Now before I launch into the countdown I’d like to state that across the board Uwe Boll has gone down in infamy for buying up the film rights to countless (arguably) great video games and turning them into 90 minutes of eyesore. Which is why there’s only one of his films on this list. I could fill an entire 5 top bad video game to movie list with his career sheet from IMDB.com. Instead I’ve livened it up as to why some of these other poor attempts never stood up to the gaming experience. Instead the examples I chose were varied but failed for an embarrassingly close myriad of reasons. You’ll also notice that my choices are mostly in the horror/suspense genre. That’s because the games that succeed so well often have an awesomely intricate story that most horror filmmakers don’t seen to grasp, well not since Troll 2.

#5

The least of our worries.

Silent hill was on the whole was a decent movie; it had a decent atmosphere, some well designed and backed up monsters and the acting was semi-believable. Let me stop there with the compliments. Let me stop there because if you were ever sitting on your parents carpeted floor in your onesie back in the day of 1999 and you were playing Silent Hill; You quickly realize some of the problems this movie had. I’m not saying that the series of Silent Hill hasn’t had it’s hiccups *cough* Homecoming *cough*, but throughout Silent hill was about the slow building mental terror that deep seeded regret and sadness culminated within the main characters. The first issue I had with the Silent Hill movie was Sean Bean. I’m not sure if I’m getting this out the right way but I think every movie that Sean Bean has ever been in he’s either the bad guy, completely clueless, dies randomly or any combination of those three. Let’s see. Equilibrium. Pwned in the first ten minutes of the movie. The James bond movie. Was a bad guy that was chopped up in a motorboats rudder. Oh! Let’s not forget Lord Of The Rings, ‘Sorry old Bean, it’s time for a dose of Uruk’Hai justice.’ Even in ‘Ronin’ he winds up playing a nervous tweaker who is busy pissing his britches in the corner like a nervous cat when there are too many people in the room and winds up being kicked out of the otherwise three ringed circus of cock-smackingly awesomeness that is Jean Reno.

Which finally brings me to Silent Hill. Where the hell did you wind up then Sean? Clearly your demented and adopted child doesn’t mean much to you since you’re sitting quietly at home spanking it to Cinemax pornography. Sean Bean needed a more functional role in that movie to say the least, the only real purpose he served was to establish the layer of reality that the rest of us existed on was not the same one that he had lost his daughter and wife to in Silent Hill. Not to mention if you want to start anywhere in a series of movies with an awesome story you clearly stick to the first movie. It seems that they borrowed little bits of each game to make an ugly, bastardized child that can’t speak with it’s mouth and instead uses hand puppets made of luncheon meat of a movie. While it holds true to some of the creepy aspects it’s still not Silent Hill the way we remember being hunted through the mist by shuffling undead dogs. Silent hill was a good horror movie by today’s standards but please stop jumping on the J-horror train by sticking a few maladjusted children in it with long black hair in front of their faces and expect me to eat the shit sandwich that’s supposed to taste like awesome survival horror.

#4

How do you fail here?

Resident Evil. I remember the day I saw the trailer. I do, I watched and the thought of Milla Jovovitch wandering around the Raccoon City Mansion with only a few bullets trying desperately to stick together with her S.T.A.R.S. team members while taking refuge from the zombie apocalypse outside made my adolescent pubes grow a few inches faster. But like those shopping comparisons (What you expected, What you Paid for, What you got) I expected a tense and dark look at the deformation of science with a few badasses with limited ammunition in their pockets thrown in. What I paid for at the movie theater was another look at Milla Jovovitch’s delightful pancake nipples and zombies, oh yes. Zombies. What I got was sandpaper handjob of a film where pseudo S.T.A.R.S. members invade the widely known evil corporation UMBRELLA’s (dude, didn’t you know they were totally experimenting on people? Well hell, everyone else here in Raccoon City knew. We’re not surprised at all.) secret underground lair. Thingy. It wasn’t connected to a huge creepy ass mansion with giant spiders or snake experiments gone wrong or anything! HOW CAN YOU SCREW THAT UP? The amount of bad CGI put into this movie on disembodied hands in water could’ve been used to have some really cool shit in it! Also, I’ve never seen so many well groomed zombies! Why is it when in a video game we’re thrown into a dystopian world with a catastrophe such as Zombie outbreaks being the backdrop we accept that for what it is, but when they want to make a movie about it they have to spoonfeed us a bunch of not so scary bloodied up office workers in lieu of a true shambling horde?

Perhaps the biggest sin that Resident Evil perpetrated was that it assumed if you liked zombies then you were a blubbering simp that whined about whether Cheetarah was good in the sack or not. This simply is not so considering the Resident Evil games typically involved puzzles that made some attempt to stimulate one’s intelligence. What’s more is that after sitting through an hour and a half of complete nonsense I did in fact get to see Miss Jovovitch’s miraculous pancake nipples, along with a setup for potentially a redeeming sequel! Holy hell, I must be a glutton for punishment. But yes, I went to see the second one.

#3

Timothy Olyphant? From Die Hard? You've got to be kidding me.

Er okay, so Hitman wasn’t exactly the cream of the crap but for a series that was soaked in style, had an absolutely epic score put to it, which I will attest Jesper Kyd will give Hans Zimmerman a run for his money any day of the week. In fact I listen to him like I would regular music.

But this movie also likes doing things that were never a part of the excellence of playing dressup with the locals for a full two hours just to get that one perfectly timed sniper shot through the waiter’s legs into the target’s forehead. i.e. like setting up the recycled and asinine staple of pseudo love interest. There was only a brief moment in each Hitman game where he ever interacted with ANY females, not to make marks about Agent 47’s sexual deviance, though his bald head would lend nicely to certain homoerotic expectations…I’m getting off topic. Here’s the deal, Timothy Olyphant looked too happy to be a born and bred killer, not to mention he talked with that happy little Timothy Olyphant voice of his; completely ignoring the source material. What happened to silent agreement in movies? Back in the day of actual acting, the actors used things like facial expressions and body language to tell you that they could take you away to the land of gumdrops and candy buttons with their SHINY LEADSPITTING HANDCANNONS OF PROLAPSE INDUCING BADASSERY. If you’re going to make a movie about something that was fueled by fandom then you at least be as accurate to the original work as possible when transferring to a new media.

#2

Marky Mark passed the constipated face test.

Alright I have a serious bone to pick with this drivel. Max Payne brought the entire notion of Film Noir back into video games in a very approachable and functional way. They had basically made it a movie that you can play. You were able to watch each individual slug rocket out of your akimbo pistols into the various naughty parts of the fellow crack fiend across the room playing chess with a sculpture of his own feces. It was penis exploding, fragwin awesometown, population; me. I downloaded every mod out there to enhance the bullet time experience, with various Matrix mods, moves and new guns. I had everything and it was an awesome ride. The story telling sequences have been continued to be ripped off (Mirrors Edge) left and right to this day. This movie had all the hard parts done for it, and they didn’t even include any of the drug induced nightmares that I remember hating because following that goddamned crying baby along the little lines of blood was about as much fun as mainlining Dran-O into my urethra. I wanted to see that, I wanted the innocuous blowjob scene in the bar to happen, I wanted to see Max Payne get framed, but instead they explained away all the good stuff and left me with a serious case of blue balls. No Alfred Woden? You’d best be joking, asshole. While Marky Mark isn’t the worst decision, I’dve much rather seen Jason Statham with that awful look on his face every time Max Payne shoots a gun. Also. There was no real bullet time. NO BULLET TIME. Slo-motion is NOT bullet time. Thanks for soiling what could’ve competed with the awesomeness of Sin City.

#1

You watched this, didn't you? Yeah you did you sorry bastard.

You probably thought going into this movie that hrm. Tara Reid is in it, there’s a chance for a bit of eye candy, isn’t there? Also it’s based on one of the progenitors of the survival horror genres. Well damn, with such a simple silver platter to pick off of our man Uwe couldn’t possibly screw the pooch on this one. Well.

Here’s the deal, Tara Reid shouldn’t ever really be much more than a bubble-headed sex toy in any movie she’s ever been in, using guns on ghosts is completely rational and the forces of evil truly need no reason to crawl out of the woodwork to terrorize Christian Slater for his terribly failed acting career. I seem to remember in the age of text based adventures Alone In The Dark stood out for once as having a very logical way of playing through the game, it even showed a basic understanding of physics like; push box over trap door, dead guy can’t get out from trap door. Simple, right? There was no real strange puzzles in AITD put forth to the characters except how to escape the scary ghosts. Hold on just a second and since when was AITD an action series? Maybe this can be blamed on the general terrible filmmaking that Uwe Boll has been responsible for (though Postal was relatively funny considering there was no plot to screw up). The biggest issue across the board with video games turned to movies is simply this, the directors have never played these games. They simply haven’t. Nor do they give a dissected half of a rat’s turd what the fans want out of the playthrough version. Because fans never really did anything for a game did they? Moral of the story being that Hollywood is simply trying to rake in another audience and to some degree they’ve succeeded, because I went and spent 8 bucks on numerous crappy movies thinking I was going to get some degree of faithful recreation. If the most we can hope for in a video game based movie is general adherence to the original plot or story, then truly I never want to see another video game turned in to a movie. I hope to god they leave my Deus Ex right where it stands.

-K