I’ve come to depend upon Metacritic as an arbiter and aggregator of cinematic taste. If I’m trying to choose between a few movies, I’ll consult Metacritic to see what the prevailing opinions are. I’ve never spent much time there, but I understand that Rotten Tomatoes is a similar resource.
Last week, I was amused to see that the new Christian Slater film, Alone in the Dark (based on the video game of the same name) had achieved an aggregated score of 10. That’s 10 out of 100. That’s earned Alone in the Dark the honour of placing 14th of Metacritic’s worst movies ever list (though it’s still 1 point ahead of Battlefield Earth).
Via Waxy, here’s an entertaining collection of quotes from reviews of the movie. This is my favourite:
If you took the 100 worst ideas ever conceived for a science-fiction film, rattled them around in a Lotto tumbler and spilled them out onto the screen at random, you could not produce a more asinine hodgepodge.
The warning bells went off in my head when someone told me that they’d cast Tara Reid as “a young genius anthropologist”. I was going to say that that’s worse than casting Mira Sorvino as an entomologist, but then I see that she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
If you’re going to malign Miss Sorvino, I shall have to ask you to step outside.
Regarding this film, Defamer says:
It seems that a prankster has squatted on the domain uweboll.com to send a message to director Uwe Boll, the fauxteur behind the Tara-Reid-as-genius-anthropologist abomination Alone in the Dark. Visitors to the site see the above words preceded by the greeting “dear dr boll” in the page’s title. Sadly, we doubt that even the most well-intentioned of pranks will stop Reid from continuing to get acting gigs.
It’s possible that Mira Sorvino is brilliant. But Harvard is notorious for grade inflation. 90% of students graduate with honours degrees. At Harvard, “Magna cum laude” means that you’ve met specific department criteria, such as a thesis.
It’s possible that Mira Sorvino is brilliant. But Harvard is notorious for grade inflation. 90% of students graduate with honours degrees. At Harvard, “magna cum laude” means that you’ve met specific department criteria, such as a thesis.
In recent entertainment news, it appears that Miss Reid is trying to shift her image from Drunken Trollop to Intelligent Ingenue. That’s a heck of a paradigm shift.
Tara Reid as young anthropologist is up there with Jennifer Love Hewitt as a scientist or veterinarian.
I think Mira Sorvino is quite smart. Not only did she graduate from Harvard, she’s fluent in Chinese.
Mayim Bialik (“Blossom”) gave up her acting/dancing career to become a neuroscientist.
http://www.neuroscience.ucla.edu/say.html
Don’t forget Denise Richards as a busty nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. THAT made me laugh.