20 Years Ago, Metacritic's Worst-Rated Live-Action Video Game Movie Was Released

For many years, the high-water marks for movies based on video games were Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 fight film "Mortal Kombat" and his 2002 zombie flick "Resident Evil." One can see what a sorry state we were in if those two mediocre films were the high-water marks of anything. Adapting video games to the big screen has long been tricky for Hollywood. These films are often lambasted as terrible and have typically bombed ("Kombat" and "Resident" notwithstanding). Alternatively, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel's 1993 adaptation of "Super Mario Bros." is deeply beloved by a passionate cult of weirdos who love its zany ideas (a cult I belong to), but most folks didn't like how far the film strayed from Shigeru Miyamoto's Nintendo property.

There are many reasons why it's hard to adapt video games into good movies. For one, most video games are predicated on action and interactivity, while films are passive and character-driven; the two media don't overlap neatly. Many video games also lift their premises from extant B-movies anyway, so adapting them back to film feels like making a copy of a copy. (How would a "Metroid" film, for instance, look terribly different from Ridley Scott's "Alien?") On top of that, many modern video games have become so complex that their stories and premises no longer lend themselves to handy, 120-minute film packages. (Hence, the "Halo" movie was ultimately scrapped in favor of a TV series.)

Some recent films have bucked the trend, though. "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" was a huge box office hit, "Werewolves Within" is genuinely good, and kids seems to love those "Sonic the Hedgehog" movies. Heck, even the mediocre "Five Nights at Freddy's" attracted a large audience.

But the mid-2000s were a much different time. It was the time of "Doom," "Resident Evil" sequels, and German director Uwe Boll. Indeed, Boll made five utterly terrible video game adaptations in the 2000s, becoming notorious as one of the worst filmmakers of the modern era.

And of the lot, his 2005 film "Alone in the Dark" might just be the worst.

The first "Alone in the Dark" video game was released in 1992, but was only available to play on home PCs. It has been credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the first 3-D horror game ever made. The first "Alone in the Dark" game made for a home console was 2001's "Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare." Its release saw the franchise explode in popularity, so a feature film adaptation wasn't far behind. The original game was set in the 1920s and had players flee monsters to escape from a haunted mansion in Louisiana. The first sequel was also set in 1920s Louisiana, although the second sequel was set in the Mojave Desert in California. "New Nightmare" was the first game to be set in the present. In that game, players had to locate mystical tablets with eerie, evil qualities.

Taking its cues from the 2001 game, Boll's "Alone in the Dark" is about various character retrieving magical artifacts of some kind and investigating their connection to a newly appeared pack of killer monsters that stalks and kills our heroes. Christian Slater stars as a paranormal investigator with amnesia who's trying to find the pieces of his past. Meanwhile, Tara Reid plays the curator of the museum where the bulk of the film's action takes place and Stephen Dorff portrays a solider-like agent working for the mysterious Bureau 713.

"Alone in the Dark" features additional twists involving the extraction of monster DNA, as well as multiple scenes of people getting picked off by unconvincing monsters. The monsters can incubate inside human bodies and produce their own EMPs, making sure the lights turn off wherever they go (hence the title "Alone in the Dark"). The fact that the monsters have to be in the dark likely saved the film's creatives a lot of money when it came to visual effects.

No one liked "Alone in the Dark." It currently has a 1% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 119 reviews. Ann Hornaday, writing for The Washington Post, felt that Boll's film was almost bad enough to be enjoyable, but never quite reached that threshold of entertainment, making it merely bad. Scott Brown, writing for Entertainment Weekly, gave the film an F, stating that it was so bad, it counted as being postmodern. He also described it as a "film-like mass." Jack Matthews, writing for the New York Daily News, argued that "Alone in the Dark" feels like wearing a blindfold and selecting something terrible at random at Blockbuster Video ... after reaching into the trash can. And the Pulitzer-winning punsmith Justin Chang, writing for Variety, said that Uwe Boll should put down his joystick, and fast.

In August 2024, Metacritic compiled 42 of the more high-profile films to have been based on video games and ranked them by favorability. The best-loved video game movie was "Werewolves Within," and even that one only had a 66-point positive appraisal. Still highly rated was Anderson's "Mortal Kombat," as was the recent "Pokémon: Detective Pikachu." "Alone in the Dark" came in dead last with a score of 9.

Boll came out poorly across the board on that same list. His "House of the Dead" was ranked 40th, his "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale" was 39th, his "BloodRayne" was 36th, and his "Postal" was 34th.

Despite his horrible track record, Boll remains active, able to secure big name actors in a pinch and complete films quickly and under budget. In person, he's a charmer and has great ideas. He made two films — "First Shift" and "Bandidos" — in 2024 alone, and he has three more in production. This was after Boll said he'd retire in 2016. "Alone in the Dark" is pretty terrible, but Boll doesn't seem to mind. He was on to the next thing before you even saw it.