Card-carrying B-movie fans get your name tags at the door, we have a one-man film festival going on as we speak . . .
Having nothing whatsoever to do with Jack Sholder’s 1982 film by the same name (though it would have indubitably been better off if it had), modern day cinema’s equivalent to Ed Wood, Uwe Boll, follows his cinematic atrocity of two years prior, House of the Dead, with something so mind-boggling subpar, even in respect to its predecessor, that the mere thought of executing such a level of anti-accomplishment provokes, nay, demands clichés such as “digging under the barrel,” thereby proving that earning a doctorate does not entail the prerequisite of common sense while suggesting that the Arts might not be aesthetically analogous.
Basing his newest film on yet another video game, the artistically handicapped Boll seems to hold a steadfast resolve upon, not one, but two issues (thus, prompting the non sequitur notion that he has had an equal number of thoughts during the course of this life): One, despite countless discussions so far ending in a stalemate, video game premises make good movies and, two, in lieu of what his previous works adamantly proclaim, that he’s a director. Such are the unsubstantiated, if not overtly erroneous, grounds that the Good, er, Bad Doctor builds his newest work upon.
Boll opens with a Star Wars-esque voice-over scroll of the history leading up to his tale, a verbose, overlong ditty which could have just as easily been shown instead of told in the form of flashbacks as, indeed, he does midway through the feature but, natch, using characters as a mouthpiece. As such, we are allotted a 10,000 year-old Native American civilization, the Abkai, that–wouldn’t ya’ know it, being Manicheans–let out the bad from their Pandora’s Box, hence the ancient peoples being extinct. And, well, it gets unnecessarily convoluted from here and, even with the line-for-line intro which the plot departs from arbitrarily, I won’t bother because neither should you.
Moving on, what can be said of a film whose credits list a “TTransportation Captain” while enlisting the A-team efforts of Hollywood’s greatest, including Mr. Heroin himself, Christian “I-Always-Looked-Surprised” Slater, Tara “Drunken Plastic Surgery-at-a-Discount” Reid, and Stephen “Insert-Derisive-Nickname-at-Will” Dorff ? (With the latter, it is perhaps not a good sign that, once someone hears you are in a movie, the initial response is “Awe . . . fuck!”) Answer: A surprisingly educational one in which we learn there are numerous Canadian banks in California; corpses roll over on their own accord; cabs are stick shifts; government bureaus, though closed, remain open (of course we intuitively know this but it would take Boll’s genius to affirm such); wounds, once healed, instantaneously become gaping sores within a blink of an eye–which is the exact amount of time that super bullets lose their effectiveness before regaining them.
Atop the consistency faux pas, we are forced to contend with the metaphysics of our villains, which are sketchy at best from the get-go, only to be overtly, unapologetically eschewed during the climax because, alas, Boll was taught in lit class that light equates with good, to hell with the prior note that his monsters are touché when it come to sunlight . . . . Then there’s the matter of poor editing, such as the case in which two characters, placed in the foreground, are met by an orphan whom, upon making the offer of tea, turns and ascends a flight of stairs–the problem being that we watch as the character’s ass bobs up and down for twenty-some-odd paces before going out of frame, the distraction all but eradicating our focus upon the current dialogue which, supposedly, is central to the scene. But, then again, the characterization itself avails itself to being either typecast or forthrightly absent. James Bond’s Q finds yet another incarnation while Reid plays, get this, someone smart. Talk about challenging yourself with roles. Thank God Boll had the presence of mind to place glasses on the character in order to aide in our disbelief . . . . And then there’s the matter of negligent plot exposition, i.e. plot holes, such as why some of the infected appear as zombies while others as monsters. To add to the latter, just because you visually rip-off Ridley Scott’s Alien does not mean that we will issue you benefit of the doubt, especially considering that your forerunner does his audience the service of explaining things as he goes along. I take that back, plot holes . . . um, yeah . . . the awe that is being evoked is due to having experienced your first plot chasm. Feel free to gape at will.
Yet, despite all, the true trademark of a Woodian is a genuine, oblivious lapse of logic. For example, attempt to trace the rationale of the following: “They’re all coming here for a reason. Until we know what it is, we won’t be able to stop them.” However, Boll can’t take sole credit here because three, count ’em three people gave these lines the O.K. before shooting began, though, considering his companion’s lack of experience and the tone of the film (it takes practice to overlook something this blaringly asinine), I would like to think Elan Mastai helmed the original dialogue in question for his truncated, very hyperactive reading of Lovecraft leaves one with the impression that the writer views the American gothic short story master as Arnold Schwarzenegger with a fountain pen.
Regardless of how inept, incompetent, and unskilled Uwe Boll might be, he is undoubtedly, much like Ed Wood, onto something: The idea that, if bad enough, people will come to see just how bad is “bad.” On this note, the director does not disappoint with Alone in the Dark as, once more, he goes one less than he did before, leaving one with, not only a bad aftertaste, but the migraine-inducing hypothetical of how his next effort could possibly get any worse.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
