Ever since the gaming world enveloped the planet as a new source of media to keep kids failing school exams and be generally unsociable, a few movie directors out there thought they’d try and transpose this into a new media. We all know that with the exception of Goldeneye on the N64, and maybe a few others, films to games are usually completely crap. The other way round however is usually a but of a lottery. Some are good in the case of Mortal Kombat, but others are drearily woeful and cause much friction from the fan communities of the respective game. So here are my top (or bottom depending on how you look at it) games which were turning into diabolically shite films. (There’s probably some spoilers coming up but these films are bollocks and I’ll be doing you a favour!)

7.  Super Mario Brothers (1993)

Now before I get in the swing of things, I just want to stop King beating the hell out of me for choosing Super Mario Bros. Yes it probably was an integral part of our respective childhoods but this film is plainly bollocks. You can see that all the casting department did was manage to pluck Bob Hoskins from a BT advert and stick him in a comical pair of red dungarees, and then not bother casting people to be ANYTHING like the game. Yes I suppose you can argue that it was “loosely” based on the game, but seriously Dennis Hopper as King Koopa? Get out. The storyline was complete tosh and as a child I wanted to see some proper Mario shit, but I don’t remember any flower power, giant mushrooms and I certainly don’t remember Bob Hoskins jumping on anyone’s head! I suppose this was the film which first started off making video games into films, but it’s still shite! Consider it’s contemporaries to be Turtles and Ghostbusters, and then yes, this film was crap! Luigi didn’t even have a moustache, and looked more like Mario’s son. And was completely ethnically different. Casting fail.

6. Mortal Kombat Annihilation (1997)

Now for the record, I loved the first Mortal Kombat film. Unlike Mario Bros it did actually stick to a similar format of the game. Yes it was cheesy in parts and most of it probably didn’t make any sense to anyone who hasn’t played the game, but I thought the first film was quality. The ending of that film left it wide open to a sequel, as Shao Kahn bursts out of a tower and the fighters prepare to battle, then roll credits. But Annihilation picks up EXACTLY where the first film ended. The main huge buggering up of this is that they actually changed two of the actors. Brigette Wilson and Christopher Lambert being replaced as Sonya and Rayden by Sandra Hess and Jamer Remar. The fact that they look NOTHING like the other actors makes it a farce immediately. Then they kill off Johnny Cage in the next five minutes. The film dirges on then on with the warriors meeting possibly every single warrior from Mortal Kombats 2 & 3. But they’re all badly done this time. Nightwolf is so cliched and frankly nauseating, Sub-Zero II is a midget and looks like someone has drawn on his face with a red marker pen, Jax is just a black guy wearing a Volkswagen Polo and worst of all is Shao Kahn. At the end of Mortal Kombat 1 he is massive, ethereal and over bearing. In this he’s a bald gump who looks like a weather beaten root vegetable. I could go on about the animalities and Sindel spending about 70 minutes of you life screaming like a mongoose trapped in an electrical circuit, but I’ll leave it there.

5. Wing Commander (1999)

Urgh, this film was quite simply awful. Freddie Prinze Jnr gurning throughout this painful slobber with his dumbass sidekick played by Matthew Lillard. Can I also mention that these clowns were both in Scooby Doo together? Anyways back to the film. Prinze and Lillard play First Lieutenants Blair and Marshall piloting a fighter ship called Tiger Claw on their first ever combat mission. They are part of the Terran Alliance fighting off some aliens beginning with a weird name beginning with “K”. I can’t remember, this film was mostly erased from my mind for being so crap, in fact I’m not even sure if anything did actually happen for about 120 minutes, and just had a complete of CGI animators masturbating themselves into a coma over the special effects, which in all fairness, weren’t too bad at all. It’s a typical “twist” in the story that there’s tensions between Blair and the pilots because he’s part alien or something bollocks like that and wahoo he saves the day. End of. Toilet film. Even the game had Mark Hammill in it! Luke Skywalker or Fred from Scooby Doo? It’s not even close! Next please!

4. Doom (2005)

Now being a wrestling fan I am a huge fan of The Rock (or just Dwayne Johnson as he’s known now) and loving the Doom game when I was younger I was ecstatic to see this come out on DVD and picked it up for about £5 from Amazon. What I wasn’t expecting was the unbelievable shower of shit which was waiting for me inside. There were no bloodshot marines, pink demons, floaty head things spewing plasma balls or any cyborg demons. No. It just had the monster things from Doom 3. Now having played through the first two games religiously (not as much as Bear, but still a lot), I can’t say I recognised anything from the games in the film…until the one bit where Karl Urban’s character goes all uber-soldier and the film goes into first person shooter mode. No I’m not kidding. I really wish I was joking, more than anything. But it happens. At this point I wanted to cringe myself into oblivion but that film really was that bad. We also had Dexter Fletcher of Gamesmaster and Lock Stock fame as some kind of gimpy mechanical man-spider. If it wasn’t associated with the game it would have probably been a competent sci-fi action film, a bit like a crap version of Starship Troopers, but in reality it was based on a great game and it turned out to be a stinker of a film.

3. Double Dragon (1994)

What the fuck is this!?! This is horrible. Scott Wolf and Mark Dacascos as Billy and Jimmy Lee?? I know Mark Dacascos can fight like in Cradle 2 The Grave and Drive, but Scott Wolf?? Bailey from Party of Five? Well I watched this film through sheer curiousity as it was my first game on the Master System as a kid, and this film sucks immensely bad. The lines are cheesy and really contrived and the acting is just awful. And the fight scenes are almost over choreographed that WWE punching looks more realistic. You do actually spend the whole time laughing AT the film instead of being genuinely entertained. When you consider there to be celebrated actors like Robert Patrick involved, and a very young Alyssa Milano, that still can’t save this sinking ship. The storyline I suppose is true to the game, kipnapped girl, brothers beat up gang to get girl back. But if we’re sticking to the film religiously, why don’t they fight each other at the end? Anyways, the storyline was retard simple and the acting was woeful making this a mockery of a great arcade classic.

2. DOA: Dead Or Alive (2006)

I’m quite surprised that only one Uwe Boll film here made my list, mainly because I refuse to watch House of The Dead and Bloodrayne on principle. But back to the film. Not only was this an awful adaptation from a crap Tekken clone of a game, the film had about as much structure as using custard for a multistorey car park foundation. The likeliness of the characters to their game counterparts is good, but so are the Scary Movie films, and they’re parodies, this is meant to be serious. The girls in it are hot too as the cast list includes Devon Aoki, Holly Valance and Jamie Pressly, but that still doesn’t save it. It’s the storyline which is the killer. In typical fashion, it’s a fighting tournament on a deserted island and the antagonist has alterior motives for wanting to find the best fighters. I don’t mind spoiling it because it really is that bad. Ok ready? He wants the best four fighters so he can put them in a tube and extract/download their fighting ability….WTF?? If that wasn’t bad enough, he then uploads them into a pair of sunglasses, which grants him the ability to fight, well not just that, become the best fighter IN THE WORLD. How on earth wrote that into a storyline? What were they thinking? If you posed that idea to anyone who hasn’t had a lobotomy they would tell you that that is the stupidest concept in the history of cinematography. Does it make it worse that the bad guy is Eric Roberts? And Eric Roberts fights? Aaargh just the thought of that film gives me a migraine!!

1. Street Fighter: The Movie (1994)

If you thought DOA was a steaming pile of horse crap, I firmly believe that this is the wirst game adaptation ever, and shall be never beaten. SF2 was king of the world back in 1991 and was a household name within a year as the best selling game on the planet. It was iconic and it was only a matter of time before some idiot director thought they would make it on their own and turn it into a “blockbuster”. Sadly this film was beyond shit. Recruiting Jean-Claude Van Damme seemed a coup at the time, as with the success of Kickboxer, this would attract the masses to the cinemas, but there’s shooting yourself in the foot, and then there’s this film. JVD is cast a Guile, as you will recall had a huge bush of hair almost like a young Will Smith. Did I see any sonic booms or flash kicks? Not a sausage. But the casting fails because JVD is also about 5′ 6″. Now as a protagonist in a film, he shoudl have some stature about him. And why wasn’t Ryu the main character? Every other piece of media to do with SF2 has Ryu as the lead but they obviously thought they’d put a unique spin on it by having Guile. But the horrendous casting doesn’t end there. Raul Julia a.k.a. Gomez from Addams Family was M.Bison. What. The. F**k! He’s about as convincing as having John Inman from Are You Being Served play as Vega (although Vega was pretty camp). But apart from the red hat, you wouldn’t be able to tell he was M.Bison. The one everyone remembers though, was casting the role of Cammy as Kylie Minogue. Clearly the writers of this film had never even played Street Fighter but to put a POP STAR in as a supporting character was just plain ridiculous. The roles of Chun Li, E.Honda and Balrog were just farcical as Chun Li was a news reporter instead of an Interpol detective and the Honda and Balrog were her cameraman and boom operator respectively. Why they dressed as a sumo wrestler and boxer is anyone’s guess and it just reeked of lazy writing or lack of imagination. Who the fuck would have a camera crew DRESSED as a SUMO and BOXER. Seriously. I’m not nitpicking, but casting Wes Studi as Sagat when he’s about 50 and is about 5′ 8″ hardly gives the impression of a Muay Thai champion. But while I am nitpicking, Dhalsim is a doctor of something or other, which has a machine with a Nintendo viewfinder on it turning an ordinary guy into essentially what becomes Blanka…so much for growing up in the Amazon rainforest, Ryu and Ken are just travelling fighters, and Ken has short, brown hair to top it off. The likeness to SF2 is laughable and if it was loosely based on game, it probably would have been offered some mercy, but since it is actually called Street Fighter and is supposed to solely based on the game, it fails beyond all comprehension. I think the only think which could have made it worse would be a twist whereby it’s all a dream. As a life long Street Fighter fan, this is quite possibly one of the most painful and utterly terrible films ever made, let alone taking a spin on a video game, especially one as famous as Street Fighter.

I think I can work out about 4 characters who were from SF2. Sod knows who the other ones are!?!