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The Worst Movie Tie-Ins Ever

Throw Away The Script

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14-May-2009 History of terrible movie adaptations

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It's not just films that get turned into terrible games. It's two-way traffic and sometimes games get adapted for film with apalling results. Here's our brief history of terrible movie adaptations of your favourite videogames.

Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros.
Released: 1993. Starring: Bob Hoskins, Jon Leguizamo, Dennis Hoopper.
The stinker that started it all and the last word in videogame sacrilege. Among the hideous ticklist of wrongness: setting the action in New York rather than the Mushroom Kingdom; Bowser depicted as a human; Princess Daisy has a ball of pink snot for a father; Toad is a lizard; Mario's full name is revealed as 'Mario Mario'... we dare you to watch it and not weep tears of despair.

Street Fighter

Street Fighter
Released: 1994. Starring: Jean Claude Van Damme, Kylie Minogue
Although not quite as rancid as the forthcoming Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, this still successfully redefined terrible. With a nonsensical plot that recasts Ryu and Ken as conmen and Zangief as a gurning goon, and some of the most pitiful SFX this side of an episode of Thunderbirds, sitting through this movie is more painful than a tiger uppercut to the groin.

Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat
Released: 1996. Starring: Christopher Lambert, Robin Shou
elatively speaking, this one isn't bad! There's some well choreographed scrapping, plot is kept to a bare minimum, there's some fun special effects and it sticks fairly closely to the source material. All things considered, this is the Citizen Kane of videogame movies. Its sequel, on the other hand, is an audio/visual abomination that we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Released: 2001. Starring: Angelina Jolie, Jon Voight, Daniel Craig
If all videogame adaptations, none have wasted such esteemed acting talent and cinematic source material quite so flagrantly as this sorry effort. It should've been easy: a sexy hero + Indiana Jones-style adventuring + scenery chewing bad guys = a rollicking good time, right? Wrong. This is boring, cheaply made and utterly unthrilling. Somehow the sequel is even worse.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Final Fantasy: Spirits Within
Released: 2001. Starring: Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Donald Sutherland.
A bit of a weird one this. Not only does it bear no relationship to the series from which it takes its name, it's also not strictly a film, featuring ground-breaking computer generated animation. Well, it was ground breaking in 2001. Now it just looks creepily unlifelike.

Resident Evil

Resident Evil
Released: 2002. Starring: Mila Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, James Purefoy.
Again, this could have been a cracker. After all, how hard is it to make a bad zombie movie? Somehow, Paul W Anderson manages it though, thanks to a tedious plot that focuses too heavily on conspiracy, double crossings and malevolent computer systems rather than relentless zombie killing. That bit with the laser wall o' death is kinda cool though...

House Of The Dead

House Of The Dead
Released: 2007. Starring: Jurgen Prochnow, Jonathan Cherry.
Ah, it's time to introduce the great Uwe Boll! The German writer/director is infamous for his staggeringly inept videogame tie-ins (don't see also: Alone In The Dark, Bloodrayne, In The Name Of The King) and this sorry zombie effort probably ranks as his most offensively poor effort. Scareless, goreless, witless and generally abysmal in every conceivable way.

Fred Dutton

Interactive

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Posted by Mama Luigi

One of the worst movie adaptions of a game has to be Doom. The story was completely hacked to pieces.

Speaking of Uwe Boll, he has done one good movie. The film of the video game, Postal for PC was excellent in that it captured the atmosphere of the game completely; a satirical gore fest that sets out to be offensive in every way possible.

Posted by deityofanime

Spirits Within was an AMAZING film! I know that it has little to do with the games but it was never meant to! And as far as the storyline goes it is to date one of my favorite films. The plot completely discards the basic Hollywood plot that we see in EVERY high concept film ever to come to movie screens and kill our brain cells in favor of a more complex one actually forces the audience to think in order to understand it for a change.

It's unfortunate when audiences slate movies that are ahead of there's time just because they don't understand it or don't appreciate a more complex narrative.

Posted by Shaun2005

Tomb Raider wasn't so bad if you kept staring at Jolie (Not a bad thing tbh). The sequel threw in some horrible (READ AMAZING) scenes involving the sea and Jolie.... but yeah apart from the movie was a disaster.

Mortal Kombat wasn't a terrible movie, just a terrible attempt at a plot and love story.

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