Infamous director Uwe Boll (“Far Cry”) spent a whopping $20 million in 2005 to film “Alone In The Dark” one of the most iconic video games of the 1990s. With Christian Slater of “True Romance” and “The Name of the Rose” fame, “American Pie” star Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff of the original “Blade,” the Wermelskirchen native even had quite a prominent cast on camera. . . Ultimately, however, the result resembles a cinematic catastrophe with a story that seems to fit together confusingly, amateurishly staged action, visibly cheap CGI effects and ridiculously lousy dialogue. In our FILMSTARTS review, it received the lowest possible rating of half a star.
“Alone in the dark“ runs today, June 14, 2023 at 10 p.m. on Tele 5. The channel offers a repeat on June 16 at 10:55 p.m. If these dates do not suit you, you can stream the film FSK 16 for free in the broadcaster’s media library until July 14, 2023. Alternatively, it is available from online retailers such as Amazon as Blu-ray, DVD or paid video-on-demand. The haptic variants include a longer Director’s Cut with FSK-18 approval:
For the intrepid among you, there’s even the no better “Alone In The Dark 2” starring Rick Yune, Lance Henriksen and Ralf Moeller, which also has an FSK 18 sticker:
“Alone In The Dark” on Tele 5: That’s the story
Edward Carnby (Christian Slater) is a private investigator who specializes in supernatural phenomena. He brought back from a trip a more than 10,000 year old totem of an extinct Indian tribe. He gives the artifact to his ex-girlfriend Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid). The archaeologist working for a museum must try to decipher the history of the artifact.
However, it doesn’t take long for disturbing things to start happening around them both: innocent civilians turn into bloodthirsty zombies and attack their fellow humans. Aline’s boss, Prof. Hudgens (Matthew Walker), seems to be to blame for this: he wants to use Carnby’s find to control a gateway between our world and an alien realm of dark forces.
Carnby warns his former military buddy, senior special agent for the government, Commander Rickard Burke (Stephen Dorff). He moves in with his unit to protect the town, but soon realizes that the origin of the spectacle seems to be linked to Carnby’s traumatic childhood…
“Alone in the darkbegins with an incredibly long introductory text and voice-over, explaining the actually quite simple situation in an almost ridiculously complicated way. Anything that takes forever to read, for example at the beginning of the classic “Star Wars” movies, seems like a condensed one-liner. It’s just as tough in “Alone In The Dark” – punctuated by one of the most poorly staged and most pointless sex scenes in Hollywood history plus several minutes of idleness – until finally the zombies come.
The boring one-dimensional undead aren’t the saving grace of the whole thing though, and they’re just another reason why Alone In The Dark consistently ranks among the worst video game movies of all time. That is why the attempt to ride the wave of success of the “Resident Evil” series failed miserably at the box office. However, that didn’t stop Uwe Boll from fabricating several other equally gruesome game adaptations such as “King’s Swords – Dungeon Siege”, “Postal”, “Far Cry” or “BloodRayne”.
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