T5W#555-Top 5 Guilty Pleasure Video Game Adaptations

Three years after they crushed the box office, Mario and Luigi are back with their ever growing gang of Nintendo favorites for another cinematic offering with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.  If it’s even half as good as it’s predecessor, it’ll continue to cement just what kind of a new golden age of Video Game Adaptations we live in now.  The Last of Us and Fallout continue to reign supreme on the TV side while we still have more big screen spectacles to look forward to with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat II.  However, it’s hard to forget the dark ages of Video Game Adaptations, the ones that got it all wrong, that might’ve made money but made no one happy and…yeah I’ll admit some of them I do like in a so bad theyre good kind of way.  Maybe it’s because I grew up with a lot of them and watched them a ton, some bad video game movies can get an amusing chuckle out of me and I might, dare I say, even genuinely enjoy them.  So, on today’s Top 5 Wednesday, I’m counting down my personal picks for the Top 5 Guilty Pleasure Video Game Adaptations. 

 
#5-Doom

Karl Urban and The Rock lead this first attempt at a Doom movie and by rights, just having these two in an R Rated Doom project should be a win in and of itself.  But let’s be honest, they’re two of the three main things that make this movie somewhat enjoyable for me.  Doom is a film that has no Doom in it whatsoever: No Demons, No Hell on Mars, No Super Shotgun and a totally wasted BFG.  But damn if I don’t salute Urban and Dwayne for how serious they take their underwritten roles and how they deliver all of their cringe worthy dialogue with a straight face (especially The Rock, who gets my Top 2 favorite lines of the movie).  Also, for what it was at the time, the FPS sequence is kinda cool, there just should have been more of it throughout the movie before the final act.

 
#4-Super Mario Bros.

This movie is the stuff of legends with a well documented production history that is the definition of “Development Hell”.  Whoever thought giving Mario the dark and gritty scifi treatment (a la what theyd eventually do much better for Battlestar Galactica) is an idiot for sure but past the bad special effects, nonsensical plot and lack of any faithfulness to the source material, the performances of stellar actors braving the hellish production shine through.  Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo make a legit solid brotherly duo and you can feel the ham and rage building within Dennis Hopper in every scene.  Despite everything this movie does wrong, it’s something you need to experience to believe it really happened, especially considering where Mario is now in his cinematic career. 
 

#3-Street Fighter

Now this is a movie that truly is so bad it’s good and is just a ton of fun all around…if you ignore the overcomplicated plotting and the lack of any substantially good fight scenes…ok so why is this worth a watch?  For one, the dialogue is so quotable and hilarious, fitting since this was directed by the guy who wrote Die Hard, Steven E. Desouza.  And then there’s Raul FING Julia.  This was his final film role before his death and my God does he look like he’s having an absolute blast as M. Bison.  His charisma is endless, his persona larger than life and a lot of those quotable lines come from him (It was Tuesday lives in my head rent free).  Street Fighter manages to overcome much of its shortcomings to be an entertain watch and it’s a flick I’ll probably review here on the blog closer to when the new movie comes out.
 

#2-Wing Commander

So this one holds a special place in my heart.  It was one of those movies I was so excited to see my Dad did a rare thing and got me out of school early to check out.  For that, Wing Commander is awesome.  As an actual movie, even though it comes from the man who created the original game series, it feels lacking in story and character.  The latter definitely suffers from recasting the VG’s amazing cast with up and commers Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard to make this a poor mans space age Top Gun.  But the action is solid and I really don’t think the visual effects are as bad as they say (seriously people think the VFX are Asylum level bad, why?)  It’s a dumb scifi actioner that gets the job done for me and I’ll still watch it without complaint if it ever pops up on streaming.
 

#1-Mortal Kombat

Like Doom, Mortal Kombat does little to adhere to what made the games so popular in the first place.  The PG13 rating (of the 90s) assures no fatalities and very little if any blood.  And yet despite that major handicap, Mortal Kombat still manages to work thanks to great production and costume design, truly kick ass fight scenes and the one of the most epic theme songs ever concived in the history of mankind.  Not to mention, a lot of this movies influence can still be felt throughout the MK franchise even today from Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa reprising his role of Shang Tsung in later games and that aforementioned theme becoming the franchise main anthem, even being used in the 2021 adaptation.  It’s far from a flawless victory but it’s a helluva fun watch and definitely one of the better early Video Game Adaptations out there.