The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project, Alone in the Dark, also known as The Only Uwe Boll Film The Reverend is Doing For the Project. Who's Uwe Boll? Well, he's a German filmmaker notorious for buying the rights to video game properties, making movies that, apart from being absolute shit, have fuck-all to do with the original games (and often justifying it by saying that the target audience is just going to download the movie anyway and not see it in theaters, so he might as well get the mainstream audience who's going to be turned off by how shit these films are), and challenging his critics to boxing matches where he pummels the shit out of them. These films never made their money back, but due to a loophole in German law, was able to keep doing this shit for well over a decade. He's retired now, thank Jah, but we at least have his shitty movies and this mirror of his Letterboxd account. I don't do video games, so here's someone just going into Alone in the Dark blind:

• And we open on the director reading this long and slow infodump crawl that was added because test audiences had no idea what the fuck was even going on.
  
• Cheese gives you nightmares? That must be why Wisconsin is the most terrifying state of the Union. Tied only with Vermont. 
  
• What's the point of Christian Slater giving that opening spiel if he's just going to give a lot of the same info to the cabbie? You know, this is where a better director would take the information he didn't give the cabbie, stop the action and give us some visualisation of what exactly he means. 
  
• Huh, evidently he took the Soy Sauce.
  
• Christian Slater seems to have gone through a period where he doesn't use doors properly. If he has to use them and not smash into a window, he's slamming into it with his body.
  
• Did we really have to see that bullet's route through that block of ice?
  
• And how the fuck does he do a somersault kick while LYING ON HIS BACK?
  
• Something about the way this fight scene is shot seems  incredibly off. I think the shots are too long to give the illusion of fast-paced action, but not long enough to give the audience a sense of reality.
  
• Tara Reid is a museum curator. Also, apparently Uwe Boll thought putting her hair in a bun and giving her glasses was enough to make her look smart. That is all. 
  
• Is it weird that I'm actually surprised at Christian Slater properly opening a door in this film?
  
• Why do we value gold? Because it's scarce and useless enough that we decided to use it for currency?
  
• New-FOUND-land? Is that in Can-NAH-da? 
  
• Maybe there's a reason these creatures are always in the dark.  Maybe it's because the CGI is so shit that you'd never take them seriously if they went into the light.
  
• So, there's a crew member named Marco, and he's fallen inside a trap door. And, because they can't get the lights on, they have to keep yelling "Marco!" And if there was, say, a popular pool game where someone who can't see shit has to keep yelling "Marco!", this would be hilarious. If only that was the case...
  
• Also, I think at some point, there was a guy who got shot by a bullet that missed him by about three feet.
  
• And somehow, everybody's gone. 
  
• So, why the fuck didn't the Abkani just destroy all the keys to the Dark World and any and all evidence that the Dark World ever existed?
  

Also, a very strange thing, well two: the first is that there's a random sex scene where Tara Reid jumps Christian Slater's bones while Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry sing "7 Seconds" (A song about racism, mind). And Tara Reid never gets naked (which is what Uwe Boll thinks caused the movie to tank, and not the fact that it's absolute shit, plus the fact that by that point, anyone could just google "Tara Reid Boobs" and get a decent-quality picture of her tits from the incident at P.Diddy's 35th birthday party and see her nipples are, honestly, kinda odd-looking.) I was ready to critique this, and maybe even talk about the time when I sang "Blood of Eden" with Alison (at least before I knew it was a breakup song), at least until I figured out that Peter Gabriel wasn't actually involved. Then came the second strange thing: when I played the film, IT NEVER SHOWED UP. I expected to hear some 90s Sophistipop and the sounds of sexual groaning and writhing, but those sounds never came. After doing some research, looking up where it would be, at least based on the old Nostalgia Critic review of the film and DVD subtitles for the film I found (somewhere between the 45 and 50-minute mark,) it just wasn't there, and it was the same with the upload on Tubi. Then I just looked it up on IMDb and found there's apparently a director's cut with extra violence, but the love scene (which he apparently thought was critical to the film's success) removed. I can only assume this director's cut is what Amazon and Tubi saw as fit to stream.