The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Amid a stark, doomsday landscape, a Scandinavian knight barters for his life with an attendant Grim Reaper by instigating the slowest chess match ever. Game gurus, if you must adapt this, at least have mercy on our souls by imagining the late, kerrazy Bobby Fisher squaring off against Death from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in a heated bout of Battleship.

Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis)
Imagine a game that never really advances, no matter how many levels you pass. Even Bill Murray’s delightfully smug mug can’t get you through that existential crisis.

Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
The director already adapted his Godfather to the medium, so why milk one of his other great masterpieces? Because hearing lines about napalm and horrors and Disneyland isn’t nearly as fun as deploying pretend napalm, instigating imaginary horrors, and braving a fake Disneyland—in what would essentially be a hide-and-go-seek search for a kooky, melodramatic chubby dude with a God complex.

The Incredible Shrinking Woman (dir. Joel Schumacher)
An ennui-afflicted housewife begins to physically downsize after huffing a strange brew of chemicals. While looking for a cure, she assumes an infinitesimal size. As novel as it’d be to helm a game starring Lily Tomlin circa 1980, we’d rather tango with The Atom.

Zapped! (dir. Robert J. Rosenthal)
Show of hands: Who wants to recreate the pubescent shenanigans of the sexed-starved, telekinetic Chachi and/or Buddy Lembeck?

Cocoon (dir. Ron Howard)
Old folks carouse in a fountain of youth/swimming pool that’s fuelled by alien pods. Cute! That is, until your inept controller skills cause a geriatric to take a laser beam to the brain (hey, peaceful aliens don’t make for a compelling game). And that’s only one step worse than killing a defenseless baby, you bastard.

Zardoz (dir. John Boorman)
Now, don’t mistake us: battling foes whilst wearing a crimson linen bondage/sumo get-up totally sounds like a good time. The fact that most of those foes are complacent? Sort of a bummer. (Props to io9 compadre Graeme McMillan for this suggestion.)

Naked Lunch (dir. David Cronenberg)
I was going to single out Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on this list, but apparently the Powers That Be adapted the David Lynch TV show into a game a while back. (Truth be told, the riddling Log Lady as narrator or interstitial jigs from that midget dude could be nothing short of awesome.) So I instead turn to Naked Lunch, William Burroughs’ junkie musing about folks who get high off insecticide and start seeing giant bugs and stuff. How to play a mind-numbing game that revels in sensory overload but doesn’t make a lick of sense?

Plan 9 From Outer Space (dir. Ed Wood)
Yes, Konami made a Plan 9 game in ’92. But since hi-fi technology clearly has no place in the Ed Wood oeuvre, let’s learn from foolishness past.

Encino Man (dir. Les Mayfield)
Pauly Shore and Sean Astin find and defrost a frozen caveman! Then he gets a makeover. Aaaaaaand that’s pretty much it.

Lensmen begins two billion years in the past, when a race of noble philosophers, the Arisians, have developed awesome mental powers. Invaders from another universe, the Eddorians, come to our universe because they detect that our galaxy is passing through another one. This galactic do-si-do will lead to the creation of countless new inhabited worlds for the Eddorians to conquer.

So the Arisians breed a new super-race of humans to defend the galaxy. And they give the Lens, which focuses thought the way a lens focuses light, to our heroes. (It's sort of like the Guardians giving a super ring to Green Lantern.) Only the Lens' proper owner can wear it without dying. The Arisians only give Lenses to worthy individuals, and if you try to get a Lens but aren't worthy, you just disappear.

In the end, the heroic Kimball Kinnison marries the ultimate product of the Arisians' billion-year breeding program, Clarissa MacDougall. She's the first female to receive the coveted Lens. Their genetically perfect offspring have amazing powers and become the Children of the Lens.

Not only is Lensmen the sort of sprawling saga that does badly in the movies (not unlike Dune), but its themes of eugenics and oddball sexism are obviously a product of the 1930s, when the series began. Can Howard and Universal make a non-sucky version? Probably only by changing it beyond recognition. Luckily, there's some precedent: fans complain that the anime version of Lensmen has nothing in common with the novels except the title and a few character names. Image from cover of Second Stage Lensmen. [SciFi Wire]