Pong: the Movie would have more personality

February 2, 2005 1:45 PM

We've discussed it before. But now it's actually made it to the screen. And it looks to be one of the worst films ever made.
posted by fungible (52 comments total)

IMDb - 1.9/10.

Ouch.
posted by purephase at 1:51 PM on February 2, 2005

And don't mis the trailer for his next movie.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 1:55 PM on February 2, 2005

Holy cow. 2% on RT! I'm totally forcing my roommate to see this with me this weekend. Poor bastard doesn't know what's coming....
posted by graventy at 2:02 PM on February 2, 2005

In response to the Bloodrayne trailer: What the hell was Michael Madsen thinking?
posted by Ndwright at 2:06 PM on February 2, 2005

Michael Madsen? What about Ben Kingsley?
posted by fungible at 2:07 PM on February 2, 2005

Well, maybe not the worst.
posted by driveler at 2:11 PM on February 2, 2005

Does anyone have a link to the previous alone-in-the-dark trailer, the really, really hilarious one that included about a full minute of marines just...shooting into the air...?
posted by odinsdream at 2:13 PM on February 2, 2005

Wow. It looks like they may have spent a whole $8 on the costuming for Bloodrayne. Did they replace all the leather with construction paper?

Besides, everyone knows Bloodrayne was supposed to be a porno!
posted by qDot at 2:23 PM on February 2, 2005

Interestingly enough, the rating of 2% on RT is not the worst rating ever given... A search by year and rating returns 48 movies made since 2000 with a rating of 0%, among them Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, National Lampoon's Gold Diggers, and Roberto Begnini's version of Pinocchio.
posted by Johnny Assay at 2:27 PM on February 2, 2005

it has tara reid in it. you expected this to be a good movie?
posted by Igor XA at 2:34 PM on February 2, 2005

A while back, my buddy Elan Mastai came up to me and told me about a screenplay he was working on.

"You'll love it, Joey," he said, "'cause it's about that old game you really loved back at school. Remember Alone in the Dark?"

(Say this in your best Troy McClure voice: You may remember Elan's screenplays from such movies as MVP II: Most Vertical Primate.)

Elan, you're a swell guy -- now go get yourself a better agent.
posted by AccordionGuy at 2:35 PM on February 2, 2005

heh
posted by interrupt at 2:35 PM on February 2, 2005

A search by year and rating returns 48 movies made since 2000 with a rating of 0%.

Yes, but to be fair, many of those movies have less than 10 or 20 reviews on their pages, while AITD has 81. That's what's compelling: Page after page of really holy-mother-of-fuck bad reviews there, many of them hilarious. Must have been a fun day to be a film reviewer.
posted by fungible at 2:38 PM on February 2, 2005

it has tara reid in it. you expected this to be a good movie?
posted by iamck at 2:40 PM on February 2, 2005

There is only one movie based on a video game that ever has any hope of being good.

Dig Dug.

Starring Jackie Chan as Dig Dug.
posted by AccordionGuy at 2:41 PM on February 2, 2005

If Dan Brown made films...
posted by runkelfinker at 2:43 PM on February 2, 2005

iamck, I was thinking the same thing... but in that one she was cast, I presume, because she wouldn't have to act.
posted by mowglisambo at 2:57 PM on February 2, 2005

No freaking kidding, runkelfinker.
posted by Eekacat at 3:00 PM on February 2, 2005

There are ads for this all over the NYC subways.

I'm starting to realize that massive outdoor advertising is one way to tell that a movie sucks so bad that they're trying to pump up the opening night because they know the word of mouth is going to be abysmal.
posted by bshort at 3:04 PM on February 2, 2005

Ben... Kingsley... ???!?!??!

Seriously man, I'm sure there are people who would lend you the money rather than force you to work with the Boll Weevil.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:11 PM on February 2, 2005

Defective Yeti is all over it.
posted by barjo at 3:21 PM on February 2, 2005

Oh sweet baby Jebus.
This man has some sort of vendetta against videogames.

Alone in the Dark
Bloodrayne
and Far Cry (2006)
posted by isol at 3:22 PM on February 2, 2005

"In retrospect, please add one finger to every other review I've ever done, because none deserve as low a rating as this."
posted by iamck at 3:28 PM on February 2, 2005

You can't discount Welcome To Mooseport
posted by catchmurray at 3:30 PM on February 2, 2005

....A rave.....on an abandoned island........FULL OF ZOMBIES!

Uwe Boll is the best thing ever. House of the Dead is so amazingly awful it's good. I don't even think there was a house in it.
posted by hughbot at 3:31 PM on February 2, 2005

Holy cow. 2% on RT!

Ahem. Actually, the rottentomatoes.com scoring is incorrect. Of the two "positive" reviews (out of 85), one links to this page, where the reviewer rated it as "total crap" (as did 5 of 8 voting users).

And the one "valid" positive vote, at this site, was a "C+"., which included faint praise like This is one of those films that's hard to defend. Can I just say I liked this film for what it is, and end my review now?

So this film has got to be a strong contender for some type of award - perhaps a MST3K-like treatment?
posted by WestCoaster at 3:38 PM on February 2, 2005

hughbot: There was a house! There was, like, a place, and they were in it, and then Jurgen got really drunk and started throwing grenades and...and...

I'm so there. Uwe is my new hero. Because not only does he splice in clips from the videogames during action scenes, he actually splices in clips from the videogames that are the "insert two quarters" promo scenes from videogames!

Thank you, thank you, thank you UGC, for making all these terrible movies so very easy to see...
posted by Katemonkey at 3:44 PM on February 2, 2005

Always nice to see the two reviewers that liked it -- and one of those only recommends it to people for a laugh.

For reasonable moviegoers, there is no reason on Earth why you should waste your valuable time and money on the likes of “Alone in the Dark,” a film whose only obvious distinction is that it has been put together with slightly more competence than “House of the Dead” (which says more about “House of the Dead” than anything else). And yet, for the vast numbers of unreasonable moviegoers out there, the sheer stupidity of the film could provide more inadvertent entertainment than most of the other films they are likely to encounter this year.

The other one manages to call it incomprehensible a couple of times but still admit that it does the best it can. That's when you know your standards are just a little too low.
posted by ontic at 3:46 PM on February 2, 2005

Speaking of Uwe Boll...
posted by grefo at 3:49 PM on February 2, 2005

Boll: Alone is a much better film than House of the Dead and better than most horror movies out today. Today, I looked out at the word of mouth on Alone in the Dark and there seems to be a lot of medium, okay and good reviews coming out. This movie isn’t shit and whoever says it’s shit doesn’t like horror movies.
posted by fungible at 3:56 PM on February 2, 2005

grefo (and barjo), you might want to actually follow the links on the original post, thus saving you the time and effort of reposting them.

[/snark]
posted by googly at 4:02 PM on February 2, 2005

From Rotten Tomatoes:
"The three stars have seen better days, but I'd like to think they could still do something classier and more dignified than this. Like gay porn."
-- Rob Vaux, FLIPSIDE MOVIE EMPORIUM

Heh.
posted by DakotaPaul at 4:04 PM on February 2, 2005

A little background on Something Awful
posted by bugbread at 4:18 PM on February 2, 2005

Reviews like these make me want to run out and see this movie. (I'll sneak into it at the multiplex, of course, giving my money to something presumably more worthy, like MILLION DOLLAR BABY.) I love good movies, and hope to make a career out of writing about them, but, DAMN, there's nothing quite like a really really REALLY terrible film. Bad films that are screamingly, horrendously bad are actually, I find, extremely instructive: negative-example modeling, you know. There are probably more ways for a film to be interestingly bad than there are for it to be interestingly good. And, if HOUSE OF THE DEAD is any indication, ALONE IN THE DARK will be horrendous in all kinds of really interesting ways.
posted by Dr. Wu at 4:24 PM on February 2, 2005

how right you are, iamck. what i should have said was, "it's starring tara reid. you expect this to be a good movie?"

i'm sorry i ever attempted to soil the name of the big lebowski. eh, fuck it. let's go bowling.
posted by Igor XA at 4:35 PM on February 2, 2005

I second odinsdream in the call for the trailer linked to in the original post. It was the best worst thing I've ever seen.
posted by unsupervised at 4:49 PM on February 2, 2005

And it looks to be one of the worst films ever made.

Now, I still haven't seen it, but if I seriously doubt it is even remotely close to the worst films ever. Matter of fact, I doubt it would even place in the top five worst movies I saw last weekend.
posted by shawnj at 5:05 PM on February 2, 2005

Does the movie have any resemblance at all to the original game? Why did they even bother to buy the license???

I just hope Uwe keeps his filthy mitts off of Eternal Darkness.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 5:16 PM on February 2, 2005

My favorite quote from this Uwe Boll interview:

DG: Is Alone in the Dark Tara Reid’s last chance, in terms of her film career, and what can we expect from her in the film?

Boll: Screaming, running, jumping, kissing and fucking Christian Slater. She also has a few good lines of dialogue.
posted by zardoz at 5:20 PM on February 2, 2005

Thanks for that link, bugbread. I think we just might have a new Ed Wood on our hands in Mr. Boll.
posted by picea at 5:37 PM on February 2, 2005

shit, shawnj, those ain't bad. They're just b-movies; most of them are charmingly entertaining in their own doofy way, especially stuff like Plan 9 or Robot Monster.

Bad, you wanna try and watch Red Zone Cuba, by and starring Coleman Francis. **WITHOUT** Mike and the 'bots. Or try to suffer through Wild Wild West without once vomiting.

Or, for b-movie dreck, Nudist Colony of the Dead (this is, no shit, a musical, featuring the hit "God's Gonna Show Us The Way") or Corpse Grinders 2, which makes anything Ed Wood ever did look like Citizen Kane.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:54 PM on February 2, 2005

metacritic has it at 10.
posted by glenwood at 7:04 PM on February 2, 2005

To hell with the audience. They should know better. I for one feel bad for Christian Slater.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 7:33 PM on February 2, 2005

yeah, I was surprised to see so many lukewarm reviews atop the metacritic heap. A few of them could easily up the RT percent if they were included as freshes.

This thread sent me directly to bittorrent.
posted by damehex at 8:39 PM on February 2, 2005

Christian Slater... we hardly knew ye...
posted by madman at 1:31 AM on February 3, 2005

glenwood, excellent Entertainment Weekly line in your link: "Far be it from me to dismiss a man's effort (Uwe Boll) in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value. "
posted by biffa at 2:57 AM on February 3, 2005

Hey, (full disclosure: I'm also friends with the writer) I was there on opening night with him, and while the movie is certainly of poor quality, it's not all-time bad. It's not Battlefield Earth bad. It's not Showgirls bad. If you want to compare it to anything, it's much better than House of the Dead, which does creep into Battlefield Earth territory. I'm just sayin'.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:38 AM on February 3, 2005

Is this an act of self-hate? Or just hate?
posted by papercake at 6:10 AM on February 3, 2005

What, no one has mentioned Gigli yet? Heh
posted by mabelcolby at 7:33 AM on February 3, 2005

Bloodrayne: Her revenge is never... satisfied? Is that even a sentence?
posted by rusty at 7:33 AM on February 4, 2005

The metacritic rating is now down to 9 (out of 100), which is defined as "extreme dislike or disgust".
posted by WestCoaster at 11:33 AM on February 4, 2005

uwe boll's true motives explained...
posted by joedan at 4:11 PM on February 4, 2005