Welcome to Respawning’s Film & TV Club! The purpose of this is to get a bunch of us together every Wednesday and allow us the chance to chat shit about whatever takes our fancy in the world of Films & TV!
Today we’re looking at those films that have fallen to the bottom ranks of Rotten Tomatoes… The poor performers on IMDB… Those films based off of videogames that just should never have existed!! Our least favourite films based off of videogames!!
Javier
WORST video game movies….I mean there’s so many right, it seems that most of the time these massive film corporations can’t get it right, to a point where I haven’t seen recent ones such as Warcraft or Assassins creed because I don’t want to waste my time. (I really thought Ass creed was going to be good). Now I don’t know what the issue is, is it because they can’t capture the charm of a game, or a video game story isn’t translated well to screen, or there are too many hours to squeeze in to 1.5/2 hours (book adaptations seem to do it fine) but there’s not been any that have blown me away.
Anyway for me the worst one, like WORST is probably Mortal Kombat Annihilation, now there a lot of bad video game adaptations from the 90s but this one hits me hard as I LOVED it as a kid, but unfortunately when going back to it as an adult I wanted to cry. Especially as the first MK movie ain’t that bad.
Another I have to mention is Super Mario Bros, this film is far removed from the actual game and is just an absolute eye sore that needs to be forgotten about.
William
The biggest failure of video game movies for me? Doom. I LOVE the Doom games so to see the potential squandered is such a massive shame. With a poorly acted script and terrible use of some excellent cast members (Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban who both went on to bigger and better things!) This could have been something beautiful and exciting but it just tries to hard to be dark and edgy. Can’t blame it so much for that though since it was the mid 2000’s and EVERYTHING wanted to be dark and edgy (myself included) The biggest shame though? what keeps me up at night still? For 2 glorious minutes this film is just what you want it to be. 2 minutes of amazingly filmed and edited first person action with all the Doom staples chucked in to make even the most die hard fans squeal with delight! in summary. Play the games and avoid the movie like the plague.
Chris
The Resident Evil live action films are the worst, hands down. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Why? Because everyone knows the live action ones are shit. But the most recent CGI adaptation, Resident Evil: Vendetta, is a hidden gem made of a different kind of crap – the so-bad-it’s-good kind.
Our movie begins with Chris ‘Recognised Him First From His Arms’ Redfield with a squad going to investigate the radio silence of an undercover operative at a secret research facility. Well, an operative and her son. That’s right: She asked to take her real ten year old son to a bioweapons lab whilst she spied on it, and the BSAA said ‘Sure, I see no problem with this.’
It only gets stupider from there. Join Chris, Rebecca, and Leon in some of the stupidest shit these characters will ever be in, the original Resident Evil cut scenes included: Long-term zombie virus research being undertaken in a Chicago Uni campus lab; Leon intentionally endangering and straight up murdering civilians whilst fighting Cerberus on a highway; insta-full blown zombie reversal; completely ineffectual villains (some with really bad dental hygiene for no reason); villains and heroes running around in circles less than a mete apart firing at each other’s feet…it’s kind of amazingly bad. But I don’t want to spoil everything here. It’s something you should experience first hand: So seek out Vendetta, and let yourself become infected with laughter.