20 years ago, Metacritic’s worst rated video game movie was released

Over the years, there have been high marks for movies based on video games Action film by Paul W. S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat 1995. and his 2002 zombie film. Resident Evil. You can see the sorry state we’re in when these two mediocre movies were the top marks. Adapting video games to the big screen has long been a challenge for Hollywood. These films are often criticized as being terrible and generally bombed (Combat and The Resident notwithstanding). Also, Rocky Morton and Annabelle Yankel’s 1993 adaptation of Super Mario Bros. much loved by a passionate cult of geeks who love its quirky ideas (a cult I belong to), but most people didn’t like how far the film strayed from Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto property.

There are many reasons why it is difficult to adapt video games into good movies. On the one hand, most video games are based on action and interactivity, while movies are passive and character-driven; the two media do not overlap neatly. In any case, many video games also depart from existing B-movies, so adapting them to film is like making a copy of a copy. (How, for example, would a Metroid movie look terribly different from Ridley Scott’s Alien?) Also, many modern video games have become so complex that their plots and plots are no longer suitable for use as 120-minute movie packages. (So, the Halo movie was finally canceled in favor of a TV series.)

However, some recent films buck this trend. Super Mario Bros. was a hit at the box office, Werewolves Inside is really good, and kids seem to like the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Heck, even the mediocre Five Nights at Freddy’s drew huge audiences.

But the mid-2000s were a very different time. It was the time of “Doom”, the sequels of “Resident Evil” and the German director Uwe Boll. Indeed, in the 2000s, Ball made five extremely terrible video game adaptations, becoming infamous as one of the worst directors of our time.

And of them all, his 2005 film Alone in the Dark might just be the worst.

The first video game Alone in the Dark was released in 1992, but it was only playable on home PCs. It was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first 3-D horror game ever created. The first Alone in the Dark game made for a home console was 2001’s Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. Its release caused the franchise to explode in popularity, so a feature film adaptation was not far behind. The original game was set in the 1920s and players had to escape from monsters in a haunted mansion in Louisiana. The first sequel was also set in 1920s Louisiana, while the second was set in California’s Mojave Desert. New Nightmare was the first game set in the present. In this game, players had to find mystical tablets with creepy, evil qualities.

Taking a cue from the 2001 game, Ball’s Alone in the Dark follows various characters as they retrieve some magical artifacts and investigate their connection to a newly-emerged pack of murderous monsters that hunt and kill our heroes. Christian Slater stars as an amnesiac paranormal investigator trying to find pieces of his past. Meanwhile, Tara Reid plays the curator of the museum where the bulk of the film takes place, while Stephen Dorff plays a soldier-like agent working for the mysterious 713 Bureau.

Alone in the Dark has the added twist of extracting the monster’s DNA, as well as several scenes where people are picked on by unconvincing monsters. Monsters can incubate in human bodies and produce their own EMPs, making sure the lights go out wherever they go (hence the name Alone in the Dark). The fact that the monsters had to be in the dark probably saved the filmmakers a lot of money when it came to visual effects.

Nobody liked Alone in the Dark. He currently has an approval rating of 1%. Rotten tomatoes based on 119 reviews. Ann Hornaday writes for The Washington Postthought Ball’s film was bad enough to be enjoyable, but never reached that threshold of entertainment that made it just plain bad. Scott Brown writes for Entertainment Weeklygave the film an F, stating that it was so bad that it was considered postmodern. He also described it as a “film-like mass”. Jack Matthews, writing for the New York Daily News, claimed that “Alone in the Dark” feels like putting on blindfolds and picking something creepy at random at Blockbuster Video … after reaching into the trash can. And a Pulitzer pun Justin Chang writes for Varietysaid that Uwe Ball should put the joystick down and fast.

In August 2024 Metacritic has compiled the 42 most talked about movies based on video games and rank them according to favorability. The most popular video game movie was The Werewolf Within, and even that only got a 66 positive rating. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat continues to receive high ratings, as does the recent Pokemon Detective Pikachu. Alone in the Dark took last place with 9 points.

Ball fared poorly on that same list. His “House of the Dead” came in at #40, his “In the Name of King: A Dungeon Siege Tale” at #39, his “BloodRayne” at #36, and his “Postal” at #34.

Despite his terrible track record, Ball remains proactive, able to find big-name actors at short notice and complete films quickly and on budget. In person, he is charming and has great ideas. In 2024 alone, he made two films — First Shift and Bandidos — and has three more in production. This comes after Ball said he would retire in 2016. Alone in the Dark is pretty creepy, but Ball doesn’t seem to mind. He was on to the next thing before you saw it.