Alone In The Dark: rare insight on why Uwe Boll's masterpiece failed

Everyone who's known me personally for any reasonable length of time knows that I love bad movies and anything associated with them. From the classic Medved Brothers tomes like The Golden Turkey Awards to the popular and accessable MST3K to comprehensive modern websites like Jabootu, if it covers terrible movies, I'm there. As entertaining and often hilarious as these sources may be, we rarely gather any hard evidence as to why a particular film is so dreadful. We can always point and laugh over silly rubber monster suits, gaping plot holes, and incoherent dialogue, but seldom do we know why those elements are present. Was the director blessed with an awesome vision but couldn't achieve enough funding to pull it off? Was a reasonably good presmise betrayed by a ghastly script? Was the whole project ruined in post-production through overzealous editing by the studio? All are easy to speculate about, but difficult to prove.

That's why it's so refreshing to see an article like today's Something Awful, which explains precisely where Uwe Boll's poorly-recieved video game movie Alone in the Dark went wrong. The article is written by a non-regular to the site, Blair Erickson, who explains that he was given the chance to work on the Alone In The Dark movie script, right around the time that Boll was finishing up his similarly crappy Sega arcade game homage House of the Dead. According to the article, Erickson wrote a reasonable script with actual story elements like characterisation (remember that?) but that Boll wanted something with gun battles and car chases. Keep in mind, of course, that this is supposed to be an atmospheric horror film: the game it's based on was set in Victorian times and featured a detective named Edward Carnby exploring a mysterious and creepy house. For those who have never played it, imagine a Silent Hill game starring Sherlock Holmes, that's not too far off. That's certainly a servicable, if well-worn, premise for a horror film, but Boll seemed more interested in mixing elements of Tomb Raider, Blade, and Alien. Come to think of it, that might have made a decent film too, with the right director. The article chronicles some of the arguments between director and screenwriter, complete with Boll's rather inelegant english and rather faint ideas of what a horror film involves. Erickson (who always refers to himself as "we", suggesting either that he had a screenwriting partner not mentioned in the article or he's British royalty) ultimately walked away from the project. Good for him, I say, as being associated with a turkey like Alone in the Dark would have been an unwise career move.

Of course, the article only really presents one side of the story, but it's an argument that very much rings true, especially considering how wretched Alone in the Dark ultimately turned out. As a side note, I've always wondered why movie makers bother to license properties for their films if they're not going to be faithful to them at all. The putrid Dungeons & Dragons film, for example, had virtually no connections with any existing Dungeons & Dragons material whatsoever. So why bother licensing it at all? Neither dungeons nor dragons are patented concepts, nor are haunted houses or scary monsters. The most obvious answer might be brand recognition, as in "I like playing Dungeons & Dragons, so I think I'll see the movie" but that clearly isn't the case here. Alone in the Dark has never been outrageously popular, and the last game in the series, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, came out almost five years ago. A good number of even hardcore gamers haven't even heard of the series, and it has almost no hardcore fans. Why on earth is there a movie for a mostly-forgotten property like Alone in the Dark, when there hasn't even been a movie for Myst, or Quake, or Half Life, or Halo, or Diablo, or the literally hundreds of better candidates? Okay, it might have something to do with those licenses costing more than a six-pack of Miller High Life and a half-empty bag of Funyons, but still.

For the record, I have not yet seen Alone in the Dark, but I plan to remedy that situation as soon as possible. Any movie that gets a 3% at RottenTomatoes and shows up at #12 on the IMDB's Bottom 100 Films list three days after its release is a special thing indeed. Such a movie only comes out once in a cherry moon.