Hollywood Top 5: Lamest Movies Based on Videogames
Uwe Boll isn’t the only director with a lousy videogame-to-screen movie on his resume. John Leguizamo, The Rock, and even Alyssa Milano has at least one movie based on a videogame that they would rather no one knew about. Curiously, most of the movies on our list comes from the early/mid-90s, when side-scrolling games were at their peak of popularity, which was probably why Hollywood thought they could cash in by throwing money at an awful script and hiring some known names. Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Hopper — big names in Hollywood at the time. The results, alas, were unspectacular. Here, then are the Five Lamest Movies Based on Videogames.
#5. Doom (2005)
“Doom” is not really all that bad of a movie, but it suffers from the same thing that most videogame-to-screen movies suffer from: a dearth of storyline in the original game, which results in a poorly translated film. When the entire game is centered on a guy walking through various levels, portals, and what have you shooting the crap out of everything (as most first-person shooters generally were back then), is it any wonder the movie version will be a train wreck? Even The Rock’s muscles and plenty of grisly gore couldn’t save the day. The film, though, does get some brownie points for having a character with the last name Grimm, whose codename was Reaper. Get it? Grimm Reaper? Eh. That was pretty much the most clever thing about the whole film.
#4. Double Dragon (1994)
You got that doofus from Party of Five as one of the heroes and that guy from Terminator 2: Judgment Day playing the heavy. What could go wrong? Basically, pretty much everything. The 1994 live-action version of the side-scrolling game “Double Dragon” is more embarrassing for everyone involved than it is a really bad movie. Mind you, it is a really bad movie, I’m just saying that as much as we hated it, the actors involved probably hated it even more, and that’s gotta tell you something. It was also supposed to be Mark Dacacos’ big Hollywood break, having just done the surprisingly well-received “Only the Strong” a year earlier. But alas, Mark’s chance at hitting the A-list effectively ended with this travesty, and left him permanently in the B-arena. Damn you, “Double Dragon”!
#3. Street Fighter (1994)
Another videogame-to-screen failure that came out in 1994, “Street Fighter” had pretty much everything going for it, including a starring turn by Jean-Claude Van Damme, then in the prime of his Hollywood action movie career, and a noted writer/director of action movies at the helm. Alas, the movie was a travesty of crappy scripting, perfunctory casting (Raul Julia as M. Bison? WTF?), and Godawful directing. What made the film’s awfulness doubly baffling was that it boasted Steven E. de Souza as both writer and director. De Souza had previously did action gems like “Die Hard” and “The Running Man”, and although he did have some duds on his resume — “Judge Dredd” being one of them — the guy was a safe bet when you needed an action movie done right. So what happened? I haven’t a clue. I could only surmise that the Street Fighter movie was never supposed to be about “Colonel Guile” (played by Van Damme). Then again, it’s kind of hard to blame it on just the casting/choice of main character, as pretty much everything about “Street Fighter” blew big chunks.
#2. House of the Dead (2003)
Oh come on. You knew this list wouldn’t be complete without the king of awful videogame-to-screen movies, aka Uwe Boll. The good Doctor lands at #2 with his horrendous “House of the Dead”, a movie that you could rightfully call brilliant in its ability to be absolutely atrocious in just about every respect. The story makes absolutely no sense, Boll’s directing shows zero promise, and the film’s one big gimmick was that whenever a character died, we saw it from their POV, ala the game. During an interview about the movie, Boll once complained: “It’s a game where you shoot zombies; what did they expect?” True enough, Boll. But did you have to make it suck THAT much? It’s like the man was trying to make it suck, because it didn’t suck enough by itself, Boll had to go above and beyond and pile on the suckiness just to ensure that not a single goodness could squeeze its way through. (The film’s one big saving grace? Boll did manage to get a tit shot from a then-unknown Erica Durance, now playing Lois Lane on TV’s Smallville.)
#1. Super Mario Bros. (1993)
The worst thing about this 1993 live-action version of “Super Mario Bros.” (and yes, there were a lot of really “worst” things about it, but this was simply the worst) was that it had a massive budget, and what did they do with it? Well, they made Dennis Hopper the villain, for one. The film starred John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins as New Yawk plumbers who disappears down a sewer pipe into some mystery realm or something just as insipid. I mean, come on. How the hell do you make a movie about a side-scrolling game like Super Mario? Answer, you don’t. But they gave it a shot anyway, and spent a heck of a lot of money doing it, too. Just for doing the unthinkable (it’s Super Friggin Mario Bros.! That is not a game you turn into a movie, you morons!), and throwing a ton of money at it, “Super Mario Bros.” lands at the top of our list of Lamest Movies Based on Videogames.
Honorable Mentions: every movie based on a game made by Uwe Boll that didn’t make the list.