Uwe Boll lines up Dungeon Siege, BloodRayne, Fear Effect movies

Following the recent announcement that he has acquired the rights to make a movie based on Eidos' Fear Effect games, producer/director Uwe Boll is also set to make films based on Dungeon Siege and BloodRayne.

Boll's production company, BollKG, announced some time ago that it had acquired the rights to Fear Effect from Eidos (who curiously announced the deal again this morning, leading us to believe that they're actually proud of this) making this the third movie deal to be signed by British publisher.

Eidos published two Fear Effect games, both on the PSone console, and no plans for a return to the series have been announced as yet. Boll apparently plans to create a Charlies Angels style movie using the two sexy (and conveniently for such an accomplished make of B-movie trash, lesbian) heroines, Hana and Rain, as his key protagonists.

The catalogue of game-based movies which Boll has in the pipeline now also includes Gas Powered Games' PC RPG Dungeon Siege, which is set to have a script written by David Freeman, whose previous credits include, er, the jingoistic nonsense that passed for a script in Command & Conquer Generals.

A film adaptation of Majesco's BloodRayne is also on the director's plate for the next couple of years, featuring as it does a leather-clad female secret agent who fights Nazis (and Nazi giant spiders) - and is, in case we hadn't quite established the B-movie credentials yet, a vampire.

Much as this sounds like a delectable menu of movie goodness, the involvement of Uwe Boll in these projects does cast some doubt on the ultimate quality of the fare on offer - with Mr Boll being best known for his work on the recent movie conversion of Sega's House Of The Dead.

Recently honoured by its inclusion in IMDB.com's Bottom 100 Films list, the unrelentingly dreadful House of the Dead ("a volley of idiotic plotting and bad acting," according to the Toronto Star) was probably best described by the New York Post, which summed it up as follows: "You'd be hard-pressed to find a duller, more incompetent - and less scary - flick with cheesier effects in a remainder bin crammed with direct-to-video horrors."

In a time when cross-media presence, encompassing games, movies, books and as many other aspects of modern media as possible, is considered vitally important to the success of key properties, it's disappointing that games continue to sell themselves short in this way - with the rush to have a movie based on a game franchise made at all completely overriding the need to have movies based on games accepted as a legitimate addition to the medium.

Ultimately, this kind of behaviour from publishers and film producers alike doesn't just produce laughably bad films - in the long term, it contributes heavily to a business culture within the entertainment industry that sees videogames always playing second fiddle to movies and being treated a merely another item of merchandising, rather than a legitimate piece of media in their own right.