Review of Alone in the Dark 2 (2008) by Joseph H — 28 Jan 2010

The writing/directing duo of Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer take over for Uwe Boll (thankfully?) in continuing Alone in the Dark with a sequel that takes the story in a completely different direction which focuses on a evil witch that is looking to sacrifice a young woman (Rachel Specter) who works with a team to try and defeat the witch before she takes over her body.

Things become complicated when Edward Carnby (Rick Yune taking over for Christan Slater) whose now Asian apparently, falls under the witches curse and must help the team while try to save his own self.

The "team" consists of the girls father (Bill Moseley, always nice to see him), Ralf Moeller (also cool), Danny Trejo (as the maintenance guy?), and Lance Henriksen (also cool to watch). Some other notable genre faces that show up include P.

J. Soles (Halloween), Zack Ward (Postal), Michael Pare (Seed), Natassia Malthe (Bloodrayne 2 & 3), and Jason Connery (The Devil's Tomb). First off, this movie is a vast improvement over the original film.

Secondly, this movie still blows hard. I appreciated the creators taking this in a completely different direction, but it seems like EVERYONE has forgotten the original source material which was the god damn video game.

Any traces of that are lost. Secondly, this film has a TON of great, notable genre icons in it, whom a lot of are used poorly as glorified cameos (Soles, Trejo, Pare, Connery). Also, making this a PG-13 film was highly dumb.

I like the idea of a large body count, but it's completely pointless when they're all offscreen. Uwe Boll isn't the director this time around, but I could feel his presence throughout all the awkward, confusing parts of this film, which was mostly all of it.

Then again, this movie had like a hundred different producers, so there's not telling who's input is who's in this mess. Much like it's first one, Alone in the Dark II is also a stinker.

Great cast though.