Borderlands Isn't So Bad: 5 Video Game Adaptations That Are Even Worse

Video game films are a sore subject for the movie industry. It is generally accepted that of all the adaptations released in the last 30 years, the number of truly worthy ones can be counted on one hand.

Borderlands also turned out to be a disappointment – the movie has just been released and already has a crushing 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hardcore fans, however, remember that the world of game adaptations has seen far worse examples than Borderlands.

1. BloodRayne, 2005

The notorious director Uwe Boll's example is a lesson for those who are afraid of making mistakes. After all, if you repeat the same mistake countless times, you can become the director of the movie BloodRayne.

The film has almost no connection with the plot of the game: Rayne, a vampire-human hybrid, is looking for her father to carry out a righteous judgment on him, and ordinary residents of Romania oppose her.

The director himself compared BloodRayne to Underworld. However, the viewers did not appreciate the director's efforts, the movie failed miserably at the box office and received six nominations for the Razzie.

2. House of the Dead, 2003

House of the Dead is a Japanese video game series popular in the late 90s. The adaptation was once again made by Uwe Boll, for whom it was the first step on a road littered with the corpses of video games he butchered.

The movie begins as a typical slasher: a group of teenagers go to an island where a party is supposed to take place. Nobody cares that the place is called Island of the Death and that the transporters are very suspicious men with criminal looks.

Boll (who has never denied the low quality of his films) fended off the criticism by saying that viewers expected too much from a movie adaptation of a game where nothing happens except killing the living dead.

3. Max Payne, 2008

Max Payne won the hearts of gamers thanks to bullet time – the slow-motion effect the game's creators borrowed from The Matrix. The image of the main character – a New York cop in a Hawaiian shirt under a leather trench coat, obsessed with revenge – migrated directly from noir to Max Payne.

In the 2008 film of the same name, Mark Wahlberg was cast as the protagonist – and it became one of the most important examples of miscast in the history of cinema.

The plot of a noir tragedy was turned into a banality with a sermon on the dangers of drug addiction and, for some reason, got a completely useless mystic storyline.

4. Street Fighter, 1994

A mad dictator takes innocent people hostage and demands a ransom. Only William Guile (played by Jean-Claude Van Damme) and his team of the most experienced fighters can deal with him.

Street Fighter was one of the first fighting game adaptations, indecently expensive by the standards of the 90s. The movie turned out to be ridiculous, with a simple (even by video game standards) plot. Even Jean-Claude Van Damme couldn't save it.

However, this did not prevent Street Fighter from making a decent amount of money at the box office and becoming a cult movie (in very, very narrow circles).

5. Doom, 2005

One of the most influential games of all time, Doom was released in 1993 and changed the world of first-person shooters forever. As a nameless space marine, players roamed the monster-filled corridors of a Martian laboratory, collecting keys and weapons that could send demons back to hell.

The presence of such excellent actors as Rosamund Pike, Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson in the lead roles did not affect the quality of the movie – from start to finish it was a mediocre and boring work. The scene filmed entirely from the first-person perspective is perhaps the only thing that justifies the existence of this flick.