by Chris Hewitt,Knight Ridder Newspapers

A woman I work with has an annual so-bad-it’s-fun movie night, and I can’t wait to tell her this year’s stinker should be “Alone in the Dark.”

The unintentional hilarity begins with boob-flashing party girl Tara Reid, cast as a brilliant archaeologist.

Reid – whose name should not be found in the same sentence as the words “brilliant” or “archaeologist” or, for that matter, “actress” – plays the sort of brilliant archaeologist who wears midriff-baring baby tees to her museum job and who doesn’t know how to pronounce “Newfoundland.” I’d like to see the producers spin off her character into her own adventure/archaeology series: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dumb.”

The rest of this “28 Days Later”/”Alien” hybrid also worships at the temple of dumb. Christian Slater deserves props for not embarrassing himself as a “paranormal investigator” who announces, “I hunt and track down the strange and the unusual.” Wow! Not just the strange but also the unusual? And I bet he hunts and tracks down the odd and the weird and the unconventional, too. Slater also finds the hidden nuances in these three lines of dialogue: “Go, go!”, “Go, go, go!” and, my favorite, “Go, go, go, go!”

Slater isn’t awful like Reid is, but all of the actors, including Stephen Dorff as a brilliant something-or-other, lack the authority to be believable as people in positions of power. Watching them play dress-up is as convincing as it would be to watch a middle-school production of “On Golden Pond,” which, come to think of it, still might not be as laughably bad as “Alone in the Dark.”