Inventory: 11 live-action video game movies that were never going to work

Live-action video game movies have been a gamble since Hollywood’s first big swing introduced a pair of humble plumbers to some terrible lizard-people, all a month before Jurassic Park gave audiences dinosaur fever. But a few films that took video games into the realm of flesh and blood never had a chance.

That’s not just because for decades—after a few high-profile flops—video game movies were relegated to the filmmaking slums occupied mainly by Uwe Boll and DTV schlocksters. It’s also because making a good video game movie requires threading a lot of multimedia needles. Simply sticking an IP’s name on a poster isn’t good enough, and neither is simply trying to achieve some sort of recognizable fidelity with the costuming or prop design. Identifying the ineffable spirit of the game and approximating it in an artform that inherently strips its audience of control, well, that’s an achievement that only a tiny fraction of these adaptations have successfully unlocked. The majority of attempts fail, producing game-skinned mediocrity—interchangeable genre entries wearing the clothes of their source material like so much overpriced DLC. 

But for a few games, and a few filmmakers, the challenge was much greater and the results, much weirder—either because their inexplicable subject matter was anathema to cinema, the way they were adapted defied all logic, or their content was so vastly different from the source material they were allegedly based on, these films started on hard mode with only one life remaining. Here are 11 live-action video game movies that were never going to work, in chronological order.

St. John’s Wort (2001)

Photo: Toho

Turning 1992’s seminal horror “sound novel” Otogirisō, which combined the effectwork of radio dramas with a choose-your-own-adventure narrative, into a movie isn’t that dissimilar a task from adapting the decision-driven Until Dawn three decades later. That latter movie opted to deal with the branching narratives that form the appeal of these games by pivoting to a time-loop gimmick—a way for audiences to experience the different (possibly deadly) paths taken by characters over which they have no power. Director Ten Shimoyama and writer Goro Nakajima, faced with a similar predicament in 2001, threw a lot at the wall to try to compensate. Their version of this creeping haunted-house story (starring Ju-On: The Grudge‘s Megumi Okina), replaces the game’s static background images with over-the-top style. Ten’s camera cycles through conventional cinematography, handheld POV shots, and black-and-white security cam footage. Images reverse themselves or freeze into game-like stills—there are even multiple endings. It’s a hectic choice that makes the dilapidated manor seem more like the setting for an early-aughts music video than a Roger Corman picture, evaporating what little atmosphere the horror has with its frantic visual gesticulating.

Chanbara Beauty: The Movie—Vortex (2009)

Photo: Geneon Entertainment

The nadir of games (and game adaptations) where the premise could be summarized as “nearly nude woman has a weapon,” the OneChanbara series sold enough copies through jiggle physics alone to justify not just one, but two live-action feature films. Ogling a bikini-clad cowgirl as she hacks and slashes her way through a few zombies? That certainly sounds like the foundation for a crude B-movie. But after the first film wears out its welcome, the straight-to-DVD sequel, Chanbara Beauty: The Movie—Vortex, doesn’t even have that boldly crass novelty going for it. Filmmaker Tsuyoshi Shoji can’t rise to the simple task of titillation, shooting his recast lead (Yû Tejima) with such inscrutably angled, edited-to-shreds choppiness that even those looking for a cleavage-driven dopamine hit will find themselves disappointed and confused. A film whose predecessor already reached the ceiling of “softcore cosplay” hits the floor hard, with drunken fight choreography, color-sapped cinematography, and locations as sparse as the clothing. It looks like a musty old Playboy left to rot in the woods, covered in CG blood spatter. It’s hard to alienate an audience of indiscriminate deviants, but Chanbara Beauty: The Movie—Vortex finds a way.

Shrill Cries: Reshuffle (2009)

Photo: Shochiku

Another “sound novel” adaptation, Shrill Cries: Reshuffle takes on an additional formal burden from the Higurashi: When They Cry games that makes it a difficult subject for a film: The series is split into “question arcs” and “answer arcs,” with the latter going through the same scenario as the corresponding question, only with a new perspective that helps shine new light on the mystery at hand. Attempting to translate that concept into two separate films, writer-director Ataru Oikawa ended up making one rock-solid rural mystery and one 90-minute collection of deleted scenes. Shrill Cries Of Summer offers spooky, lo-fi campfire horror with an over-the-top cast of schoolgirls, but its follow-up film is a victim of its very concept. Composed of heightened interpretations of moments from the first movie while running through the same story beats, Shrill Cries: Reshuffle is basically doing a feature-length version of that Fight Club “this is how it really went down” montage—novel in concept, exhaustingly redundant in execution.

The King Of Fighters (2009)

The King Of Fighters could have taken the easy win, following the fighting-game-film format put forward by Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat back in 1995: Like hundreds of martial arts movies before, set the personal and global stakes of a tournament, assemble a group of eccentric living weapons, and pit them against each other. King Of Fighters is an even simpler proposition—though getting into the weeds of the games reveals stories of ancient demons and mythical treasures, they’re much more straightforward than almost all their other fighting franchise contemporaries. Fewer monsters, more silly slugfests. It wasn’t known for flashy fatalities, but its innovative team mechanic that allowed players to craft squads from its sizable roster. Unlikely allies is a perfectly simple action-movie gimmick, but Gordon Chan’s The King Of Fighters movie instead opts to lean hard into the unwieldy sci-fi/fantasy plot. Fighters brawl in an alternate, virtual dimension they access via Bluetooth headsets (making them the players of their own fighting game, essentially), and spend most of their time in the real world having complicated conversations in hallway after hallway. The story-to-fight ratio is completely imbalanced, with combat delayed by visits to hospitals, graveyards, and art museums, side plots about the CIA, and goofball comedy bits. But even if the movie didn’t work, at least one person made it out of The King Of Fighters unscathed: John Wick filmmaker David Leitch, who played Terry Bogard and served as the movie’s fight choreographer.

In The Name Of The King 3: The Last Mission (2014)

Well, at least it reassures audiences that it’s The Last Mission right there in the title. Uwe Boll’s final entry into his disconnected trilogy of Dungeon Siege non-adaptations is the furthest from the actual games in question. The first film, a Jason Statham flop with a surprisingly robust cast, was at least a down-the-middle fantasy knock-off. Things started to go very wrong when the second film sucked Dolph Lundgren through a time portal. The third film, now completely lost in the realm of latter-day Steven Seagal releases, thrusts Dominic Purcell’s improbably named mob enforcer Hazen Kaine back into medieval times thanks to a tattoo of his, which matches a magical medallion. Another harrowing lesson for white people who get tattoos of symbols they don’t understand. As this franchise limped along, its connection to its fantasy setting got more and more tenuous, and its real-world narrative got more and more confounding. Hazen Kaine isn’t just a fantasy chosen one, nor is he—like Lundgren was—a Connecticut Yankee In Uwe Boll’s Cheap Renaissance Fair. He’s a cold-blooded killer, introduced as he’s kidnapping and locking two children up in a shipping container. He’s a Real Piece Of Shit In A Bulgarian Tax Haven, which makes the grating film hard to stand even as a curio.

Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014)

Nothing screams “surefire success” like a direct-to-video prequel to a fighting game film directed by the guy who made Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever. Much like The King Of Fighters, Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge biggest problem is conceptual: Getting rid of the first film’s pesky martial arts tournament, this adaptation opts to instead focus on the mystery of Kazuya Mishima (Kane Kosugi), an amnesiac with no memory of his identity. Luckily for him, it’s right there in the title. Though hand-to-hand combat is Tekken’s bread and butter, strange family relationships are Tekken‘s unlimited salad, and the film goes to great lengths to explain the warped backstory of Kazuya and his father, Heihachi (a returning Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). All it cost was anything that might appeal to Tekken players or action movie enthusiasts. Featuring few Tekken characters, an adult schoolgirl constantly slurping on a lollipop (played by Charlotte Kirk, the actress involved in multiple sex scandals that ended up bringing down powerful studio executives), and a villainous minister straight out of Johnny Mnemonic, Kazuya’s Revenge would feel totally disconnected from the games if it wasn’t laser-focused on one incredibly tedious aspect of the games.

Ao Oni Ver. 2.0 (2015)

Photo: AMG Entertainment

Somewhat in the vein of Shrill Cries: Reshuffle, this is another situation where a seeming sequel to a video game movie is actually something much harder to define. Instead of building from the events of the first Ao Oni—an adaptation of a viral RPG Maker horror game featuring a big-nosed blue demon chasing kids around—2.0 brings a new director and new cast to more or less go through the events of the first film as the same characters. The result is like one of those social media “updates” that nobody asked for and everybody hates: the same content, just worse. Plenty of film sequels (especially horror sequels) can feel like barely discernible variations on a formula, but rarely are they so blatantly redundant and inferior. Released only a year after the original Ao Oni, it’s unclear why there was the need for this do-over, aside from making sure that any potential gain could be squeezed out of this briefly notable indie fad.

Dead Trigger (2017)

Dead Trigger was well on its way to live-action video game movie bingo before it was even released. A generic zombie film? Starring Dolph Lundgren? With a troubled production? Add in a free space, and it’s a shoo-in for the grand prize. The film—the first to bring a mobile app into the live-action space—lost original writer-director Mike Cuff almost immediately, leaving Scott Windhauser to helm the film and its rewritten screenplay. Infighting at the beginning of a shoot? Always a good sign. Aside from its production gossip masquerading as IMDb trivia, Dead Trigger‘s failures are plain to see in every dire frame. The rare film where both the effects and the story seem cobbled together in post-production, Dead Trigger‘s bottom-of-the-barrel deliveries, dull plot, and app-priced effects lurch like so many of its undead monsters. But hints of its Frankenstein-like production still come through: Sometimes scenes don’t cut for so long that the camera eventually captures part of the filmmaking equipment, like the crash pads for the stuntpeople.

Neko Atsume House (2017)

A live-action movie based on a cutesy mobile cat game never should have worked—and, as one might expect, its tiny release in Japan barely made a blip. Neko Astsume is an idle game that turns moms’ iPads into machines that generate cute cat gifs. Not exactly material for a feature film, especially considering there’s no plot, no real gameplay, and no (human) characters. And yet, Neko Atsume House is still, secretly, one of the best game-based movies ever made. Why? Because its story of a burned-out writer who dodges his responsibilities to hang out with a bunch of kitties isn’t just relatable, but endearingly thoughtful. An author (Atsushi Itō) fed up with the idea that pop culture must include zombies, ghosts, or “sexy ladies” in order to sell, seeks a rural cat oasis of low expectations. Are those cuddles escapist, or enlightened? As the film answers this question, and as its sweetly low-key drama crams tons of cute cat footage into the story, filmmaker Masatoshi Kurakata shoots its soft pastels with a sunbeam-bright clarity. A charming supporting cast makes the whole thing feel lived-in, just as densely populated and easy to love as the free-to-play cat collector.

Legend Of The Ancient Sword (2018)

After making such Hollywood hits as Deep Blue Sea and Die Hard 2 (and such Hollywood bombs as Cutthroat Island and The Legend Of Hercules), filmmaker Renny Harlin moved to China in order to direct one of each there. The hit was the Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville action-comedy Skiptrace. The flop was Legend Of The Ancient Sword, which adapted RPG GuJian2 into a frenetic CGI mess. A flurry of MacGuffin-gathering and terrible dialogue zips past the menagerie of oddball FX creations—ranging from a comic relief panda to handsome merman to an evil tree—occupying its fantasy-steampunk world. This breathless pacing makes the otherwise bland film completely chaotic, like sprinting through a circus. This works in its favor only when its main party’s members combine their fight choreography; the resulting flourishes speak to how the sprites of a turn-based team of wizards, monks, and fighters might look in a kid’s imagination. But China wasn’t impressed: Even though it opened during Golden Week, a holiday typically filled with box office fanfare, hardly anyone showed up. It crashed and burned, even being held up as an example of Chinese audiences becoming more discerning when it comes to flashy, effects-driven blockbusters.

Touken Ranbu (2019)

Touken Ranbu has perhaps the strangest premise of anything listed here. It’s a film based on a stage show, which is in turn based on a card game, which is about legendary swords from throughout history, which are anthropomorphized as hot brooding dudes. Director Saiji Yakumo’s feature-length attempt to make heads or tails of this contains plenty of awful comic-convention wigs, a soundtrack featuring what sounds like a Japanese take on “I’m Shipping Up To Boston,” and two time-hopping teams vying for control of the timeline. The distracting dissonance permeating the film, though, comes from how unassuming everything is. Shot with a matter-of-fact visual language by a director predominantly known for grounded romances and dramas, the swordfights between handsome, short-shorted sword-men (why the humanized swords also use swords cannot be explained) lack any of the over-the-top style that would actually fit the absurdity on hand.