The only real entertainment you can get out of Alone in the Dark comes from reading its scathing reviews, many of which are hilarious in their no-holds-barred skewering of the film. It's amazing to me that Tara Reid and Uwe Boll still manage to find work in the business. Reid's puny acting skills seem to deteriorate further with every film she makes, while Boll has to be the worst "big name" director of the 21st century.

Apparently, the movie was originally intended to have an actual storyline, but Uwe Boll decided to scrap it in favor of more explosions. I don't know how a decent actor like Christian Slater got involved with this movie or how he made it through the filming with his sanity intact, but he's pretty much the only thing this film has going for it.

This film bears little resemblance to the original trilogy of Alone in the Dark games. I don't have any experience with the later releases in the series, but the Edward Carnby of the original game was a regular private investigator who was sent to find a piano in the house of a man who committed suicide and suddenly found himself attacked by ghostly monsters. In the movie, he's a veritable action-adventure hero with a mysterious childhood and a former career as an agent for a top-secret paranormal investigation unit called Bureau 713.

The whole story is built around the discovery of a previously unknown race of American Indians called the Abskani, who disappeared quite suddenly thousands of years ago after opening up a gateway to another dimension or something and letting something really, really bad into the world. Carnby (Slater) left the bureau because all of the Abskani artifacts he found were immediately classified, thus preventing him from finding out the truth. It turns out that this truth has a lot of personal meaning for him, as a missing chunk of his childhood can be traced back to a secret Abskani-related experiment conducted by rogue scientist Professor Hudgens (Matthew Walker). You don't have to remember all of this now, though, because most of it is explained in an interminably long prologue at the opening of the film.

The actual movie consists mostly of badly-shot special effects featuring alien entities attacking Carnby, his archaeologist girlfriend Aline (Reid), and the new commander of Bureau 713 (Stephen Dorff).

Since Uwe Boll thinks action and things that go boom are all that is needed to make a movie, you would think he would take the trouble to learn how to shoot those types of scenes. The man doesn't even know how to use slow motion properly, and he apparently chooses his camera angles completely at random, thus ruining the whole effect of most of the action scenes.

Of course, no explosion can be big enough to absorb the plot holes in the story or the black hole of acting generated by Reid. With multiple awards for worst directing, worst special effects, and worse acting, this is a film that really should be left alone in the dark. You can't say you haven't been warned.