The Worst Of Videogame Movies: Part 2

I just couldn't let this priceless shot go to waste.

Ah, weekend at last! As promised, I return to the table for another helping of movie adaptations of video game franchises that make me want to throw up. Having exposed the most repulsive examples of this category from the 1990s, we now move into the 21st century, to find that, while attitudes may be changing, and effects may be improving, the situation is ultimately no better. To the contrary, I am firm in my belief that the top of this list is actually the absolute worst that the genre has to offer (other than Double Dragon, that movie was fucking awful). It's worth mentioning that I will not be including the resident evil movies on this list. I've already talked about them in the past and... frankly I don't trust myself to talk about them without having some sort of rage blackout. Back to the subject! I give you, with increasing horror:

THE TOP 5 WORST GAME MOVIES OF THE 2000s

Angelina Jolie's boobs are digitally
enhanced in this movie...

#5) Lara Croft: Tomb Raider(2001): Again, let us all take a moment to be stunned that this is the best of the movies that made it onto this list. Starring Angelina Jolie as the eponymous tomb raider, This 2001 film featured everything that a movie needs to appeal to the discerning gamer/moviegoer, right? It has gunfights, lame sex puns, stone statues that attack people, lame cg monsters, and steamy shower scenes. Two of them. One with Angelina and one with Daniel Craig (who I'm sure has tried hard to forget he was ever in this movie, now that he has been in movies that were actually good). Like any movie worth its salt, the plot of Tomb Raider features time warps, alternate dimensions and an evil plot thought up by the Illuminati. If this movie had also featured some Freemasons fighting those Illuminati types, it would've been the best movie ever featured on the Syfy channel at 3 in the morning, right before the infomercials about magicbullet blenders. I will also go on the record here as saying that I find Angelina Jolie too creepy to be attractive. Her computer generated breasts cannot change that. Paramount managed to screw Eidos out of any royalties for the movie, paying them only a single fee. This movie was pointless, and full of uninspired action sequences strung together in ways I didn't care about. Fun fact though, virtually none of the main characters in this movie speak with their real accents (Craig pretends to be American, Jolie pretends to be English, and Iain Glenn, who plays the principal antagonist, pretends to be English despite actually being a Scot. What the hell Simon West). This movie grossed over 274 million dollars despite negative reviews, spawning a less successful but still very profitable sequel, that was even dumber than the first. I regret to say that I saw that one too.

I know how you feel Marky Mark.

#4)Max Payne(2008): This movie, featuring Marky Mark of funky bunch fame as the title character, features a noir style action setup, and a plot that manages to be both serpentine and also even dumber than Tomb Raider's, Focusing on a cliche quest for vengeance, Max Payne also features heavily in weird unexplained supernatural occurrences that I honestly am still not sure I fully understand, despite having seen the movie twice (again thank you FX for playing all the worst movies, over and over again, for my viewing...pleasure). I'm pretty sure they were hallucinations on the part of drugged out characters, but the movie doesn't really make that clear. Quite to the contrary, the movie makes it look like a scary winged monster kills a bunch of people. Mark Wahlberg delivers a completely zombie performance in this movie, opposite Mila Kunis, Ludacris (who should have stuck to Fast & Furious movies) and Beau Bridges who performed in the movie mostly because his kids were excited about it, despite having no knowledge of the game. I wish I had the same lack of knowledge about this shitty ass movie. Again Max Payne proved that movies don't need to be good to make money, raking in 85 million in the box office. Much like the real Max Payne, we are now beginning to reach the darkest reaches of our tour of Cinematic Hell.

#3)Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li(2009):  Those of you who read last Saturday's post about the original Street Fighter movie probably remember me mentioning this particular entry, and also might remember me saying that it was substantially worse than the original. I stand by that assertion. This film follows the story of Chun-Li and her quest for I don't know who gives a shit. The movie stars Kristen Kreuk (who is probably best known for portraying Lana Lang on the WB series Smallville) as the apparently legendary Chun-Li, who bears only passing resemblance to the character she was based on. Which is to say she doesn't really look like her and dresses different, and she is not a police officer. She still wants to fight M. Bison for kidnapping her father (instead of avenging his death) but that's about it for similarities. In addition to being nothing like the character she is based on, Chun-Li is also a really uninteresting character, who embarks on a by the numbers bad guy fight, and engages in several battles towards the end of the movie that have special effects that makes those in Dragonball: Evolution look classy in comparison. Pretty much the best thing I can say about this movie is that it's pretty short, running only 97 minutes from beginning to end, though even that feels like an eternity of punishment for wrongs I didn't know I'd committed. Unlike most of the other movies in these lists, Chun-Li performed disastrously in theaters netting 12 million against its 50 million dollar budget. Justice at last.

God Christian Slater... just die.

#2)Alone in the Dark (2005): It grieves me that this film can't be at the bottom of this list, but only one movie can be worst, and this one is...marginally better... I guess. Like so many movies that are awful, and the last two I'll talk about on this list, Alone in the Dark was directed by Uwe Boll, who is best known for being a complete and utter dickbag, who I believe makes movies with the express intent of them being so bad that they give you cancer. He is also well known for in the past using Germany as a tax shelter so that he could fund his awful movies, which almost universally tank (He actually admits doing this on a DVD commentary for Alone in the Dark). He has in fact made so many shitty movies based on games that I had to pick what I thought were the three worst ones for this and the first place slot. This movie stars Christian Slater as Edward Carnby, an agent for a mysterious government organization that investigates scary weird stuff and has sort-of super powers, and then there's a portal to another dimension, dinosaur monsters, and a bunch of other really stupid things that Uwe Boll loves to do. Also Tara Reid is in this movies so... yeah that's not great. There's not a whole lot else to say about this movie. It's a terrible movie in every way, it has not a single redeeming moment, and watching it from beginning to end might kill you (I am hardened from years of training). I don't really need to mention it, but like all the others this movie was financially a disaster in and after the box office. Everyone involved should feel ashamed, including the cast, directors, writers, and Nightwish for having a music video tie in directed also by Uwe Boll.

What is going on with Michael Madsen's hair.

#1)BloodRayne(2006): And here we are at our final stop on this park ride, BloodRayne, the most unrepentant shit heap that I have ever sat through, which is saying something pretty dire. Starring Kristanna Loken (you might remember her as the terminator from the awful Terminator 3 movie) as Rayne, this absolutely abysmal vampire movie features some of the worst dialogue ever penned, attached to an utterly ridiculous and completely cliche plot, wrapped in bad effects and accompanied by some really uncalled for sex content and some of the most fake and ridiculous looking wigs to ever appear in a film. This movie features some grade F talent as well, including the pictured Michael Madsen, Matthew Davis, Billy Zane, and also Meat Loaf as a hedonistic vampire lord, just when you think this movie cannot possibly be any worse than it already is. Against its 25 million dollar budget BloodRayne grossed less than 4 million dollars, and met a similarly grisly fate after release to DVD. Despite this, two direct to DVD sequels were made, though neither featured much of the original cast. All were directed by Boll, who should burn in Hell forever.

That completes my list! A lot of you are maybe wondering why House of the Dead or the Dungeon Siege movie weren't on the list, and the simple answer is I didn't want this to become Uwe Boll's filmography. I picked the two worst movies he's ever directed, even if that was a really tight race because they are all awful.

Join me on Tuesday when I try to wash the taste of these movies out of my mouth by going off my meds, and reviewing another movie starring Bruce Willis.

Ew, is that Christian Slater over there?