Hoping to be a sort of hybrid "Matrix" meets "Indiana Jones" meets "Alien," Unfortunately, "Alone in the Dark" is just a bad movie. I've enjoyed some of Christian Slater's work in the past and was up for this film; but no fault of his, this film fails on many levels.

The first forty minutes had this audience of critics laughing. In some cases, deep hardy belly laughs that a comedy might envy. As if fair warning that the film wasn't going to win any Oscars, several paragraphs of expository background information scroll white on a black screen. Those paragraphs are read to us, one by one. Comical.

The film strains in the acting department as well. And the dialogue -- cut and pasted from any other B- action thriller.

But the script, the actual story, * sigh *, what happened here? At least for the first half, something resembling a story line unwinds, but by the halfway mark the film completely drops its bottom. The last half is comprised of thrift shop SWAT guys poking around in the dark shooting endless rounds of ammunition into CGI lizard-like animations the likes of which we've seen many times before. What precious little point the film may have had quickly slips away.

Redeeming qualities? There is a moment there when the lights from the guns flash in the dark, the heavy metal music crunches down and the lizards slither at high speed, it's almost interesting as a senseless music video.