Alone in the Dark 2 (2008)

Sadly Over-hyped

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Uwe Boll's original video game adaptation of ALONE IN THE DARK was bad enough, but this sequel reaches new levels of low. Gone are Christian Slater and Tara Reid from the original film, jettisoned in favour of an entirely cheaper cast and an even more nonsensical storyline involving the hunt for a magical dagger and an evil witch.Bizarrely, the central character of Edward Carnby has changed race, now being played by the Chinese-American actor Rick Yune. Carnby's very soul is in peril thanks to a sinister infection that causes some dodgy-looking veins to stick out of his chest, so a crack team must infiltrate a haunted manor and lay to rest the spirit of an evil witch who's causing all kinds of trouble.This is a poorly-directed, poorly-written mess through and through, reliant on sub-par CGI and bad acting from beginning to end. All it can offer the viewer is a string of celebrity cameos from various personalities, so we get the likes of Bill Moseley, Jason Connery, former CONAN Ralf Moeller, and CARRIE's P.J. Soles. Even Danny Trejo shows up for just a single scene. Best of the lot is Lance Henriksen, who bags something of a meatier exposition-spouting role, but even he's on autopilot, and nothing about ALONE IN THE DARK 2 is good.

Alone in the Dark II starts as paranormal detective Edward Carnby (Rick Yune) helps some guy into a hospital morgue, in return the guy is going to give Carnby an ancient cursed dagger. During a scuffle with some Witch hunters Carnby is stabbed with the dagger & gets infected with 'lines' & has dreams & visions of a woman named Elisabeth Dexter (Allison Lange) being scarified with said dagger during a supernatural ceremony. Now Elisabeth is back as an evil ghost Witch who kills anyone who has become infected with the 'lines' & Elisabeth also wants to possess her ancestor Natalie Dexter (Rachel Spector) who along with her worried father (Bill Moseley) form half the Witch hunting team. The Witch hunters believe that by finding Elisabeth's remains she can be laid to rest for good & that Carnby's visions hold to key to where Elisabeth is buried but the evil ghost Witch tries to kill them all before they get to her remains...Written & directed by the duo of Michael Roesch & Peter Scheerer this is the direct to video sequel to Alone in the Dark (2005) which itself was based on a video game of the same name although had very little to do with the video game besides featuring lead character Edward Carnby & Alone in the Dark II has nothing to do with the game either but also has nothing to do with the original Alone in the Dark beside the returning character of Edward Carnby. Got that? Good. Alone in the Dark II is a spectacularly bad film on all levels, from the incomprehensible script to the cheap production values to a wasted cast of veterans who deserve to be in better films than Alone in the Dark II. The script is a mess from start to finish, there's so much supernatural nonsense that the makers keep bombarding the audience with that it becomes hard to keep up. By the time the end came & Carnby was holding that birds head in a wooden barrel with light shooting out I was thinking just who the hell did the film end up at this point? From things like a disintegrating dagger (that never does disintegrate at all) to an infection that causes'lines' on a person body that move for some reason to the ability of the Witch to track the infected to moving foundations of laboratories to character's firing machine guns at the ghost even though bullets don't do anything at all to people trying to look scared in a wire fenced cage to a guy who has kidnapped Carnby leaving his gun next to where Carnby is sleeping to a trap filled laboratory where all the answers to the traps are written on a piece of paper in plain sight to a senseless twist ending in which the Witch wanted the events that happened to happen exactly the way that they did & a climax where to bring his girlfriend back from the dead Carnby has to stab her in the chest with a dagger. At 80 odd minutes long I was throughly bored, it tries to be a mystery but each new part of the puzzle the script gives us just confuses things even more & the script ends up being a complete mess of character's talking supernatural rubbish that means nothing & trying to look serious &/or scared at the appropriate time.There isn't even any decent horror scenes here, to get a kiddie friendly PG rating there's no blood or gore apart from a leg wound & a dead body. The CGI computer effects are OK but a swirling mass of lines that merge to form a CGI Witch just doesn't look that impressive. There's no real build-up or tension or atmosphere, the whole film is quite bright & just looks like no-one involved tried that hard. Surely fans of the video game series & film fans in general won't be happy with this senseless & confused supernatural ghost story that lacks logic, scares & any sort of gore.The IMDb says this had a budget of about $4,600,000 which I find hard to believe, surely it was a lot less than that? Where did all the money go? Sure it's competently made but totally uninvolving & bland. Apparently shot in California & New York. There's a good cast here with the likes of Lance Henriksen, Danny Trejo, Bill Moseley & Jason Connery but the material is awful & they are slumming it here.Alone in the Dark II is an awful fantasy horror thriller that is a total mess from start to finish with a senseless script that tries to do too much. No real horror thanks to the PG rating, several well liked stars wasted & a really boredom to the whole affair I would say that the original Alone in the Dark is far better than this.

I always rate films I turned off as the lowest possible, and with Alone in the Dark 2, I could bear no more after only 35 minutes!I'm not a harsh judge of films, and I like to give them a chance to improve (hell, I sat through the entirety of the first one), but when the writing is such an absolute mess as this was, I knew already after 10 minutes that it had the go, and had totally given up on it after 20. The next 15 minutes were spent on me trying to use The Force to get the controller from the table.Hmm, so what's this film all about?Who cares? No, seriously, if you're curious or dumb enough to give it a go, you'll soon realise that this is a spot-on assessment.Some people die, there's some CGI mist, meant to be a ghostly witch, a dagger, some kind of infection, some weird racial transformation of the lead from the first film, some boring stuff, some nonsensical stuff... You get the point.Anyway, my summary above really does sum it all up, but for those who still need further warning: AVOID!

Because, you know...Alone in the Dark 1 was such a great film and all. Was it really necessary to make an even worse sequel to an already horrible film? This one is shockingly good at being completely worthless. The special effects were a complete mess. The acting was very hit or miss (some did a fairly decent job however it's not worth sticking up for them as they agreed to work on this filth). The story is all over the place. I've never seen a movie that felt like those involved realized nothing good was going to come of it so they just gave up and threw together what had been done and submitted it as a finished product. Now I have.