Alexa Lily Writes

At some point earlier this year, I decided that watching all of the video game adaptation movies would be a good idea. It was, in fact, a bad idea. You know how video game movies have a reputation for being bad? Yeah, that's not wrong. Well, mostly. I've been keeping a ranking going as I watch them (because arbitrary rankings are fun to do) and I'm sharing the current state of it here, now, today, for you.

This first post has a bit of catching-up to do, future posts about this will probably be in increments of ten films at a time but first we need to establish the list as it is now with the first 30 pieces of fine cinema. Let's take it from the top.

The "Legitimately Good" Zone

Okay, this is only mostly the "Legitimately Good" zone. The first seven of these are actually, really, genuinely good movies and I think even pretty solid adaptations of their respective source materials! Resident Evil (2002) is a great horror-action-thriller that I think does a pretty solid job of evoking what's good about the early RE games without trying to make a direct recreation of any of it. Monster Hunter does a similar thing and if you haven't seen it you totally should!! It's actually really good and doing this write up is making me think it might actually barely edge out RE for the top spot! The extended sequence in the first half of Milla Jovovich and Tony Jaa failing to communicate but still finding ways to work together to prepare to hunt larger monsters is great. It does end up with a weak ending that is very obviously baiting for a sequel but everything up until the last few minutes is extremely good!

Resident Evils Retribution, Extinction, and Afterlife are all very solid horror-action movies that all diverge more and more from the source material but after the first two movies it was clearly doing its own thing with the franchise and I think that's fine! I think that's good, even! More video game adaptations should be like the Milla Jovovich RE movies: gesture to the games in ways that aren't overt and cheesy but have the confidence to do their own thing. This list wouldn't be so dire if people weren't such absolute cowards.

Tomb Raider (2018) is, just like the previous three RE movies, a solid flick. I don't have a particularly deep knowledge of the Tomb Raider lore or really have much reverence for the series but this movie has a version of Lara that is closer to relatable and a lot of fun to watch. Making her a young broke millennial is a fun twist! The biggest issue with the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider duology is that her version of Lara is insufferable. Rich, privileged, white, snob who thinks archaeology is a fun hobby and has zero respect for the cultures she steals from. No thank you! And yet despite that the first of her movies is here in number eight because it has several fun set pieces. Just look the actual tomb raiding scenes up on youtube or something, they're a pretty good time and it'll save you like an hour or so.

Dead Rising: Watchtower was the real surprise out of these first ten. This is one that leans into being a bit of a B-Movie but the Dead Rising games have so much B-Movie energy to them that it works out really well. The scenes where they craft goofy weapons and then kill a few dozen zombies with them actually work because the whole movie has a fun tone to it. They're clearly having fun with it all the whole time!

RE: Apocalypse could be argued as the worst of the top ten but also it has a scene where Milla Jovovich sprints down the side of a skyscraper to get the drop on some unsuspecting guards and that whips ass, actually. It's almost the least-good of her movies but it's still fun enough.

Doom: Annihilation was another surprise for me. I assumed the direct-to-streaming movie that was publicly disowned by id Software was going to be a bad time and it was only kinda bad! I'm not going to try to tell you that it's secretly amazing or something but it's way better than I expected it to be! And it's not just because it's an action movie with a hot woman kicking ass at the center of it! It maybe mostly is that but it's not the only reason!

The "Kinda Good But Also Kinda Bad" Zone

I feel like the Silent Hill movies have a reputation for being abysmal movies and I'm here to tell you that Silent Hill (2006) is not abysmal at all and is actually pretty good! It actually really nails the vibes of its source material, maybe better than anything else on this list. It's just unfortunate that the story and dialogue are as weak as they are or else this could've been a strong contender for one of the top spots. People are right about Silent Hill Revelations 3D though. That movie is some real trash-garbage. Zero vibes, no good writing to speak of, Pyramid Head isn't hot enough, bad visual effects. It makes the fatal mistake of trying to do a (somewhat) direct adaptation of a game (Silent Hill 3) but you really, really, simply cannot do that! It just doesn't work! You can't transfer that experience from one medium to another effectively! The fact that a movie this bad is still in the middle of the list should be somewhat chilling to you, dear reader. Hold on because it only gets worse from here.

Doom (2005) is, I feel, pretty widely regarded as one of the better video game adaptations. People really love that first-person sequence. I'm here to tell you that they're right about it being an okay movie but wrong about that first-person bit (which was actually the weakest part of the whole movie). It's a lot more Aliens than it is Doom but I think that's alright. It's got some big B-Movie energy but I don't think it's exactly aware of that. The Rock is legitimately good in his role and I think Rosamund Pike does a good job with the scraps she's given. I'd honestly say it's about as good as the other Doom movie but that they're both enjoyable in wildly different ways. No, that doesn't make sense but this is my blog so I make the rules.

Okay, this is the first entry with an asterisk. Biohazard 4D-Executer is a 3DCG animation short film that had a limited showing in Japan (but somehow ended up on Youtube with English subtitles). When I started actually doing this ranking, I intended it to be for live action movies but since I had already watched this beforehand I threw it on the list just to be slightly more complete. I may add more CG stuff in the future but my to-watch list is just live action stuff for now. Anyway, 4D-Executer is a fun ten minutes and worth putting up with the 360p video quality for.

Hitman: Agent 47 (2015) is the first movie on this list that I have very little memory of. He gets hired to kill someone and there's a conspiracy and they crash a helicopter into a building? I think it ended in a way that suggested they wanted to do a sequel? I remember thinking it was a generally fine, if kind of bland, spy-action movie? Who knows.

We reach the end of the Resident Evil franchise with Welcome to Raccoon City and The Final Chapter. Raccoon City is the bad sort of adaptation that feels like a generic movie with a coat of paint thrown over it. A zombie woman bangs on a glass door to try to get Claire, starts yelling "Itchy Tasty!", and then dives through the glass door. It just throws out references to the games with no reverence for their context within their actual games. It may as well just occasionally put screenshots from the games up on the screen for you. "Remember the thing you like? This is that, right? :)" The Final Chapter, on the other hand, is a terrible ending to Milla Jovovich's sextet of Resident Evil movies. It throws out a lot of what the first five movies built and takes in way too much inspiration from Mad Max: Fury Road which changes a lot of the vibes of this movie into something completely different. Also, as someone who is photosensitive, there is a five(ish) minute long fight scene in this one that I literally cannot watch because the constant flashing lights are so uncomfortable to look at. It does some interesting things with the story but too much of the ending is just actual horseshit for it to be a satisfying ending to the series. And yet we're only halfway through the list.

Need for Speed has a few fun car stunts that, as far as I know, were all done practically. Even driving the car off a cliff and having a helicopter catch it! That was wild! Unfortunately, everything else is terrible and this movie is some hyper-dude-bro garbage. There's a few moments that try to recognize when some men are being shitty but it's usually just in service of letting other, different, men be shitty in other, different, ways. It's extremely funny to me that a major plot point of the movie is the idea that a modified Ford Mustang would somehow be on par with various European Hypercars from Lambourghini, McLaren, Bugatti, and Koenigsegg. Anyone who knows even a little bit about cars knows how laughable that is. And it's almost definitely why the Mustang gets trashed two-thirds of the way through. (Spoilers, I suppose)

Dead or Alive is a horny game franchise and the movie is no different. It feels like 90 minutes of excuses to oogle hot women in skimpy outfits. There's some alright fight scenes in this but I nearly had to tap out at the beach volleyball scene because I felt gross for watching this trash-ass movie.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life gets two special honors here: the first movie with two colons in the title and the second on this list that I don't really remember much of! I think they got rid of a lot of the cool practical sets and effects from the first Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movie and instead have questionable CGI for it. Other than that, I don't think I could tell you what happened here! But I do know it's bad!

The "Actual Dogshit" Zone

Okay, I may try to speed it up a bit here because this post is getting a bit long but also because, looking at these last ten, I think I've blocked large parts of these out of my memory. We're nearly done, I promise, this is almost over. Just gotta get through the worst part now!

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness has an asterisk on it the same as 4D-Executer does because (a) it's CGI and (b) it's a miniseries, not a movie. I don't remember much but I remember not liking it! I think I may have fallen asleep during one of the episodes.

BloodRayne and BloodRayne 2: Deliverance kind of run together in my mind. I don't remember why I ranked the second one above the first. The only solid memory of either of these is that the first one ends with a youtube-esque compilation of all the gory kills in the movie but it's seemingly framed as Rayne thinking about everything she went through to get to the end of that movie and it was extremely dumb in the bad way. I have just recalled that the second one is cowboys vs vampires and you know what that's a solid idea, that's probably why it's above the first one. They're both dogshit but the second one is slightly less so.

Alone in the Dark is barely watchable. It's bad in nearly every way a movie can be but, somehow, bafflingly, it waits to get that bad until the second half. The first half is an okay-but-kinda-bad movie and it's like they then decided it was time to really stink up the place. It's got terrible action sequences, a miserable plot, awful dialogue, bad acting across the board, awful direction, disorienting editing. It's almost as if Uwe Boll is bad at making movies. Hmm. I don't really know much about the Alone in the Dark games so I can't say if this is a good adaptation but I'm going to assume it isn't. I thought it was a series of old PC games about a funny lil guy in a spooky mansion? These movies are extremely not that.

Tekken has some good fights in it. Which, for a movie based on a fighting game, you'd think that'd carry it quite a bit. But unfortunately you would be mistaken. There is a sequel (sorta?) that I desperately need to get my hands on because I need to know how bad it gets. I need to know.

Hey, remember when I said Dead Rising: Watchtower was surprisingly good? I thought that meant that the sequel would be similarly good but Dead Rising: Endgame was actually surprisingly bad! All that fun, goofy energy in the first movie is completely gone and this zombie movie barely has any actual zombies in it. It's a deadly serious conspiracy movie about the government and scientists and fucking whatever who cares this movie sucks shit.

BloodRayne: The Third Reich has a premise that should be a slam dunk: hot lady vampire kills the shit out of a bunch of nazis. And yet here we are at the bottom of the list. It has all the similarly amateurish movie making of Uwe Boll's other movies but also it feels incomplete. It's like you can watch the budget dry up in real time as you're watching. Some shoddy editing makes a vain attempt to cover that up but it's pretty apparent that they ran out of money (or willpower, who knows) to actually finish this trash.

Have you ever heard of Dead Trigger? Because I sure haven't. Apparently it's a wildly popular first-person shooter mobile game! 100 million downloads popular! And yet this movie was the first I heard of it. This movie has the fun anecdote that the original director quit on the third day of filming and after that Dolph Lundgren and the new director had to do an emergency rewrite of the script to try and salvage the movie. The only good parts of this are the one or two times Dolph has fistfights with people because it turns out that dude is pretty good at fighting on camera (even though the people he fights are not and it very clearly shows). Oh, and this has the distinct honor of being the second movie on this list where the game developer very publicly disowned the movie and distanced themselves from it as much as possible! Congratulations!

Six or seven years ago I had the foolish idea to watch all the video game movies and didn't make it as far in as I have this time around. But I did make it to The King of Fighters. Kind of. I made it about to the supposedly-horny-but-mostly-awkward locker room scene with Vice and Mature and then shut it off there. This time I made it to the scene after there, where Vice and Mature fight a hockey hooligan (???) in a smoky alleyway, before turning it off. I hope I'm not a fraud for not being able to stomach the worst of the worst on this list.

Because I did it twice. Alone in the Dark 2 is another movie that I physically could not watch because of the flashing lights. It wasn't like Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, though, where it was just a short fight scene. This movie has flickering lights nearly constantly throughout the 30 minutes I was able to make it through. It really felt like they were trying to cover up low production values and shoddy editing. You can't see how bad it is if you can't see anything else! Nothing I saw (or attempted to see) in that first 30 minutes made me think anything in the rest of it was worth watching so I tapped out of that one too.

And now for the part where I reveal that this is all a ruse! You have been bamboozled! This isn't a list of 30 films! It's actually up to 37! The list posted here today is old and I will be making a new post in the near future once I get up to 40 movies watched! Haha! You have fallen right into my trap! Future posts about this ongoing project won't be nearly as long as this one was but the movies won't be nearly as good as most of what I talked about here today! So look forward to that!