I have to confess that I'm still waiting for a game-to-movie conversion that blows me away. Mediocrity is more or less the pinnacle of achievement that can be claimed by this particular subgenre.
I borrowed the film version of Silent Hill yesterday from our local library, and while it wasn't as bad as Doom or House of the Dead, neither was it as good as Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I suppose I should point out that with the notable exception of Doom, I haven't played any of the games that have been made into movies in recent years; many of them are console-only games, and most of the ones that aren't don't appeal to me all that much, as I'm mostly a strategy and RPG player. So I had no real familiarity with the game's storyline when I saw the film, but what I saw made little sense. It was never made specifically clear what precisely happened in Silent Hill. If you ignore that fact, there is the troubling question of what the evil is that is embodied by the little girl in the town and how the "demon" and Alessa were able to siphon off her goodness into a separate sentient and corporal entity and deposit it into the real world is unclear. Equally unclear is why the road into town was destroyed after the mom and the cop woke up if in fact the entire town exists in some kind of alternate dimension anyway. Where exactly are Rose and Sharon at the end of the movie anyway? Hell? What's the deal with the Dad character in this movie? The detective tells him to leave town and he just does it? Either he planned to get a divorce anyway or he's the wimpiest Dad ever! How do you just leave without getting even a hint of an explanation about what's really going on in that town? I read on Wikipedia that a sequel is planned. I hope it's just an ugly rumor.
I guess I shouldn't have been expecting much from Doom. The games themselves (I haven't played 3, just 1 and 2) had razor-thin plots involving your character running around and shooting, hacking, or blowing up various kinds of demons that came here from some hell dimension. So the movie basically involves The Rock, the guy who played Eomer in LOTR, and some other forgettable figures beating on and shooting various things and, of course, each other. Honestly, I couldn't sit through House of the Dead. Why? Was it horrifying beyond belief? Well, yes, but not in the way the filmmakers intended--I think. The movie was basically a college rave on an island with a bunch of brain-eating zombies and it came complete with screen-coating CGI transitions that looked so unbelievably cheesy I had to check my TV to make sure it hadn't metamorphosed into a Nintendo device.
I don't know--maybe my expectations are too high. The Resident Evil series is the only VG-movie series I've seen that has something remotely resembling a plot. If one can accept the somewhat-goofy premise that an engineered virus can reanimate dead tissue and give people a hunger for human flesh AND turn people into metahuman entities like Alice, there is a coherent story to follow across the two (so far) films, and the movies boast the best action sequences of any in the genre. If I were fighting zombies or demons or aliens in some post-apocalyptic, yet near-future world, I would way rather have Alice fighting alongside me than The Rock, because she can kill you with a pencil, not just because I'm heterosexual.
Pretty much all VG-movies, including the RE films (which were actually decent), fall into the trap of basically being designed for prepubescent or pubescent males. While any male from 10 to 100 enjoys seeing some scantily-clad female forms on the screen, that and blowing up a bunch of stuff doth not a good film make. Nevertheless, the producers of these movies seem content to insult the intelligence of the game-playing populace (which does include a sizeable segment of people of the other gender) by thinking that they can pawn off another Bad Boys remake and we'll just slurp it down as long as it has zombie mutant radioactive demons from an alien planet. And they die at the end. Except one egg. So they can make a totally awesome sequel!!
(sigh)