Game Stooge

What Grinds My Gears: Video Game Movies

• Scribbled on May 7th, 2007 by Shogun6789
• Filed in Grinding Gears, Off Topic

Recently I was bored so I started watching zombie movies on the Sci-Fi channel. Something of the Dead is already on and I see that House of the Dead and House of the Dead 2 are coming on. The games weren’t that bad so I checked out the movie. Crap, pure crap. Why make a sequel? I don’t get it.

I got to thinking “why do people ruin good games by making horrible movies?” And that was just enough oil to get the gears grinding. Take Tomb Raider for example: It wasn’t exactly the best movie, lacked a lot, and was horrible to sit through, but hell, I like looking at Angelina Jolie wearing skimpy skin tight clothing. So I sat through the first and second movies bored and thinking about how bad they managed to butcher this beloved franchise.

Then there are movies like Bloodrayne. Horrible. I couldn’t even sit through the whole thing. Now, I pride myself as a movie connoisseur of sorts and being able to watch anything, but that movie was just like BLAUGH. Then we have the Resident Evil movies. Okay, maybe they were a little interesting and such, but again, I only sat through them for Milla Jovovich, for the same reasons as Angelina Jolie.

However, in my opinion, DOOM takes the cake. At least in some of the aforementioned movies they held somewhat to the source material, but DOOM brings up the question if the creators even played the games. Yes, it is on Mars but all the “bad guys” in the movie are not Hellspawn, and there is no portal opened from Hell in which all the demons pour through.

It is a zombie rip-off. Humans find extra chromosome juice and put it into people. The people then turn into zombie like creatures. Amazing. Not to mention the lack of variety in the enemies. It was a clever idea to use the first person shooter view, but sitting through the entire movie for that was not really worth it. For what its worth I’m not even going to go into Double Dragon, Mortal Kombat, and the Final Fantasy movies but yeah, not good.

Now what gets me is the slew of future video game movies rumored to be in production. I know the Halo movie has been put on hold and although the curiosity in me wants to see the movie made, part of me is happy for it. I don’t want Hollywood ruining games like Gears of War and Hitman. It’d be pretty tough to screw up Hitman. Give it to Tarantino and it would get done fine, but I know Hollywood will still manage to screw it up.

That’s what really Grinds My Gears. I do not want to see good video game franchises get turned into crappy films that can potentially ruin the game experience. It is just an embarrassment and needs to be stopped.