Movies
Alone in the Dark II (V)
“Do yourself a favor; pretend this film was never even made. I’m still struggling to find a way to erase this from my memory.”
Uwe Boll, we get it. You really really like making horror video games into shitty movies. You’ve made your point, and you can stop now. A movie came out this past year that had cameo performances from PJ Soles, Danny Trejo, and starred Bill Moseley, and Lance Henrikson. With a banging lineup like this, it seems that this should have been an absolute cult hit complete with nerdy fans in costumes. However, this was part of the lineup for Alone in the Dark II. Yes, a sequel to the same film that raped a horrifying video game adaptation and threw Tara Reid into a film where she had to actually act scared without a piece of food in front of her. The original film starred Christian Slater and regretfully, he isn’t starring in the sequel. One would assume that they’d replace him with a look-a-like of some sort, right? I mean, that would be the logical thing to do, wouldn’t it? Apparently I’m alone on this one because some BRILLIANT casting director replaced him with the Asian guy from Fast and Furious.
Uwe Boll may have only been the producer of this film, but the directing job was given to Peter Scheerer and Michael Roesch; who wrote the first Alone in the Dark as well as Boll’s House of the Dead II. If this glittering resume doesn’t draw you in enough, maybe the fact they wrote Boll’s upcoming film Far Cry will reel you in. In the simplest terms, the three people responsible for some of the worst films of the decade are at it again.
Alone in the Dark II is quite possibly one of the worst films I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through. Watching the dog lick it’s own ass in the middle of the living room was more entertaining than this film. The script is terrible, the pacing is ridiculous, the character development is non existent, and the acting is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. If American Idol was a show about acting, the acting in Alone in the Dark II would be the bad auditions they put on TV just to make fun of. Watching Asian Slater attempt to look like he’s in pain while pouting his lips and panting like he ran a marathon was downright painful. The acting wasn’t even “so bad, it’s campy” it was just horrible. While I have no problem with re-casting if needed, I don’t understand why they would switch ethnicities to the MAIN character. It took about 25 minutes or so for me to realize that he was supposed to be Christian Slater’s character, and it completely took me out of the film. (Not like I was all that invested in the first place). Another scene in the film has one of those “but they can’t be dead!” endings, and magically one of the characters survives a bullet in the leg and the face from point blank and even has the stamina to giggle back to the cabin as if he just pulled a splinter from his leg.
The pacing was so out of control awful that I literally went to pull the popcorn out of the microwave, came back, and had no idea how the hell they got to where they were, why they were there, and what it had to do with the plot.
Even in the new millennium, special effects couldn’t save this film. There’s some pretty awful CGI and all of the actors have the aim of the A-Team. They must have unloaded about 400 rounds to the glowing CGI monster that resembled something Robert Rodriguez would put in the films he lets his kids write. The worst offender in this however, was the makeup job. There’s this dagger that belongs to the witch/CGI monster that leaves you scarred if you touch it. While I was hoping to get some sick scars and mutations, I was given something that resembled whipping someone with a tree branch and putting silly putty over it. Homemade makeup effects aren’t that difficult, and they still managed to find a way to screw it up.
Do yourself a favor; pretend this film was never even made. I’m still struggling to find a way to erase this from my memory.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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