Uwe Boll: Genius

CHUD review Alone In The Dark. They don't like it.

You really feel sorry for these actors, who have come to the very end of their careers, who are standing in front of a surely kinetic and screaming Teutonic madman who has no fucking clue how to make a movie. Christian Slater was in Heathers, man. He deserves better than this.

Adding for good measure:

It’s obvious that Uwe Boll is a genius of some kind, and I am not saying that with mockery. There’s a vision behind this film, even if it is astonishingly cheap, tacky and stupid. The problem is that Boll is working with the parameters of narrative storytelling, something he seems to really hate. He needs to move into something experimental, something without the need for cohesion or character, which are his weak points.

The folks over at Something Awful have an article by some people who worked for Boll and they back all of this up:

For those of you who actually give a shit, the original script took the "Alone In the Dark" premise and depicted it as if it was a actually based on a true story of a private investigator in the northeastern U.S. whose missing persons cases begin to uncover a disturbing paranormal secret. It was told through the eyes of a writer following Edward Carnby and his co-worker for a novel, and depicted them as real-life blue-collar folks who never expected to find hideous beings waiting for them in the dark. We tried to stick close to the H.P. Lovecraft style and the low-tech nature of the original game, always keeping the horror in the shadows so you never saw what was coming for them. Thankfully Dr.Boll was able to hire his loyal team of hacks to crank out something much better than our crappy story and add in all sorts of terrifying horror movie essentials like opening gateways to alternate dimensions, bimbo blonde archaeologists, sex scenes, mad scientists, slimy dog monsters, special army forces designed to battle slimy CG dog monsters, Tara Reid, "Matrix" slow-motion gun battles, and car chases. Oh yeah, and a ten-minute opening back story scroll read aloud to the illiterate audience, the only people able to successfully miss all the negative reviews. I mean hell, Boll knows that's where the real scares lie.