Being a gamer and a film fan is tricky business. When your favourite comic or book gets the celluloid treatment it’s easy to define whether or not it’s a success. If the characters are true to their nature in the source material and the themes are intact then it’s more or less a success. Harry Potter, Hunger Games or Lord of the Rings might have missed a few things, a few peripheral characters or scenes, but the nature of the source has been translated accurately.

Not so much for games. Many of the most popular games barely have themes. Most are built around the mechanic that the game is all about. In some cases the plot boils down to an excuse to do what you do in the game. In some cases the excuses are very good, like Portal, in other games the excuse is just an excuse, like Doom.

Sometimes the excuse is just plain stupid, so you ignore it and create something even more stupid. And therein lays the genius of Dead or Alive the Movie. My favourite game to film adaptation.

This image pretty much sums up the entire films coda of awkwardness and shamelessness

I have, I believe, seen every game to film adaptation ever made, yes Super Smash Brothers the movie, and yes Street Fighter (both the one with Kylie Minogue and the anime with the Chun Li shower scene), and yes the Prince of Persia movie where everyone, even the American actors speak with posh British accents to sound ‘exotic’ and middle eastern and the full range of Uwe Bolls assaults against the human race.

None of them have come close to entertaining me as much as DOA. The story is simple, several contestants of varying backgrounds are invited to complete in a martial arts tournament for a huge prize. They’re invited courtesy of a ninja star that flies from nowhere to stab into the nearest solid surface. And it doesn’t matter how inaccessible they are, even if they’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean, or hang gliding near a secret ninja island, somehow the ninja star invitations always find them.

Not all the characters are motivated by the prize, each has their own personal quest. In some cases its discovering the fate of a lost brother, in others it’s proving the legitimacy of pro wrestling as a real sport. Surprisingly, despite the fact all the characters plot lines are monumentally dumb, the film does a pretty good job of juggling the events and giving every one some closure by films end.

Now if you think it sounds stupid and B movie all ready, prepare yourself, there’s a lot more stupid to come. Dead or Alive transcends the B movie trope in the way the game transcends the knicker flashing beat em up genre.

People are knocked out with damp towels, there’s a deadly ninja woman dressed all in purple with hot pink hair who somehow remains invisible, and at one point the events all go on hold so the female contestants, the films focal point, can play volley ball in bikinis.

You'll believe a tiny girl with an odd shaped head can defeat a man who looks like he can tear apart a VW Beetle with his teeth

And the craziest thing? All of these events are absolutely canon with the source material. None of these things would strike a Dead or Alive fan as odd or strange, or as an embellishment added by a hack director trying to imprint his own ideas on the film to prove he should be doing something better than game movies. Director and Hong Kong export Corey Yuan has clearly studied the Dead or Alive films extremely closely and tried to create exactly the type of film a fan of the games would expect. In this regard, the film is a raging embarrassment of success.

Most of the characters even look like people cosplaying as characters from the games.

The most epic moment of hilarious and entertaining stupidity is the climax of the film (spoiler alert) where the bad guy Donovan, played by Eric Roberts in what I believe is the pinnacle of his career, uses a computer to steal the contestants awesome martial arts skills, who are at this point are kidnapped and locked in glass tubes, and download them into a pair of sunglasses, giving him the ultimate martial arts power. I recall writing a similar spec script at age 9 after watching a back to back double of Weird Science and American Ninja.

If none of his previous efforts cemented Eric Roberts as the golden god of crap, this role nails it

You’d think all ready having the technology to send ninja stars flying all over the world that can find anyone anywhere would be enough for this guy. But no, he’s power hungry; he even has a giant computer monitor to video conference with all the other evil geniuses he wants to sell his martial arts sun glasses to. But despite having the sum of all his opponents’ martial ability evil Eric Roberts is eventually defeated when his sunglasses fall off.

Then there’s an explosion and the characters literally sale into the sunset, on a boat, with each male and female character conveniently pared off in an eerie homage to Noahs Ark.

DoA is daft on a level few films are. Sometimes it seems like it’s going for a comedic approach to the action, literally dubbing in tweeting bird sounds when people are hit, other times it tries to be brutal and nasty, everyone looks like they’re in a fancy dress costume and there’s almost nonsensical moments of PG rated sexuality threaded into the film. In other words it’s a pitch perfect rendition of DOA the game, no movie has more closely followed the spirit of the game it is based on than DOA. This film is terrible, but hilariously so, I can’t help but be entertained when I watch it, it’s the sort of entertainment you get by watching shows like Gladiators or CSI, it’s just so terribly bad you can’t help but laugh.

To me it’s the best adaptation of a game to film so far. I urge you enrich the lower the parts of your brain by seeing this film.