Alone in the Dark, directed by Uwe Boll, is primarily for children, as titles at the beginning are read aloud, presumably for the benefit of those with inadequate reading ability. The story is based on the Atari video game of the same name. Titles indicate that a mythical Native American tribe known as the Abkani, which lived 10,000 years ago, found and closed a window into the "world of darkness." Although an advanced civilization, the Abkani vanished without a trace because creatures from the darkness passed through the window before they closed the opening, leaving only artifacts that were first discovered during 1967 in an abandoned mine near Vancouver. Professor Hudgens (played by Mathew Walker), a mad scientist who uncovered the artifacts, performed experiments implanting tiny dragon monsters in the spines of twenty orphans, nineteen of whom vanished one night. At the age of twenty, Edward Carnby (played by Christian Slater), the lone survivor of the experiments because he was subjected to a medical treatment that killed the parasites, joined Bureau 713, a special government unit that tracks paranormal activity, but he later quit because he wanted to find out more than his job permitted. When the film begins, Carnby is returning home to Vancouver with Abkani artifacts from the Amazon, Hudgens has found a gold chest somewhere on the ocean floor, and a shipment of an Abkani artifact has arrived at a museum, where his anthropological assistant Aline Cedrac (played by Tara Reid) opens the box contrary to Hudgens's instructions. When the crew of the ship opens the chest, monsters emerge, and the film degenerates from a kungfu James Bond tale into a man-versus-monster struggle. MH
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