Were these dreaded video game movies really as bad as we remember?
Video gamers like me have pretty low standards
when it comes to movies based on the games we love. We don't need the movie to
be very faithful to the source material, because the source material is usually
not enough to fill 90 minutes of story.
I recently took a trip down memory lane and
reviewed five of the lowest rated video game movies according to Rotten
Tomatoes. I wanted to see if they were really all that bad. Keep in mind that
I'm not comparing these movies to There Will Be Blood or 12 Years a Slave.
I'm just commenting on whether they were any fun or if they were really that
bad.
Double Dragon - The original story from the video game started
with a woman getting gut-punched and taken away by the bad guys. You (and your
brother if you're playing two-player) emerge from the nearby garage and kick
butt until you reach the final bad guy. The twist ending had you and your
brother fighting to the death for the woman's favor.
That's a tough story to pad out. The makers of
the film chose to go the "mystical" route, featuring a medallion of
sorts that unleashes the power of the Double Dragon. Moldy cheese from
beginning to end, the movie is a complete mess featuring poor fighting scenes,
the one thing I'd hoped they'd get right. They even did their best to make
Alyssa Milano look ugly, but that's an impossibility. It scored 0% on Rotten
Tomatoes, deservedly so. Was Double Dragon really that bad? Yes.
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| "Is this LV-426?" |
Doom - Doom was the spiritual successor to Wolfenstein 3D, the first legitimate first person shooter ever released for computers way back in the early 1990s.
You're a space marine sent in to kick demon butt, all the way to the
end. Again, that's not a whole heck of a lot for movie makers to work with.
They took on the task admirably, with Dwayne
"The Rock" Johnson featured as a profanity-spitting space marine. The
movie attempts to be a mash-up of Predator and Aliens, and does a serviceable
job of it. My main complaint about Doom is that they were so over the top with
the swearing, making sure we know that this is an R-rated movie every two
minutes. Johnson probably dropped more F-bombs in this movie than in all of the
rest of his movies combined.
Toward the end of Doom, there's a five
minute scene where we watch the action from a true FPS perspective. I was
shocked to find myself enjoying it; I had heard that it was terrible, but the
scene was a gift to gamers and fans of the Doom series, with lots of little
nods to the franchise. Was Doom really that bad? No.
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| "How did this happen? Das Boot then Uwe Boll?" |
House of the Dead - Uwe Boll's first of many attempts at adapting a
game to the big screen is a disaster. The video game is an on rails shooter
where you simply wait for zombies to pop up, then shoot them in the head. Boll
could have gone anywhere with this simplest of premises, but he chose to make
what can't even qualify as a B movie.
Three minutes into the movie, every one of the
late teens/early twenties actors have established that they don't know what
they're doing and that you'll hate every one of their characters. Featuring
every corny line and scene from the worst horror films you've ever seen, the
first hour of the movie is an excuse to get us to one scene of guns and
explosions that looks like it was made ten years earlier than the movies
release.
The most baffling choice that mister Boll made
was to transition from scene to scene with half-second clips from the video
game. It was downright hilarious to watch one boring scene of meaningless
dialogue cut to another similar scene, with a flash of pixelated zombies in
between. Was House of the Dead really that bad? Yes.
Street Fighter - Based on what is arguably the best fighting
game series ever, Street Fighter is a ridiculous romp featuring Raul Julia as
the evil General M. Bison, trying to take over the world. Julia's performance
is hammier than your typical Easter dinner, but it's actually endearing to the
film.
Featuring many characters from the series,
including Jean-Claude Van Damme as the American (!?) soldier Guile. Street
Fighter hit all the right cheesy notes for me. It has a comprehensible (albeit
silly) plot.
That's the main difference between this movie and
Double Dragon; DD's story seemed tacked on at the end, after they had shot most
of the action scenes. Street Fighter is a cooky, wacky, zany trip from
beginning to end, but at least it makes sense. Was Street Fighter really that
bad? No.
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| "Sweet! I just blew a hole in Kevin Costner's fin!" |
Super Mario Brothers - Ever since this baffling take on gaming's most
beloved franchise was released over 20 years ago, rumors have swirled as to
what went wrong. Some people even went so far as to say they whole cast and
crew were on drugs during filming. While that's obviously not the case, one
thing is certain: Super Mario Brothers is the worst video game to movie
transition I've ever seen.
Game Informer magazine published a five page
article in an issue a few years back debunking the myths and telling the even
stranger truths about what made this movie such an incomprehensible mess. Long
story short, nobody on the cast and crew really knew what was going on. The
directors had no idea what they were doing. Key parts of the movie wound up on
the cutting room floor.
There is one unconfirmed rumor that still exists
about SMB. Many claim that the term "Epic Fail" was first used after
the movie's release. I can neither confirm nor deny that claim. But when I'm
asked "Was Super Mario Brothers really that bad?". I reply, "It
was even worse."
- Tom McDaniel