How would being a horror movie disqualify a movie from being a ghost story, anyway? Wouldn’t one expect that most ghost stories would be horror?
I *like *Korean ghost story movies. At least, some of them.
But horror movies are not necessarily ghost stories. They distinguish themselves in other ways.
I remember Poltergeist being a big disappointment. The weird lady throws this rope down into the “ghosty” place and drags the kid back. Great storytelling that.
Agreed. Resident Evil, The Island,
Sure you have The Island, all the Resident Evil films, Star Wars prequels, The 6th Day, Alien Resurrection, Cloud Atlas, Species, a lot of other crappy horror films.
But you also have Twins, Multiplicity, Never Let Me Go,
Moon, The Prestige (although not an “evil” twin, one was a bit more of a jerk).
Do Blade Runner replicants count as “clones”?
I guess I’ll give it to you. The “they were secretly twins / clones” twist rarely pays off.
Movies about virtual reality.
The Thirteen Floor, Strange Days, Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, Tron2, every Matrix film but the first.
Exceptions:
The first Matrix film (and by extension, the anime Ghost in the Shell)
Fun exception: classic Tron
I’m not going to disagree that so far, video game adaptations have been terrible.
But… I do want to point out that the overwhelming majority, if not all of them have been of very popular games that don’t have much in the way of actual plot. Games like DOOM, Mortal Kombat, Need for Speed, etc… are based on what amount to arcade games. I suspect the upcoming Angry Birds and Warcraft movies will suck balls as well, as there’s no plot in those games at all.
Had the filmmakers taken a game franchise that plays more like a real movie- like say, one of the Call of Duty games, Dead Space games, Mass Effect games, Wasteland/Fallout games or Half-Life games, they might have a better movie on their hands.
It sounds like you’re describing Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Weren’t both games heavy on plot?
I don’t know about Silent Hill, but Resident Evil was somewhere between an arcade game and the games I mentioned; enough plot to explain why you’re where you are, and what you’re doing, but you weren’t really solving a problem or resolving a conflict- IIRC, you were trying to escape and not die. There were puzzles to solve, but it wasn’t a dialogue-driven game IIRC (it’s been nearly 20 years since I played it).
And that’s more or less what I’m getting at; the games I mentioned all more or less revolve around solving a problem / fulfilling a quest, and your character is the protagonist. Games like Resident Evil were more akin to fighting games, where there’s enough plot to explain where you are and what you’re doing, but there’s no plot that changes through the movie based on the results of your actions.
HP Lovecraft adaptations. Examples: Dagon, Cthulhu (2007), From Beyond
Critically acclaimed exception: The Call of Cthulhu
Fun exception: Re-Animator
Also, many or most were made by Uwe Boll, who is notoriously bad.
I’ve noticed that book adaptations of games tend to be a lot better, since they often have actually *good *authors write them. Greg Bear, Mercedes Lackey and Alan Dean Foster are much better authors than Uwe Boll is a movie maker.
This reminds me of Searching for Bobby Fisher:
Uwe Boll is worse at making movies than you are at doing anything.
I see your point and I agree…but I’m sure Hollywood could fuck up even well written games. Although I would be forced, FORCED, to go see Planetfall: the movie despite knowing they would fuck it up.
Truly Madly Deeply
Genre: Movies based on (specific licensed*) toys.
Examples: The Smurfs, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Masters Of The Universe, Battleship, The Care Bears Movie
Critically Acclaimed Exception: The Lego Movie
Fun Exception: Clue
*The Toy Story movies may feature several licensed toy brands, but the 2 main characters were created for the movies.
OOOOOO, I totally forgot about Clue :smack:. I love that movie even tho it totally destroys my first theory.
Dammit, I should have linked them, bit tired that day…
I left out Let the Right one in, it was interesting (and there was a US remake, not sure of its quality). Also I’m not completely sure Byzantium was about Vampires, it was a bit vague…
I find Doom a weird one, in effect, it’s not a movie based on the game in any way. Well, I was expecting the floating eyeball or some other sort of classic monster from it and that pretty much was what defined it apart from fast paced survival.
It was basically a slow paced survival horror. It did strike me as if they’d made that sort of movie, then secured the license to the name Doom near the end, and tacked that on. But it’s not a Doom movie to me…
I’d love to see a Portal movie though…
I guess what I’m getting at is that it’s trivially easy for Hollywood to take an arcade or action shooter game and botch it up in the process of turning it into a movie. There’s no plot, or just enough back story in the intro to explain WHY you’re shooting mutants, and the gameplay consists of “shoot a whole lot… level up, shoot more and different mutants in a different setting.” So they make a lot of it up, and usually have a vested interest in keeping a lot of the shooting and action, so it’s usually very cruddily done.
Something like a Call of Duty:Modern Warfare game would pretty much by definition have to follow a different trajectory, in that the single player game was essentially an interactive movie where you, the player, carry out the shoot-em-up scenes and other action elements. That would translate well into a movie.
So would something a bit more interactive / player-influenced like say… Fallout 3 or GTA. They’re called “sandbox” games, in that the world is a big ‘sandbox’ where your character can interact, and there are dozens of side quests (i.e. non-story line), as well as the interactive movie storyline that your character’s actions and decisions influence. To turn it into a traditional movie, the filmmakers would need to pick a specific trajectory through the storyline and flesh that out with more dialogue, etc… but the skeleton’s already there and fairly fleshed out.
Something like Planetfall would actually work well for much the same reason- my big concern would be more with the art direction, as those old infocom games were totally text based.
It could be 2 hours of text crawling up the screen!
The screenwriter is eaten by a grue.
Dude, Warcraft has acres of plot.
Mostly dumb plot, granted, but there’s still a lot of it.