5 Bad Video Game Movies That Are Still Better Than ‘Borderlands’

It was only a matter of time, but the golden age of gaming adaptations has already hit a snag. After high-brow television adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout becoming Emmy darlings and The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy’s breaking box office records, things seemed to be on an upward trajectory. With greater respect for the source material and some actual effort, it appeared as though Hollywood had finally caught up with the untapped storytelling potential of video games.

Then came Borderlands. Eli Roth’s action-comedy adaptation of Gearbox’s popular sci-fi shooter franchise could’ve been a layup; the games are colorfully silly space adventures tailor-made for mindless fun. But after multiple creative shifts and reshoots fans of Borderlands have been left with a movie that’s as boring as it is soulless.

The cardinal sin committed by Borderlands isn’t that it’s bad, but mundane. As a director, Eli Roth is mostly known for making juvenile grindhouse send-ups like 2023’s Thanksgiving and, frankly, could’ve been a solid pick had he committed to making a movie as unabashedly tasteless as his previous repertoire. At least people would’ve laughed. Instead, we got 100 minutes of secondhand embarrassment.

And here’s the thing: there are plenty of awful video game movies that are still entertaining. Paul W.S. Anderson’s chopsocky disasterpiece Mortal Kombat (1995) and Steven E. de Souza’s cornball take on Street Fighter (1994) are crowd favorites, reassessed over the years as b-movie junk food that are hard to pass up on a hungover Saturday afternoon. Even later star-studded misfires like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and Assassin’s Creed (2016) have their place as braindead vanilla entertainment suited to hotel-room TV viewing.

For the most part, early adaptations were low-budget cash grabs aimed at taking something popular with kids and doing the bare minimum to capitalize on name recognition. But through shoestring production and hammy performances, beautiful trash art can be born.

There’s a perverse sense of joy in seeing iconic characters make the leap from pixelation to live-action, playing out stories that are somehow even thinner theatrically than they were in arcades, with actors parading around in Halloween store attire. The key is commitment to the bit.

Here are five video game movies that, despite being terrible by any measure, are still more worth watching than Borderlands.

1. ‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’

2021

When most people recall a Resident Evil movie, their minds shoot to one of the six action-horror hybrid films starring Milla Jovovich which, from 2002 to 2016, inexplicably managed to become the longest-running mainstream success story of video game adaptations. From director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Monster Hunter), the Resident Evil movies were largely popular and remained modest office hits in their zombie-like ability to return year after year.

This is not one of those movies.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is instead a low-budget reboot of the franchise released to minimal fanfare in 2021, following the end of the Jovovich era. Directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down), it sought to be more faithful to the story of the games by A, actually using its characters and setting, and B, being about zombies.

Whereas the previous Resident Evil movies focused more on super-heroics peppered with light monster elements, Welcome to Raccoon City is an honest to God horror flick. Adapting the plots of the first two games as one story, it sees most of the franchise’s enduring protagonists working in tandem to survive a hellacious night following a sudden undead outbreak in a small town tucked away in the midwestern woods.

In a condensed retelling of Resident Evil 2, one thread follows hitchhiker Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and rookie cop Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia) paired up in a desperate search for an escape route as the virus spreads. The other subplot follows the events of Resident Evil 1, with spec-ops S.T.A.R.S. team members Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine exploring an eerie mansion owned by the evil Umbrella corporation that is ground zero for the horrors being unleashed. In rapid pace, both stories converge in a miraculously speedy 107 minutes of throat ripping and jump scares.

Welcome to Raccoon City is a flimsy movie. It looks and feels cheap and the acting is sloppy, but you know what? That’s Resident Evil. The early games were infamous for their cheesy dialogue and schlocky full-motion video cut scenes in an era before polished CGI could tell the story on old PlayStation hardware. Being ironically crappy is part of the series’ DNA.

By committing to definitively being a low-budget B-movie, Welcome to Raccoon City effectively recreates everything it means to be a Resident Evil story, and although haphazardly executed, takes care to showcase all the characters and memorable beats fans love that were completely omitted by the previous blockbuster take on the franchise.

2. ‘Doom’

2005

Back in the mid-2000s, before he became one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, Dwayne Johnson was still simply the Rock, just beginning to cut his teeth as an actor. At the time, a movie like Doom seemed like a perfect vehicle for the pro wrestler-turned-action star. Beloved video game IP? Check. Sci-fi action and minimal dialogue? Check. A Big Fucking Gun? Triple check.

With the combination of a fun as hell source material and a likeable rising star, Johnson should’ve been able to take all those checks to the bank, but it didn’t quite pan out like that. Instead, Doom ended up a curiosity: a theatrical bomb that isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think, but squanders both the charisma of its cast and the very simple concept of the game. It’s all wasted potential.

Doom takes the basics of a game where you mow down demons on Mars and turns it into something more vanilla. Set in 2046, it centers on a group of marines led by Johnson’s Sarge and Karl Urban’s Reaper on a mission to an interdimensional gateway portal called the Ark. Scientists have been screwing around with portals and genetic experimentation and have unleashed hell. Not the literal Hell, like in the games, but a less offensive, more generic hell-in-space where hideous monsters mutated by an artificial 24th chromosome pair are slaughtering people wholesale.

Under the direction Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave), everything from the set design to the lighting feels amateurish. Scenes are simultaneously too dark and over lit, and the monster effects wouldn’t scare a child on a haunted hayride. Yet, somehow, everything kind of comes together into a bargain bin take on Aliens, culminating in a wonderfully dumb recreation of the game’s first-person shooter POV in a one-take haunted house sequence.

One key reason Doom is so interesting is because of its sole good idea, which is a late-stage rug-pull wherein Johnson ends up infected and becomes the movie’s true monster. The twist leaves Urban’s Reaper, the film’s de facto protagonist and all-around good guy, taking up arms to kill a possessed Johnson. The switch up infuriated fans at the time, with many feeling cheated by the film’s marketing of Johnson as its star, but in retrospect it’s an anomaly we’ll likely never see again. The vast majority of the action hero’s movies see him save the day. Here, he get totally vaporized.

Doom has a reputation for being bad but, honestly, it could be worse. Its follow-up, 2019’s Doom: Annihilation, is an even more low-budget abomination that reboots the story with an entirely no-name cast that’ll make you go full-on Event Horizon, eyes clawed out and all.

3. ‘Double Dragon’

1994

Despite a handful of modern attempts to reinvigorate the video game franchise, Double Dragon remains mostly forgotten. One of the seminal beat ‘em ups of the late Eighties, the original arcade release in 1987 helped usher in a wave of martial-arts action games that would take over the subsequent decade. Without it, there would be no Street of Rage or Turtles in Time.

But just like the games that inspired it, 1994’s Double Dragon movie has also failed to get its due. While the likes of Street Fighter (1994) and Mortal Kombat (1995) are mostly accepted as cheesy fighting games turned cheesier films, Double Dragon generally remains left in the dust.

As an adaptation, there’s not much to say. The plot of the games is as barebone as it gets: Two brothers, Billy and Jimmy, must fight a gang to rescue Billy’s girlfriend, Marian. With so much free rein, director James Yukich could do just about anything. He decided to essentially remake Escape from New York with kung-fu magic.

Like many movies of the time, Double Dragon leans heavily on the downfall of urban society as a backdrop for justifiable fisticuffs. Set in a version of Los Angeles destroyed by an earthquake (two years before Escape from L.A.) the story follows martial arts genre staple Mark Dacascos and Party of Five’s Scott Wolf as the Lee brothers, who are in possession of one half of an ancient medallion that grants untold power. Hunted by crime lord Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick), who wants to unite the remaining half with his own, the duo must fight their way through a graffiti-painted punk version of the apocalypse (and of course, protect Marian).

Without much iconography to revere, Double Dragon has the benefit of just needing to be a martial arts romp with some monsters and mysticism thrown in. Also aping heavily from the work of John Carpenter’s own urban martial arts odyssey Big Trouble in Little China, Double Dragon ticks off just about every cliché you can imagine with just enough self-awareness to let viewers in on the joke. In some ways, it plays like a parody of a parody, but that’s giving too much credit.

In the end Double Dragon is exactly what it needs to be: a tasteless fantasy martial arts flick that feels like it should be playing on VHS in the background of a scene from a better movie.

4. ‘Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li’

2009

Look, 1994’s Street Fighter movie is a bad-movie classic. Featuring incredible miscasting with Belgian action star Jean-Claude Van Damme playing all-American colonel Guile and pop superstar Kylie Minogue as his plucky sidekick Cammy, it’s a beautiful mess elevated by oddity. In his final performance before his death, Raul Julia delivers a masterclass in scenery chewing as M. Bison. It’s got a version of Blanka body-painted like a Bill Bixby-era Hulk. What more could you ask for?

How about an even worse Street Fighter movie?

2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li has many of the same issues as its predecessor. The plot is ridiculous, the fight choreography agonizing, and the dialogue is actually worse than before. Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak (of Doom fame) it stars Kristen Kreuk as a young Chun-Li in a prequel to the events of the original game, on a mission to hunt down the man who abducted her father, M. Bison (Neil McDonough). Bison is the head of the criminal syndicate Shadaloo and a real bad guy, mainly because he murdered his pregnant wife and literally transferred the good parts of his own soul into his unborn daughter, Rose. It’s a whole thing.

Pairing up with Interpol agent Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) and Detective Maya “Crimson Viper” Sunne (Moon Bloodgood), Chun-Li must do all the legwork of an international police procedural for a chance to take down Bison for good.

The Legend of Chun-Li is about as bad as filmmaking gets, but it is raucously funny. Picture the Black Eyed Peas’ Taboo going full Man in the Iron Mask meets Freddy Krueger as Street Fighter character Vega. On top of a baby becoming a vessel for her father’s soul, there’s other supernatural elements that the budget simply can’t manage, like Chun-Li’s use of her famous in-game move Kikoken that looks like an effect from a Nineties-era Sci-Fi Channel original.

The movie’s comedic secret weapon is an all-time awful performance by Chris Klein as a sleazy Interpol agent who aggressively hates everyone around him while delivering poetic lines like, “This guy walks through the raindrops.” It’s one thing to play a beloved Street Fighter character without a single fight scene, but Klein delivers 100. percent and then some on crafting a persona built entirely on the ick.

With a new Street Fighter movie on the horizon, there’s a possibility that the franchise may still get an adaptation that can do justice to the classic game, but deep down, one can hope it’s equally terrible. Paired with the first Street Fighter and The Legend of Chun-Li, another misfire could make for one hell of a trilogy at a bad-movie matinee.

5. Super Mario Bros.’

1993

Of course, no list of bad video game movies is complete without 1993’s Super Mario Bros. Long before Nintendo conquered the box office with its own cinematic mea culpa for the plumber brothers, Super Mario Bros. had killed the company’s desire to ever produce a feature film again. And for good reason.

Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’re likely to know about at least some of its many issues. It’s become the fodder for film podcasts and YouTube breakdowns wondering where it all went wrong, but it’s all right there on screen. It’s a cyberpunk film, through and through. Leaning into a bizarre series of influences, directing duo Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel drew inspiration from the dark aesthetic of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film and movies like Mad Max and Blade Runner to create a grimly fantastical world parallel to Nineties New York. You know, just like Mario.

The famously troubled production played out like Nintendo’s Heart of Darkness as the creatives in charge clashed with just about everyone else involved in the film, including its stars Bob Hoskins (Mario) and John Leguizamo (Luigi). Both actors have gone on record decrying their involvement in the film, even openly admitting to being drunk during filming days. The directors pointed fingers at Dennis Hopper, who played Bowser, as being too difficult to work with. Even years later, the film’s female lead, Samantha Mathis (Daisy) has only seen it once. It was all a clusterfuck.

But workplace drama aside, the result of Super Mario Bros. is a fascinating movie. Taking all the whimsical elements from the adored children’s franchise and whittling them down into grim sci-fi fantasy is kind of brilliant in a weird way. But not for the world’s first big video game movie. Mario gets sexualized. Bowser devours people. Yoshi gets stabbed. It’s a nightmarish look at the Mushroom Kingdom by way of Paul Verhoeven.

Super Mario Bros. has a reputation for being terrible, but has there ever been a movie so artfully botched? Aside from being the gold standard for what not to do when adapting a video game, Super Mario Bros. has become something of a cult classic. People have been ironically revisiting the movie for the last 30 years, scratching their heads at every detail. That’s a legacy you can’t force, it’s a grassroots movement of hate watching.

So yes, Super Mario Bros. has become the crown jewel of bad video game movies. But you know what? It’s still better than Borderlands.

From Rolling Stone US.