Number 70: Epic Movie (2007)
Two of the biggest criminals of modern cinema are Jason
Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.
Don’t know who they are? Well they are the ‘great’ minds
that brought us Date Movie, Meet The Spartans and this, Epic Movie. Spoiler alert, but this isn’t
their last appearance on this list. And yet somehow they are still making
movies.
I genuinely hate these movies. When I first pulled up the
list of the IMDB Bottom 100, it was Freidburg and Seltzer’s movies I was least
looking forward to. The jokes are never funny and they are so lazy. Just
because something exists doesn’t mean it’s funny.
Pirates of the
Caribbean that was something that happened wasn’t it. And Harry Potter was popular wasn’t it. Wasn’t
there a Chronicles of Narnia film
that done quite well. And Cribs, kids
like that don’t they?
If you want to know the story, it’s Chronicles of Narnia with pop culture references. Just watch Narnia instead, I’m not a big fan of
that either but it’s better than this. I don’t even want to write about this movie
anymore as each word feels like a small victory for the dumbass duo but I’m
obliged to.
I’m sure you know the formula for these films by now, so I
won’t waste much more time on it.
Take popular films and tv shows, stick them in a blender and
see what we get. Hmm, something entirely inedible and unsatisfying.
But somehow you can make a career out of it.
Number 69: Alone in the Dark (2005)
Take one video game franchise, add one of the most notorious
hack directors of recent years and what you get is Alone in the Dark.
Before addressing video game movies, let’s discuss director
Uwe Boll. He is a terrible director and is in the industry for all the wrong
reasons. He’s not in it to advance the medium, he’s out to make a quick buck.
That’s why he makes so many video game movies as he sees gamers as an easy
mark. It doesn’t even matter that his films flop badly, he still makes the
money back in taxes. He lives the real life of The Producers. He’s a terrible director who makes awful movies. And
all the boxing matches in the world won’t change that, Uwe (in 2005, Uwe Boll
challenged all the critics of his films to boxing matches because that wins you
the argument).
Video game movies don’t have a great track record to begin
with and Uwe Boll has done more than anyone to cement their legacy of shit. By
Boll’s own admission he doesn’t play video games, so he doesn’t care if it’s
faithful to its source material. As long as it has the game’s name in the
title, that’s good enough for Boll. Alone
in the Dark is a perfect example of this.
Alone in the Dark is
a cultish video game made in 1992. It’s not particularly obscure but it’s not
widely known either. It’s credited as being the first 3d Survival horror game,
way ahead of Resident Evil. And the
series is very, slow paced. This is something Boll can’t get his head around
and has gunfights and chase sequences going on every 5 minutes.
Let’s look at the title of the film, Alone in the Dark. You know why the developers of the game chose
that title? Because it encapsulates the fear and isolation the character (and
by extension, the player) are feeling in the game. In the movie lead character
Edward Carnby, played by Christian Slater (oh Christian, the 00’s were not kind
to you), is never at any point isolated. At no point does he ever need to be
afraid.
It goes without saying, the cobbled together story makes no
sense. There’s secret experiments on orphans being done which involves
centipedes being shoved down their throats, people turn into vampires for a
bit, there’s an invasion of xenomorphs and an invisible deity killing people.
None of this has anything to do with events in the games.
The annoying thing is, in the hands of a competent director,
Alone in the Dark could have been a
half-decent horror flick. Someone who understands tension can be as good if not
better than an explosion.
But they gave it to Uwe Boll, and sadly we’re not done with
him on this list yet.
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