Alone in the Dark 2 (2008)
Directed by: Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer
Reviewer: Dustin Hall

No…. just no.

I thought that Uwe Boll being unassociated with this movie might spare its audience some pain. No such luck.

One might think that Bill Mosely and Lance Henriksen might bring a necessary degree of badass to the table. But like Christian Slater before them, they fail to make Alone in the Dark a name in terror.

The story is unrelated to the original Alone in the Dark, though the name carries over thanks to a few aesthetic similarities to the video game series: most noticeably the red veins of death that appear across the body of the victims of the ‘evil’. Though, unlike the previous movie or the video game series, this Alone in the Dark has nothing to do with ancient evils or Cthonic Gods but, in more pedestrian style, a witch.

The story focuses around Edward Carnby… yes, the same character as Christian Slater from the original movie, only somehow Christian Slater has transmuted from a Paranormal Detective to a Korean thief with an eye on selling a cursed knife on the black market. Korean Slater gets himself stabbed and infected with a curse about five minutes into the movie, so enter: Gun-Toting Paranormal Investigation Squad! Featuring Bill Mosely as a 40-year old Shaggy! Gotta love the goatee.

The cursed Edward joins forces with this rag-tag squad, eventually enlisting the help of Lance Henriksen, to stop the onslaught of a centuries old witch, now attracted to the curse in Ed’s blood, whose sole desire is to infest the body of young love-interest Natalie (Rachel Specter).

With the cast in place, its time to send them running through a seemingly endless series of plot-holes as they try to decipher Ed’s dreams and discover the location of the ‘lab’, which is actually a big rock room that looks nothing like a lab, and destroy the witch’s body. There’s a forced love interest somewhere in there.

Looking back, it’s impossible to list all of the problems this movie’s writing had; needless to say, when the movie finally drug its corpse across the finish line, and got to the point where the Gun-Squad found the codex that determined their mission – oddly enough in the same place that they had been looking for the entire movie – and then have their final battle with the witch’s immobile corpse, the filmmakers find a way to continue the running time for another excruciating ten or fifteen minutes, and I only survived by gnawing off one of my own limbs.

There’s no scares, no intrigue, and certainly no real attempt at imagination or quality film making here. The writing is the worst, but sometimes you can forgive a bad story for a good scare factor or some good effects work. The only thing, though, more eye-rollingly bad than the plot and dialogue was the make-up work. Hey, Alone in the Dark, who’s got visible glue under all their appliances? You do.

One of the worst pieces of crap I’ve seen in a long time. Avoid at all costs.