Metacritic's worst-rated live-action video game movie was released 20 years ago

For many years, there were high marks for movies based on video games Paul WS Anderson's 1995 fighting film Mortal Kombat and his 2002 zombie film Resident Evil. You can see how sorry we were when these two mediocre movies were anything but brilliant. Adapting video games to the big screen has long been difficult in Hollywood. These movies are often considered terrible and usually bombed (Kombat and Resident notwithstanding). Alternatively, Rocky Morton and Annabelle Yankel's 1993 adaptation of “Super Mario Bros.” is beloved by a passionate cult of weirdos who love its crazy ideas (a cult to which I belong), but most people didn't like how far the film strayed from Shigeru Miyamoto's Nintendo property.

There are many reasons why it is difficult to adapt video games into good movies. First, most video games are based on action and interactivity, while movies are passive and character-driven; the two media do not overlap neatly. Many video games also lift their premises from existing B-movies, so adapting them to film feels like a rip-off. (How, for example, would “Metroid” look terribly different from Ridley Scott's “Alien?”) Also, many modern video games have become so complex that their stories and premises are no longer convenient, 120-minute movie packages. (As a result, the Halo movie was eventually canceled in favor of a television series.)

However, some recent films have reversed this trend. The Super Mario Bros Movie was a huge box office hit, Werewolves Inside is really good and kids seem to love those Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Heck, even the mediocre Five Nights at Freddy's drew a large audience.

But the mid-2000s was a much different time. It was the time of “Doom”, “Resident Evil” sequels and German director Uwe Boll. Indeed, Ball made five very terrible video game adaptations in the 2000s, gaining notoriety as one of the worst filmmakers of the modern era.

And his 2005 film Alone in the Dark might be the worst.

The first video game “Alone in the Dark” was released in 1992, but it was only available to play on home computers. It is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first 3-D horror game ever created. The first Alone in the Dark game for home console was 2001's Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. Its release sparked the popularity of the franchise, so a feature film adaptation wasn't far behind. The original game was set in the 1920s and players had to run away from monsters to escape 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 this game, players had to find mystical pills with eerie, evil properties.

Taking cues from the 2001 game, Ball's Alone in the Dark follows various characters who retrieve some sort of magical artifact and investigate its connection to a newly formed horde of murderous monsters that are stalking and killing our heroes. Christian Slater plays a paranormal investigator with amnesia who tries to find pieces of his past. Meanwhile, Tara Reid plays the curator of the museum where most of the film's action takes place, and Stephen Dorff plays a soldier-like agent working for the mysterious Bureau 713.

Alone in the Dark includes additional twists involving the extraction of monster DNA, as well as several scenes where humans are captured by unconvincing monsters. Monsters can incubate in human bodies and generate their own EMPs, making sure the lights are turned off 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. It currently has a 1% approval rating Rotten tomatoes based on 119 reviews. Ann Hornaday writes for The Washington Postthought Ball's film was almost bad enough to be enjoyable, but it never reached that threshold of entertainment, making it nothing but bad. Scott Brown, writes Entertainment Weeklygave the film an F, stating that it is so bad that it is 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 wearing a blindfold and randomly selecting something terrible at Blockbuster Video … after going through the trash. And a Pulitzer-winning pun Justin Chang writes for Varietysaid that Uve Boll should put the joystick down and fast.

in August 2024, Metacritic compiled 42 of the most popular movies based on video games and ranked them in order of favor. The most loved video game movie was “Werewolves Inside” and even that only had a 66-point positive rating. Anderson's “Mortal Kombat” was still highly regarded, as was the recent “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu.” “Alone in the Dark” ranked last with 9 points.

Boll fared poorly on this same list. His “House of the Dead” was #40, his “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale” was #39, his “BloodRayne” was #36, and his “Postal” was #34.

Despite his terrible track record, Ball remains active, able to land big-name actors and complete films quickly and under 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 films under his belt. This comes after Ball said he would retire in 2016. “Alone in the Dark” is pretty awful, but Boll doesn't seem to mind. He was on to the next thing before you even saw it.