Geeks on Film: Top Ten Worst Video Game to Movie Adaptations Ever!

I was watching Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li last weekend and after about an hour of sitting through what I honestly thought was one of the worst films ever made, something dawned on me. I have been through this before. I have been a gamer my entire life, and as such I have been exposed to countless horrible theatrical adaptations. I have seen the characters I once held near and dear defiled by Hollywood, because they feel their theater going public can’t handle the intricacy of someone killing demons from hell with a chainsaw. As you go down this list Uwe Bolls name seems to crop up more than once, he definitely falls under the category of repeat offender. Compare my list to yours and let me know how I did after the jump.

10. Doom

You figure a game about man opening a inter-dimensional gate on Mars that leads straight to hell would be a no-brainer story-wise and writes itself. I mean this movie even has the Rock and they seemed to screw it up, so bad in fact the Rock himself has been quoted as saying the film wasn’t quite the best it could be. This seems to be a recurring theme as we go down the list.

9. Alone in the Dark

What do you get if you combine washed up 80′s actor Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Uwe Boll? Why the 2nd worst reviewed film of all time that’s what. A film that is what they call “very loosely” based on the video-game of it’s namesake, which basically means they let Uwe Boll rewrite the script to add more action to what was supposed to be a thriller. The film has been re-cut and re-released more than a Thanksgiving turkey and much like a Thanksgiving turkey the older it got the harder it was go down. The known last cut made by the infamous director removed almost all of Tara Reid’s scenes from the the film, at least he tried to fix it. They say this film did well on DVD. The only reason I can fathom for this is the movie was such a flop, it was dumped on DVD ASAP. Where people who had already watched Boa versus Python were looking for something equally as stimulating.

8. Double Dragon

This was one of the best beat-em ups for for the old NES and for some reason they decided 7 years after the fact to make a film out of this property, and bad doesn’t even begin to describe it. This is one of those weird cases where they tried to stay a little too close to the video game instead of taking some much needed artistic license, with disastrous results. Sorry some things look better as an 8-bit sprite. The movie is notable for having Robert Patrick star as a villain who bears a striking resemblance to Vanilla Ice or as fans call him the V-1000. This clip isn’t the trailer it’s the end of the film, the final battle that just has to be seen to believed.

7. DOA:Dead or Alive

How you screw up a video game with the simple premise of a fighting tournament where the roster is mostly made up of beautiful women kicking ass and taking names is beyond me. Another “loosely” based video game film that was troubled from the start and with a budget of 21 million dollars someone should have stopped this train wreck from happening. The film was finished in 2005 and didn’t make it to US screens till 2007. When it finally did premier in the US after bombing in every other country, it did so without critic’s screening the true sign of a movie that is truly DOA dead on arrival. The movie went on only made back 6 of its 21 million dollar budget. I actually tried to watch this and only made it halfway through. Sadly a movie with Devon Aoki should not be this hard to watch.

6. Postal

This is another bomb by Boll, by this time Hollywood should have known better. But quite honestly with a property like Postal it could have worked in its favor.  In Running with Scissors defense the film rights were sold to Uwe Boll with the express condition that the president of Running With Scissors, Inc. Vince Desiderio was to be involved with the writing process and production of the film.  But after many disagreements on the direction of the film, Vince wanting a much more serious dark and gritty film. Uwe fired him rewrote the script with his long time collaborator and decided it would not just be a comedy, but a statement against all the people who didn’t like his movies. The film was only shown on 21 screens across the US due to the films “Political Content” and because Postal like all Uwe Boll films sucked.  I know I didn’t make it through 20 mins of the “Unrated Director’s cut” shutting it off after suffering through watching a nude Dave Foley use the bathroom. Argggghhhh!

5. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

Notice part one isn’t on here, there’s a reason for that it was actually good. This half hearted sequel to the 1995 movie suffered for several reasons, the first being almost none of the original talent from the original returned for the sequel. The second reason because they tried to stay to true to the source material which in some cases can be a bad thing. Where in the first film they centered the plot on a few characters, in the second film they tried to add the entire roster of 2 games and the plot collapsed under the weight, with the movie doing so badly the planned third was cancelled in early pre-production. One thing that also stood out to me about this film was the lack of budget, where the first films special effects were some what believable these were just laughable. Kinda like the third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie where you can see the actor’s eye holes in the turtle masks.

4. BloodRayne 1+2

BloodRayne: the video game is the story of a hot female vampire agent who works for a mysterious organization who assassinates Nazis cutting them up with machetes strapped to her arms. How the hell could you screw something as awesome as that up? Well Uwe Boll did, or course. First he made it a prequel to the game and set the film in the dark ages, then he decided to cast the girl who played the terminator in T3 who really can’t act all that well. That coupled with random sex scenes that make almost no sense to the plot or pacing of the film and seemed simply the to guarantee a run on late night skinamax. This was Boll’s third foray into video game based films and I honestly couldn’t believe he got some of the people he did to “act” in this like Ben Kingsley. After making only 3 of it’s 25 million budget a sequel was made. This one as well a prequel to the game with a story that somehow involves cowboys and vampires. Oh, those wacky Germans.

Eric: A lot of people hate on Ewe Boll, and there’s a reason for that. Not only does he make horrible films based on beloved video game series (though it’s debatable whether or not BloodRayne is, in fact, beloved), he somehow manages to get fantastic Hollywood talent involved in his abominations. Ben Kingsley? Surely Boll tricked this Oscar winning actor into starring in this tripe. The only good thing about the film, is that scene in the dungeon. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The rest of the movie is utterly unwatchable, particularly the acting of Michelle Rodriguez. Awful!

3. Street Fighter(1994)

Capitalizing on the then popularity of the 90′s action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, the only man who could make a split seem somewhat manly. This film while being so amazingly bad, on so many levels it made 3 times it’s $25 million dollar budget. Why is that? Because the kind of people going to see a Jean-Claude Van Damme film in the 90′s usually dated their cousins and weren’t concerned about a plot or acting for that matter. They just wanted to see this guy fight  and bonus points if he does a spilt at some point in the film and somehow uses fire to kill someone. Street Fighter the movie was also sadly Raul Julia’s last role as M. Bison. I am almost positive his family will one day invest millions of dollars to have him cloned just so this won’t be the last film on this distinguished actor’s resume.

2. Street Fighter:The Legend of Chun-Li

This is one of the few films to make this list that was released in the age of the interwebs that we live in today, and was like watching a train wreck in action. I believe the technical term is “Hot Mess”.  This is one of those films that everyone knew was going to be bad when the word first broke that the production was “troubled” to say the least. As production of the film went on we heard more and more how those involved with the production of the film were not thrilled with the direction the writer and director had taken with the film. From casting Kristin Laura Kreuk as the lead when she obviously, is neither cute or Chinese. Which is the basis of the character of Chun-Li in the first place. They basically completely ignored the video game source material completely, they couldn’t even claim a “loosely based” on this one. In fact if you changed the names of the characters you wouldn’t even know that this film was based on Street Fighter. This was also the first time Capcom were questioned on their green-lighting of such bad adaptations of their video game properties. Funny thing is Capcom released a full length theatrical anime with the special edition of the Street Fighter 4 video game that is legendary compared to this film. Why they didn’t simply save the $50 million dollars it cost to make Chun-Li and release this in theaters is beyond me. I also found the “Director’s Cut” very disturbing because nowhere in Street Fighter did they rip babies out of pregnant women. For a movie that should have been empowering to females it was extremely misogynistic and sometimes hard to watch.

1. Super Mario Brothers
This is the only film on this list that is so horribly bad, that it actually circles around and comes back to good and that is why it’s number 1 on the list. Hated by the fans and stars of the film who refer to the conditions of shooting the film as “Nightmarish”. Super Mario Brothers if you really think about it would not honestly be the easiest video game to turn into a theatrical film and they did a lot of “creative” things to make the story work. Frankly they shouldn’t have filmed Super Mario and focused their efforts on the more linear, compelling story of Duckhunt, if they killed that dog in the first five minutes of the film I would have gladly paid my 9 bucks.  But Mario being Nintendo’s cash cow seemed way to enticing to the money hungry hordes of Hollywood. Changing just about everything about the video game in order to make a filmable translation. The product was surprisingly dark and super campy to say the least. I actually remember seeing this in a very empty theater as a child and it scarred me for life, and I never thought of Dennis Hopper in the same way again.

Honorably Mention:

Wing Commander

I actually haven’t seen this one but when I told people I was doing this article it came up more than once here is what our very own Eric had to say about this fine film:

“I had high hopes for this movie. No, seriously, I did. A lot of people looked at the teen heart-throb cast and scoffed, but not me. Because I saw Chris Roberts’ name attached to direct the film. The same guy who created the video game. But alas, it was too good to be true. He somehow managed to crap all over his own creation with an absolutely horrible film, effectively breaking my heart.”