For many years, the high ratings for movies based on video games were The fight film by Paul V.S. Anderson 1995 Mortal Kombat and his 2002 zombie film Resident Evil. One can see what a sorry state we were in if those two mediocre movies were a burning sign of anything. Adapting video games to the big screen has long been tricky for Hollywood. These movies are often rated as terrible and usually bomb (Combat and The Resident notwithstanding). Alternatively, Rocky Morton and Annabelle Yankel's 1993 adaptation of Super Mario Bros. is deeply loved by a passionate cult of weirdos who love its crazy ideas (a cult I belong to), but most people didn't like how far the film strayed from Shigeru Miyamoto's Nintendo property.

There are many reasons why it is difficult to adapt video games into good movies. First of all, most video games are based on action and interactivity, while movies are passive and character-driven; the two media do not overlap neatly. Many video games lift their premises from existing B-movies anyway, so adapting them to film is like making a copy of a copy. (How would a "Metroid" movie, for example, look terribly different from Ridley Scott's "Alien?") Moreover, many modern video games have become so complex that their stories and premises are no longer suitable, 120-minute movie packages . (Hence, the Halo movie was eventually scrapped in favor of a TV series.)

However, some recent movies have bucked this trend. "The Super Mario Bros." Movie was a huge hit at the box office, Werewolves Within is really good, and kids seem to love those Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Heck, even the mediocre Five Nights at Freddy's drew big audiences.

But the mid-2000s was a very different time. It was the time of Doom sequels, Resident Evil and German director Uwe Boll. Indeed, Ball made five utterly terrible video game adaptations in the 2000s, becoming notorious as one of the worst filmmakers of the modern era.

And of the lot, his 2005 film Alone in the Dark might be the worst.

The first Alone in the Dark video game was released in 1992, but was only available to play on home computers. It is credited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first 3-D horror game ever made. The first Alone in the Dark game made for a home console was 2001's Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. With its release, the franchise exploded in popularity, so a feature film adaptation wasn't far behind. The original game was set in the 1920s and had players running from monsters to escape a haunted mansion in Louisiana. The first installment was also set in Louisiana in the 1920s, though the second installment was set in California's Mojave Desert. A New Nightmare was the first game to be set in the present. In that game, players had to locate mystical tablets with creepy, evil qualities.

Taking cues from the 2001 game, Boll's Alone in the Dark follows a variety of characters who retrieve magical artifacts of some sort and explore their connection to a newly emerging pack of killer monsters that are stalking and killing our heroes. Christian Slater stars as a paranormal investigator with amnesia trying to find the pieces of his past. Meanwhile, Tara Reid plays the curator of the museum where most of the film's action takes place, and Stephen Dorff portrays a soldier-like agent working for the mysterious 713 Bureau.

Alone in the Dark has additional twists involving the extraction of monster DNA, as well as more scenes of people tearing themselves away from unconvincing monsters. The monsters can incubate inside human bodies and produce their own EMPs, making sure the lights go out wherever they go (hence the title Alone in the Dark). The fact that the monsters had to be in the dark probably saved the film's creatives a lot of money when it came to visual effects.

Nobody loved Alone in the Dark. It currently has an approval rating of 1%. Rotten tomatoes based on 119 reviews. Ann Hornaday, writing for The Washington Postthought Ball's film was almost bad enough to be enjoyable, but never reached that threshold of entertainment, which makes it just bad. Scott Brown, writing for Entertainment Weeklygave the film an F, stating that it was so bad, it was considered postmodern. He also described it as a "film-like table". Jack Matthews, writing for the New York Daily News, claims that "Alone in the Dark" feels like wearing a blindfold and picking something scary at random on a Blockbuster video ... after reaching into the trash can. And the Pulitzer Mint Justin Chang, writing for Varietysaid that Uwe Boll should put down the joystick and fast.

In August 2024 Metacritic compiled 42 of the most famous movies based on video games and ranked them in order of favorability. The most popular video game movie was "Wrewolves Within," and even that only had a 66-point positive rating. Anderson's Mortal Kombat was still highly rated, as was the recent Pokemon: Detective Pikachu. Alone in the Dark is dead last with a 9 rating.

Ball fared poorly in the board on the same list. His "House of the Dead" was ranked 40th, his "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale" was 39th, his "BloodRayne" was ranked 36th, and his "Postal" was in 34th place.

Despite his appalling record, Ball remains active, able to secure major actors and complete films quickly and on no budget. Personally, he is a charmer and has great ideas. He's made two movies — First Shift and Bandidos — in 2024 alone, and has three more in production. This was after Ball said he would retire in 2016. "Alone in the Dark" is pretty scary, but Ball doesn't seem to mind. He was on to the next thing before you even saw him.