Cast:
Christian Slater (Edward Carnby), Tara Reid (Aline Cedrac), Stephen Dorff (Commander Richard Burke), Frank C. Turner (Agent Fischer), Matthew Walker (Professor Lionel Hudgens), Will Sanderson (Agent Miles), and Mike Dopud (Agent Turner) Directed by Uwe Boll (#1765 - In the Name of the King)
Review:
“You feel the failure already in front of you.”
You know, there are little things you can dwell on every time you see a film by Uwe Boll. For one, he actually published a dissertation that resulted in him holding a PhD (for narrative structure in TV and literature!). But yes, Dr. Uwe Boll did grow up with a love for film, shooting films on handheld cameras when he was a teen in Germany. Hell, he two whole documentaries dedicated to him and his film "process" (one aptly titled Fuck You All: The Uwe Boll Story), so obviously there is something to look into when it comes to a man who clearly doesn't take criticism siting down (or retire easy, as evidenced by his return to filmmaking after spending six years...in the restaurant industry). Remember that Boll was in the midst of his video game movie phase, one where he resolved to make his movie fast and cheap. This film was no different: seven distinct scripts were in circulation for this film with no consensus for which one would be used. Of course, maybe it would have worked out better if they went with the one done by rookie writer Blair Erickson, who came up with a first draft that aimed for a thriller with horror in the shadows...which Boll decided needed to be done on a different level that turned it into an action film. You have four production companies: Boll KG Entertainment, Herold Productions, Brightlight Pictures, and Infogrames Entertainment, all part of an adaptation of the video game series of the same name that was developed by Infogrames in 1992 all about a private investigator looking at a haunted house with undead creatures. With the movie, here is a detective of the paranormal for our lead...a survivor of evil experiments that make him sense spooky stuff and heighten his abilities (hence why he can do a ridiculous somersault kick from the ground). Yes, a movie about a long-lost Native American tribe that believed there was a door between two worlds and a totally secret Bureau 713. Oh, and an evil scientist is there or something.
Sure, his non-video game films may inspire interest in the idea that they may show some sort of passion from its director. But only misery exists in this film, and God knows misery loves company. Boll may think that his critics were out to get him because of his ways of making films, but...yeah man, making a bunch of crappy movies with the mood of a funeral parlor is not going to do any favors. Putting a text crawl in your movie (read by Boll himself!) because test audiences didn't know what the hell the movie was about only speaks misery. How can you take a movie seriously when the gaffes pile up more than the dead bodies? How do you make a scene where a guy is saying he is showing three pictures to someone but is shown presenting four pictures? How can you make a movie where the visible bullets (light in the dark shots) are shown to miss their targets completely? How do you have an actor play a dead body and then not cut away when they are tilting their head? These fundamental errors compact a movie that maneuvers through 96 minutes of screentime with pacing that can only be described as "constipated". Even B-movies have some sort of charm to carry whatever bullshit they want to peddle in weird horror enjoyment, but all you get here is a movie that has the charm of an Internet hack getting punched in the face. It actually is a contest to see who comes off worse in the acting department: Slater, who looks like he wants to sleepwalk the entire movie on autopilot, or Reid, who says her lines with zero conviction while being hamstrung by the most perplexing lines ever put on film (the one about asking why you would put all the pieces of a puzzle far away from each other is extra primo); go figure, the one thing that Boll talked about with Reid is the fact that he couldn't get her to participate in a scene where she takes her top off - yeah, because that would've totally helped. A broomstick and a bucket have more connection than these two, and the one who ends up with the most "interesting" performance is Dorff, chewing at the scenery whenever he is able to appear on screen in ways that would make a drill sergeant blush. Walker isn't even a real "mad scientist" to make fun of, acting with the urgency of a man taking his sweet time to drink coffee at 6am. The effects are laughable, reminding one that even a man in a trash bag would be more convincing than this CG mess, and it amusing to see monster action in the dark that looks worse than a quick-time event in a video game. The attempt at sequel-baiting with the last shot (after stating that the whole city was evacuated...seemingly in the span of a day) with the most blatant rip-off a better movie in years is the final nail in the bed of rakes that has no redeeming features except for people who want to see crap in the crappiest of ways possible. I just can't see myself giving myself a star for this movie, and I would like to congratulate Uwe Boll for joining the zero-star club that makes him part of such company such as James Nguyen, Rick Sloane, and Coleman Francis. Enjoy the honor and for the rest of us, pick literally any other movie than this.
Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.
Next Time: On the third day of Turkey Week, Double Down.
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