Mathieu Kassovitz’s “Babylon A.D” is a very ambitious science fiction film setting down on a mainly foreign land where depression has hit all countries and crime runs rampant. The best way to sum it up would be Vin Diesel playing Riddick by way of “Children of Men” with a heavy influence of “Escape from New York.” In other words, there’s not much originality in this piece, and it shows. While derivations are a prerequisite these days, you can’t help shake the feeling that 20th Century Fox wanted a more commercial approach to “Children of Men” and that involved dispensing of the thick social commentary and replacing it with a more standard prophesized little girl with amazing powers of mind manipulation.
Video Game Movies That Should Have Rocked, Part Two
Tomb Raider/Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
Format: Live Action
2001, 2003
WHY IT SUCKED:
I personally wanted a Tomb Raider movie that was an honest to goodness new wave adventure thriller with a woman who showed she was nothing like Indiana Jones in spite of the influences. Instead with “Tomb Raider” we were given a very cheap knock off of Indiana Jones with the style of a music video while “The Cradle of Life” was a cheap knock off of a James Bond Flick except… very, very boring! Hell, not even the manly manliness of Gerard Butler and his Scottish accent could help liven the tedious and utterly boring affair that was “The Cradle of Life.” Angelina Jolie just couldn’t seem to understand what made Lara Croft such an individual as well, thus Croft ended up just being a glamorized version of Jolie.
As for the much hyped “Tomb Raider,” the finished product is a huge disappointment opting, once again, for a comedic hint among all the proceedings on screen. Croft is given a comic relief sidekick, and even when she’s hanging from her ceiling shooting bad guys, you can’t help shake the feeling that director Simon West just isn’t taking this seriously; it’s hard to believe too, since he’s one of the forces behind the brilliant “Keen Eddie.” Take the finale in the tombs where Lara confronts those shambling statues, or when Lara is riding her dog sled without a sled, or the goofy cameo by dad Jon Voight. “The Cradle of Life” seemed to want to bore the audience in to a coma so as not to let on on how really awful it was, and surely enough, not even sending Croft globe trotting could make a sequel worth sitting through.
REBOOT?
Most definitely. With a better grasp on individuality and why the game was so beloved, as well as casting an actually British actress who has the bod and the skills, then I think the movie has definite reboot quality only if the studio realizes that the game was so epic because it was its own monster, not a lame “Indiana Jones” wannabe. The “Tomb Raider” series is filled with so much material to make Lara Croft a banner screen heroine.
House of the Dead
Format: Live Action
2003
WHY IT SUCKED:
Don’t ask me why, but when the trailer for “House of the Dead” first popped up on televisions around the US for a short time, we loved the way it looked. From the Bullet time scenes to the… other bullet time scenes, we dug the way it looked. Then we went to theaters to see it, seeking it out at the AMC here in Manhattan and boy, we were stunned at how awful it was. Not only was it an awful video game movie, but it was an awful movie, period. That was my first introduction to Uwe Boll, and my what a way to greet this here movie geek. Playing the original “House of the Dead” at my local theater, it wasn’t my bag, but it was awfully funny to sit through beat the zombies while wading through the paper thin story.
Boll on the other hand never featured a house in “House of the Dead,” brought together a large cast of really bad actors, while good actors like Clint Howard and Jurgen Prochnow were just given some of the worst material with no hope of ever salvaging these roles. Aside from the truly bad direction, there’s also Boll’s idea of humor that never pans out the way we think. Prochnow’s character is actually named Captain Kirk. No seriously. Howard wears an over sized yellow slicker the whole time on film. One character gets burned on his face and spends more time literally crying about his disfigured face than he does the walking dead outside their doors. You can’t make this stuff up and this was only the beginning of the terror train that is Uwe Boll, Hollywood’s Clown prince.
REBOOT?
Let sleeping corpses lie.
Resident Evil
Format: Live Action
2003
WHY IT SUCKED:
I’m pretty surprised that with the release of the movie there wasn’t a game adapted from the film to fit the mythos set by WS Anderson, because it’s been done with the likes of “Street Fighter.” But then, the “Resident Evil” games were never this stupid before. Though history has revised itself a bit, the reviews for the entire “Resident Evil” movie franchise has been considerably mixed but to me the “Resident Evil” movies are of varying quality. “Resident Evil” is sucky, “Apocalypse” is garbage, and “Extinction” is crap. Hey, I said varying quality, but extremely varying quality.
The trilogy as a whole has been nothing but a pastiche of scenes from different better horror films like “Aliens,” and Anderson has made a habit and ritual of stealing from Romero by blatantly copping scenes from “Day of the Dead” and “Dawn of the Dead.” All the while he insists on a hard R, but most of the violence is blurred, off screen, or left in the dark for us to imagine. “Land of the Dead” was frowned upon for leaving most of the gore in the shadows, and the “Resident Evil” movies are never any different. Then there’s Milla Jovovich who simply refuses to go beyond her shtick as the bastard child of Ellen Ripley and the Terminator while there’s never actually a Residence in the Resident Evil movies. I could go on and on but we have reviews on the site for “Apocalypse” and “Extinction” to fill you in.
REBOOT?
George Romero wrote a script that was pretty damn good. Sure, Chris was a Native American, but that was one of the few deviations from the source material and in the end I’d rather have a 90 percent faithful adaptation from George A. Romero, than a 40 percent faithful adaptation from Paul WS Anderson. I think there’s still potential in Romero’s script. I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now, we get a reboot. I can hope.
Doom
Format: Live Action
2005
WHY IT SUCKED:
This should have been a piece of cake. A guy is alone on Mars with a planet of demons and zombies due to hell’s portal opening up and killing his comrades. But that’s not what we got. Instead we were given a very boring, very dumb, and utterly sucky piece of MTV horror dribble that took its sweet time presenting forward motion in terms of plot and characterization. Instead “Doom” felt like a cheap retread of the “Resident Evil” movies with a plot involving scientists and monsters and walking stereotypes by the tune of “Aliens” walking in dark danky tunnels of water to confront a monster covered in darkness lacking any and all effect.
The only time we actually get the feeling that this is a “Doom” movie is when Karl Urban’s character awakens from consciousness and through a first person perspective walks through tunnels and halls firing at monsters and zombies jumping from all corners. Beyond that and the appearance of the BFG, “Doom” is a really tedious little quasi-horror film based around popularity of Dwayne Johnson who couldn’t save this lackluster effort if he tried.
REBOOT?
I think a reboot has definite possibilities. Stick it to the actual plot, give us a more obscure cast and you just may have a great horror actioner here.
Video Game Movies That Should Have Rocked
It’s a common rule of nature. Games based on movies always suck, while movies based on games, also always suck. But hey, we know where studios are coming from. If a game is making millions and becoming a pop culture smash, then it’s only fitting a movie would have to be made. The problem is there’s yet to be a good movie that’s been adapted from a great video game. Deny it all you want, but let’s be honest, even “Mortal Kombat,” while cool, just wasn’t faithful to the game. It was PG-13, Shang Tsung was a younger man, and the movie is very cheesy these days.
Like everything pop culture related, fans simply will not be able to agree on an idea for a movie, nor will they all enjoy what the adaptation is, even if by some miracle it happens to be a masterpiece of filmmaking, but these are the movies as they are, and all of them are really bad. In honor of the upcoming “Prince of Persia” and “Street Fighter” adaptations, we’re exploring the slew of bad video game movies, and what we wanted. Hey, we’re not going to pretend you’ve never seen this list before but we just had to get our licks in before the next big screen adaptations on film appears and possibly changes the way we think of video game movies. Hey it could happen. It’s got to happen sooner or later, doesn’t it? And hey, maybe you’ll see a choice here that just may steam you up some.
Let us know what you think and which movies we should have included.
The Legend Of Billie Jean (1985)
This 1985 drama thriller is a gem, and one of my favorite guilty pleasures of all time. In spite of one of the cheesiest one liners in movie history: “Fair’s fair!” and having one of the coolest if goofiest theme songs of all time, somehow “Billie Jean” remains one of my favorite eighties gems. Back before I ever heard of cable television, I’d watch this four times a week on WPIX Television here in the Bronx and my what a classic we thought it was. And it still is, at least to me and a few other people out there. Billie Jean is just like every other girl her age, a wide eyed optimistic beauty whose only desire is to be left alone to have fun with her brother Binx during the summer.
NinjaTown: Adventures of the Wee Ninja Volume 1
“Ninjatown” is almost exactly like Mr. Men, except that the Mr. Men here are all ninjas, and their enemies are Zombie Ninjas and Wee Devil’s, hand shape monsters who invent devious schemes like destroying the Ninjatown with giant Waffles. Si, giant waffles! “Ninjatown” has no dialogue, no story, no arc, and almost no mythos, and I was able to read the entire 46 pages (or volume 1, as it were) in fifteen minutes.
Serenity: The Other Half [Webcomic]
I didn’t want to admit it but… well… “Serenity: Better Days” sucked really badly. I kept insisting to myself that it was just mediocre, but re-reading the issues I can safely say that it sucks. If Whedon and co. were trying to show us what a poor imitation of “Firefly” would look like, then it worked. Thanks Joss. It was so bad I didn’t even finish the final issue. Yeah, that bad. So, along comes “Serenity: The Other Half,” a web exclusive mini comic book following the gang of “Serenity” in the middle of a gorram battle.
Chris Lemmon, Author of "A Twist of Lemmon" and Our Review
First and foremost, “A Twist of Lemmon” is a thank you letter and final farewell from Chris Lemmon to his father Jack Lemmon. And though intentional or not, “A Twist of Lemmon” at almost two hundred pages, is also a testament to the power of the father and son relationship and the importance of it in shaping a man. Whether a loving father or an abusive one (Lemmon was the former, by the way), the men in our lives shape who we become. It’s an often emasculated and marginalized aspect of the parental foundation that’s constantly deemed irrelevant and easily dismissed in a world that values women more over men, but the father and son relationship is one of the most powerful dichotomies of nature.