It's not surprising that movies get made about videogames - game franchises come with hordes of loyal fans clambering desperately for supplemental materials on which to spend their sweet, sweet disposable income.  That kind of devotion evokes an aphrodisiacal reaction in movie-makers, similar to the raging money-boner they got upon realizing that comic book readers would pay to see half a dozen Batman movies.  That being said, just because there's a good reason for making something doesn't mean that the thing you make will automatically be good as well.  We demonstrate that point exhaustively with the below list, which is presented in order of descending shittiness.

#8. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Directed By - Simon West

Starring - Angelina Jolie, Jon Voight, Daniel Craig

Did It Make Money? - And how!  Almost one hundred sixty million dollar's worth, all told.

The Case For

One of the most important things any screenwriter should do when writing for a movie based on some other popular material is to make a list of the things that made the original popular and figure out how include those in your script.  Here's the list for Tomb Raider:

- Twin pistols being fired?  Check.  (Constantly!)

- Weird-ass puzzles being solved?  Check.  (A bit clumsily, but they're there.)

- Some serious globe-trotting going on?  Check.  (Exotically!)

- British accent?  Check.  (Well, half-check.  Daniel Craig puts on a pretty awkward interpretation of Lara's American ex-boyfriend.)

- Tombs being raided?  Check.  (Dramatically!)

- Rude-ass titties flying every which-a-way?

DOUBLE-CHECK.  (Hooray!)

This is actually the only film that we here at Gameist can proudly recommend without reservation.  If you're at all a fan of the original games, we advise checking this movie out, because it's an incredibly faithful interpretation of everything you loved about them.  We also recommend it as a way of washing the bad taste of some of the other films out of your mind (not that we're bitter.)

The Case Against

There isn't much, but one scene sticks in our minds: you know that mouth-watering image of a showering Angelina Jolie we treated you to about a paragraph ago? 

Aaagh!  Uncheck!  Uncheck!

Yup, that's D-Craig buffin' it up in an alarming show of equal time, rigid abdominals, and limited understanding of Tomb Raider's target audience.

#7. Super Mario Bros.

Directed By - Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel

Starring - Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper

Did It Make Money? - Nope.  Lost more than twenty million, ouch.

The Case For

The way we see it, this movie has three substantial things going for it.  The first two are Dana Kaminski's breasts:

The third thing is just how fucking insane Super Mario Bros. is.  Seriously, Terry Gilliam couldn't come up with some of this shit if you gave him a half-ton of PCP and the entire weekend to himself.  This is perhaps the most aggressively unfaithful movie adaptation of any intellectual property, and what's even more shocking is how awesome it turned out.  For every plot point the directors changed, they seem to have substituted one that's about a hundred times crazier (which is saying something considering how nutty the original games were.)  Observe:

- Koopa Kingdom a peaceful, agrarian society populated by turtles and walking mushrooms?  Fuck no!  Koopa Kingdom is a dystopic metropolis occupying a parallel dimension populated by human-like monsters evolved from the Earth's dinosaurs!

We... uh.... what?

- King Koopa a fire-breathing turtle-dragon hybrid?  Fuck no!  King Koopa is a slick, obsessive-compulsive, bleach-haired lawyer who keeps his subjects in line with an army of monstrosities created through a painful de-evolution process!

You've got to be fucking with us.

- The Mario brothers don't ever actually do any plumbing?  Fuck no!  They plumb all over the fucking place in this film!

Okay, there's no way this image is real.

The Case Against

Well, like we said, if you're looking for a picture that accurately depicts a swarthy Italian plumber storming a castle to throw down with a giant turtle, you've come to the wrong film. This film is about as unfaithful as a kung-fu rendition of To Kill A Mockingbird.  That being said, we still give this one a hearty recommendation, if only for its hilarious disregard for anything that makes sense.

#6. In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Directed By - Uwe Boll

Starring - Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Burt Reynolds, John Rhys-Davies

Did It Make Money? - No (thankfully.)  It lost nearly fifty million dollars.

The Case For

Keep your hats on, boys and girls, for we enter now the Valley of Mediocrity.  You've got to wonder about any movie that bases itself on a game that consisted mostly of running in a straight line, clicking on everything that moved until it died, and then running in a straight line some more. 

"Whoa!  More monsters along the path we never deviate from!  That's a shock."

For its part, In The Name Of The King recreates what passes for the plot of Dungeon Siege pretty faithfully.  There's an evil wizard who tries to start some shit, an army of monstrous krugs, and one farmer too pissed to let any of this go.  That's about it, however.  The movie stumbles from halfway-decent fight scene to halfway-decent fight scene with some of the worst dialogue you've ever heard stringing it all together.  It's almost as boring as the source material (which is saying something.)

The Case Against

You might be scratching your heads and asking yourselves "But wait!  How could a movie starring Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Burt Reynolds, and John Rhys-Davies possibly lose fifty million dollars?  Those men are box office gold!  Jason Statham practically craps action blockbusters!  How is this possible?"

Two words: Uwe.  Boll.

"I hate you!"

We'll be seeing more from Uwe later in this list (unfortunately,) but suffice it to say that if there is one director on the planet who could possibly coax a lackluster performance out of four action-fantasy heavyweights, it's him.  Uwe is a legendary asshole, not only for having built his career from the smoudering carcasses of terrible game movies, but also for challenging anyone who criticizes him to a fight. There is likely no more despised figure in modern film, but we'll have to leave Boll behind for now and move on to the rest of the list.  Suffice it to say that if wanted to, we could spend this entire article talking about how awful he is.

#5. DOA: Dead Or Alive

Directed By - Corey Yuen

Starring - Jamie Pressly, Devon Aoki, Holly Valance

Did It Make Money? - Lost about fifteen million.  Sorry, ladies.

The Case For

It's an incredibly colorful movie; almost blindingly so.  You practically need sunglasses to withstand the some of the vibrant, sparkling sets.  There's also some fairly solid eyecandy to be found in here for both genders, even if the sweetest bits of said candy are wrapped in overly-contrived costuming and stuntwork.

She's a ninja, see.

The Case Against

Once again, there was a fundamental failure on the director's part in understanding the basic appeal of the DOA games.  Corey Yuen probably thought that he should make a movie about fighting with a few sexy ladies thrown in to spice things up.  He likely believed that as long as the fighting and spectacle was intact, people would forgive little deficiencies in areas like plot, dialogue, and narrative flow.

His biggest mistake was in thinking what DOA fans cared about was the fighting.  Fans of DOA might not give a shit about scripts and plots, but you're fooling yourself if you think for one second that they play the games for any reason apart from massive, inhuman tits on women with zero muscle tone wearing scraps of fabric masquerading as clothing.

Once again, the Internet has our backs.

And so it was that Yuen made a movie despised by everyday moviegoers for being a jumbled mishmash of stylized violence, and decried by hardcore DOA fans for having the audacity to make Kasumi both played by an actual Asian and be small-breasted.

#4. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Directed By - Hironobu Sakaguchi

Starring - Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi

Did It Make Money? - God, no.  It made about $Dick at the box office.

The Case For

A bit of pre-amble: yes, we know that it's not technically based on the FF series, you'll have to excuse us if we call bullshit.  If Hironobu Sakaguchi makes a movie that he titles FINAL FANTASY in 128-point type, he's making a fucking Final Fantasy movie.  It's not as though the FF canon is exactly rigid and airtight, after all.

In terms of nice things to say about this movie... well, it's very pretty.  Very, very pretty.  Yup, that sure is a well-animated piece of film.

Man, the Uncanny Valley is breathtaking.

Boy, what a meticulously animated movie that was.

The Case Against

For all the care that was taken making sure that the voice actors' mouthpieces had photorealistic hair, none of that stops your movie from being more boring than an Amish orgy.

Oh, they happen.

Okay, let's set the scene: it's 2065, Earth is barren, and humanity has been driven to near-extinction by some wacky aliens known as Phantoms.  Holy shit!  How is this going to play out?  Let's see if you can guess:

A) Humanity rallies and takes the fight to the aliens, driving them from our home planet with a swift boot to the ass.  Fuck yeah!  Earth!  Earth!  Earth!

B) Humanity puts up a valiant last-ditch fight against the aliens, resulting in a heroic suicide measure that wipes out both species, after which the planet is restored to its former beauty.  Fuck yeah!  Earth!  Earth!  Earth!

C) A couple of scientists and a gaggle of painfully uncharismatic soldiers babble for an hour and a half about spirits and ghosts and shit.  The ending isn't really important because if you go with this resolution your audience will be unconscious inside forty-five minutes.

If you chose C), congratulations!  You're Hironobu Sakaguchi and you just lost one hundred and thirty-seven million dollars!

#3. Street Fighter

Directed By - Steven E. de Souza

Starring - Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na, Kylie Minogue

Did It Make Money? - Nearly sixty-five million dollars.  Dang.

The Case For

The director made a couple of bold moves with this film; the first was in making many fights take place in venues other than the street, the second was somehow finding a way to glue even more contrived bullshit to Raul Julia's costume.

"Raul, can you still move?"

"Um, yes.  Barely."

"Okay, let's fix that."

Oh!  And Zangief is still all kinds of awesome.

"Prepare for a wrestling, bears!"

The Case Against

 We'll never understand why film-makers seem to have such a hard-on for films based on fighting games.  Take Street Fighter, for example.  The game is populated entirely by one-dimensional Japanese caricatures of popular stereotypes who fight each other constantly and for no good reason.  Exactly how stupid do you have to be to think you can make a decent piece of film with that as starting material?

About stupid enough to think that this doesn't look silly as all get-out, for one thing.

This is the rare sort of film adaptation where faithfulness to your source material can only cripple you.  Street Fighter immaculately recreates the game's distinctive costumes and exotic locales, which unfortunately only serves to highlight how laughably implausible both things are.  For example: a Hawaiian sumo wrestler, an all-star boxer, and a Chinese reporter tearming up to bring down a South-East Asian dictator?  Par for the course in a fighting game, utterly retarded in any other medium. 

This article comes a little too late for it to do much good, regrettably.  With a Tekken movie slated for release in August of this year, the only popular fighting game franchise that hasn't received a silver screen adaptation is Soul Calibur.  And you'd better believe that somewhere a team of highly-trained costume designers are working day and night trying to figure out a way to make Ivy's costume adhere itself to a human body.

#2. DOOM

Directed By - Andrzej Bartkowiak

Starring - Dwayne Johnson, Karl Urban

Did It Make Money? - Lost about fifteen million.  Sorry, boys.

The Case For

Well, Dwayne Johnson's in it.  He's pretty cool, you know, with muscles and stuff.  And, um, there's Karl Urban!  He played Caesar in Xena: Warrior Princess, remember?

We do.

The Case Against

We know that we're harping on this, but seriously: DOOM is about a lone space-marine shooting hell-demons on Mars.  If you're thinking about how to explain why the space-marine is shooting the hell-demons, or why there are hell-demons on Mars, or what the space-marine will do after he shoots the hell-demons, then are thinking way too much and as such have no business making a DOOM movie.

"Hey Dwayne, what's my motivation for this scene?"  "Fuck, I don't know, Karl.  How about: 'There are monsters.  I am shooting the monsters now.  Oh good, the monsters are dead.'  Jesus, you're stupid."

Here are a few more early-warning signs that you might be fucking up your DOOM movie:

- You cast Dwayne Johnson as a grizzled space-marine, but for some reason you haven't stopped casting space-marines.

- Your hell-demons are not actually from hell, but are viral mutants.  What is wrong with you?

- Your screenplay contains instances of moral ambiguity. 

- Your grizzled space-marine can't actually start blowing up hell-demons before he gets some sort of gay-ass powerup.

- You think that people will enjoy watching action from a first-person perspective even if they aren't in control.

#1. Postal

Directed By - Uwe Boll

Starring - Zack Ward, Dave Foley, Verne Troyer

Did It Make Money? - In a rather telling case against the existence of a just god, it broke even.

The Case For

Dave Foley (of Kids In The Hall fame) is in it.  Of course, that only makes this even more depressing.

Dave Foley shows his penis, but we still have a little bit of respect for him and honestly wouldn't wish Dave Foley's genitals on even our very worst enemy.  So here's Dave Foley surrounded by semi-naked ladies instead.

The Case Against

This movie might be the very worst film on the face of the planet.  Uwe Boll took Postal, which was already an unfunny pile of shit, ran it through the dank, verminous sewer that is his imagination, and somehow turned it into an even worse unfunny pile of shit.  Postal isn't so much a film as it is 80 minutes of unrelated sketches so bad that watching them is like forcing your eyeballs to eat pain.

"I still hate you!"

There is literally nothing linking the various scenes of this movie together, apart from their retardation and juvenile contempt for anything resembling political correctness.  First Dave Foley is pooping onscreen.  Now a sweaty, emaciated redneck is pouring flour onto an obese woman's stomach while he has sex with her.  Now an angry black cop has shot an elderly Chinese woman in the face for waiting too long at a parking light.  Now a gang of Arabic terrorists and some cultists wearing Hitler moustaches are shooting dozens of children dead.  All of these things appear in Uwe Boll's Postal.  No, we aren't kidding.

How bad is Postal?  We'll put it this way: we could have titled this article "X Things That Are Terrible About Postal" and it would be twice as long as it is now.  Everything about this film is nauseatingly atrocious - the dialogue is stilted, the jokes fall flat, the acting is horrible, and the plot makes no sense.  Everyone who paid real, adult dollars to attend this rancid failure of cinematography should feel utterly disgusted with themselves.

Boll's target audience.

So there you are, folks.  Eight movies based on videogames.  Some good, some bad, and some that make us blind with rage.  Hopefully you found this little excursion into the world of gamer cinema enlightening, and if not, hopefully we at least taught you to avoid anything at all involved with Uwe Boll.

When not subjecting himself to cinematic torture, Malcolm writes for The Last Gaffe.

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