Five Awful Films Based on Great Games

1 – Alone in the Dark

Infogrames

Released: Jan 28, 2005

Cost To Make: $20,000,000

Box Office: $10,442,808

Being neither Alone nor in the Dark for nearly 99% of the film, Christian Slater is steered through this exploding mid-fuck of disambiguation and misplaced career choices with none of the usual things your Hollywood-addled brain has come to expect in a film. Things like a main character you actually care about, for instance.

At any point in the film you can wander away, grab yourself a snack, check out your forehead for blackheads and maybe have a go at flushing the bog. When you come back you only need see the Slater or his sciency-bird to know no-one crucial to the outcome of the film is missing.

There’s something about monsters and orphans and I think that’s meant to tie it in with the games, but if it wasn’t for the title there’d be nothing here to recommend as a way of spending two hours of your life you will never, ever get back. As a game-to-film translation it lacks even more, no-one’s even brave enough to go check it’s still breathing.

If you’re going to fail, fail big. For real comedy, the directors commentary is pure gold. Skip through until near the end, just after he’d waxed lyrical about European funding in the film industry, and hear his confused, almost broken ramblings against his detractors and just about everybody else on the planet he hasn’t challenged to a boxing match.

You’ll never hear Spielberg burn-out in a commentary like this, and for that reason alone Uwe Boll should keep making his films; from House of the Dead through to Alone in the Dark, Far Cry and Postal, the Boll legacy will live long in the filmic landscape.

Because even the Garden of Eden needed a compost heap.

Robert Baker