an attempt to find out how they link to his experience as a boy.

While he is searching he discovers that someone else is trying to stop him when a nearly indestructible man tries to kill him and take one of the relics. After a number of slow motion action shots, the use of bullet time and some bad choreography, Carnby manages to impale the man on a spike, severing his spine.
Armed with his new relic, Carnby heads off to see his brainy archeologist girlfriend Aline (Tara Reid). (There's certainly no type casting in this film.) With the other relic pieces that they have already found they can now put together what looks like a key.

When Carnby comments that it looks like the pieces were split up and taken to the farthest reaches of the known world, it probably should have been a clue.
While they are working on the puzzle, they are suddenly attacked by some hairless demon dog creatures that can shift in and out of phase. Fortunately for them, the former paranormal security task force, 713, that Carnby used to work for shows up at the last moment with more firepower than the U.S. Military.
The 713 has been tracking these paranormal activities and have found that they are converging upon the town.

Following the paranormal signatures they find themselves at a mine, one that has a secret passageway leading to Carnby's old orphanage.
An army of 713 agents guard the entrance while the three main characters take a small strike team to look for answers inside.
The monsters overrun the place, slaughtering all of the agents while they strike poses firing nonstop to the sounds of Heavy Metal music being played loudly in the background.
Deep in the mines they find a hidden laboratory where the children had been taken and experimented on, not by aliens or monsters, but by

They have no idea why this is happening, but have created specially coated bullets that can kill the creatures.
   The leader of the special task force is Commander Richards (Stephen Dorff) and happens to be Carnby's greatest rival. The two engage in the typical male posturing until they are forced to work together.
   At this point, the 20 children who disappeared 20 years ago and whom you are just finding out had gone back to leading normal lives disappear once again.
   They are easily found as they come after Carnby and Aline like super powered zombies. Once again, Richards and his forces are there to help out. Their attackers are strong, and before they can stop them almost all of Richards' men are killed.

the 713. Experiments that were done for unknown reasons to fuse aliens with the spinal chords of human beings.
   As they try to piece together the answers, the former director of the 713 and the now curator of Aline's museum shows up to inform them that he is responsible for what happened to the children 20 years ago. Somehow, while it's never explained, the experiments on the children have something to do with the pieces of the relic that when placed together are a key to opening the door to where the demon dogs live.
   Nobody seems to wonder how the creatures they've been fighting managed to escape from their cave. It also never occurs to the scientist during the last 20 years that instead of looking for some silly key and putting aliens inside people, that maybe he could have used some of the mining equipment in the mine and made a tunnel to the next room.
   As in all movies, the two main characters survive and manage to return to the city. When they finally get there it's an exact duplicate of the Resident Evil ending, where the entire city has been evacuated and they are standing in the middle of what looks like a war zone.
   Once you realize the film was based on a video game everything thing becomes clear, the bad plot, terrible acting, and the guns that never run out of ammo. Unfortunately, the video game is a hundred times better.