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Wednesday, December 28, 2016

The History of Video Game Movies (Part 3: 2005-2009)

If you're interested, you can first read Part 1 covering the 1990s or Part 2 about 2000 to 2004, or watch the video version of this article.


In the first half of the decade, things were looking up for video game movies, as there were huge hits like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil.

However, from 2005 to 2009 game adaptations were mostly underwhelming, with none making over $100 million at the box office. They performed especially poorly with critics as all of them scored below 35% on Rotten Tomatoes and five of them got below 10%, which is an awful score.

On that note, we start with one of the worst movies I've ever seen, Alone in the Dark, based on the survival horror series from Infogrames. The franchise began in 1992 on the PC and has somewhat died out recently, as it has only seen two entries since 2002.

The film adaptation was directed by infamous German filmmaker Uwe Boll, who is notorious for making exceptionally awful movies, many of them inspired by video games. He had already made the terrible game adaptation House of the Dead in 2003, and he'll come up in this article four more times.



Alone in the Dark has an astonishingly bad Rotten Tomatoes score of 1% and it currently has an IMDB user rating of 2.3, making it the 43rd lowest rated movie on the site.

Pretty much everything about the film is embarrassingly bad, starting with the acting from B-list stars like Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff.

There's also some very fake-looking CGI used to portray the monsters.

Peter Hartlaub gave a particularly scathing review for the San Francisco Chronicle, writing "It fails so miserably as both an action and horror picture that it succeeds as a comedy. It's a film so mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality."

Alone in the Dark was released in January of 2005 and made a paltry $10 million on a $20 million budget.