An Unflattering Boll Cut from 1UP.com

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An Unflattering Boll Cut

Why the notorious director of Postal, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne might actually be a genius.

ew names raise the ire of gamers as much as Uwe Boll's. The mere mention of his name in certain circles is sure to cause great anguish and a gnashing of teeth. He is as reviled among video game enthusiasts as Jack Thompson. Boll makes movies, famously terrible movies, that transcend their mere affiliation with video gaming in their universal dislike. It's not just gamers who hate his films, but everyone. It's gamers, however, who harbor the purest of hatred. His highest rated film on film-review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes is 11% fresh. His lowest is 2005's Alone in the Dark, which has a 1% fresh rating. That's one percent. Anyone with good taste, or any taste for that matter, is put off by the mind-numbingly terrible movies Boll is somehow able to churn out with a surprising regularity. Video gamers hate him particularly because of his films like Postal, Far Cry, and BloodRayne.

But is the unmitigated hate warranted? Is there some redeeming nugget of genius hiding within these pictures, some sly subversiveness that we're all missing? To find out if perhaps Boll's movies are redeemable when viewed with a skeptical eye, I decided to put myself to the test by watching a few.

First, a little background on Dr. Uwe Boll: The guy is definitely not an idiot, as so many people desperately want to believe. That "Dr." part? Boll holds a doctorate in literature. It's difficult to believe, sure, but one simply cannot hold such a degree without being intimately familiar with the art of storytelling. His educational background lends credence to the idea that maybe his films are more than they appear. It hardly seems possible that someone who holds a degree in literature could make something so counter to the very concept of "literature," so something else may be going on. Something more sinister, or at the very least, more profitable.

By now, the cynics reading this have already pointed out that, in fact, there is something else going on. The films of Uwe Boll took advantage of a well-meaning tax break in his home country of Germany. If you aren't familiar, the "tl;dr" version is funding for films can be written off against personal taxes. Taxes are only paid on profits. Profits are something Uwe Boll's films don't make. It's like a bizarre, real life scam from The Producers, only it's perfectly legal and Boll has made a comfortable living from it. Did I mention that in addition to studying literature, Boll also studied economics? I'm not sure what area of focus he specialized in studying, but if I had to guess, it would be business economics.

In my quest to learn if Boll really does make unapologetically awful films, I treated myself to two of his most famous movies, Postal and BloodRayne. BloodRayne is arguably his most successful video game adaptation, with two sequels and another reportedly in the works. Postal is probably his most well-known movie. I was hoping to get ahold of Alone in the Dark, one of the most egregious examples of how bad his movies can be, but I failed to find it and also very easily convinced myself against looking very hard. It's most famous for featuring a scene where a character who was recently killed on-screen gets up and exits the set. I am really upset that I missed out on that one scene. With BloodRayne and Postal, however, I did get to see a few things I never thought I would see, nor did I ever think I wanted to.

Postal is a movie based on a game that is usually rolled out to show off the depravity and violence in our medium. When a senator is looking to make a career, he or she will queue up some footage from Postal 2 and pluck our collective heart strings with pleas about "the children." If I were in the business of selling box quotes, I'd call it an homage to depravity, but since no one is buying what I've got for sale, I'll call it what it is: a game where you violently kill people in ridiculous ways for... reasons. The movie Postal is basically the same, only it's trotted out whenever someone on the internet wants to show us how shitty Uwe Boll movies are. And I will give them that.

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Growing up, some of my comedy heroes were the cast of Kids in the Hall. As much as I loved watching Canada's finest export, at no time did I ever think to myself, "You know, someday I'd really like to see one of the cast members' penises." Uwe Boll, on the other hand, thought to himself, "You know, I have one of the elder statesmen of Canadian comedy in my film. I bet my audience would get a real kick out of seeing everything he has to offer." And so, with that, I can no longer die peacefully as one of the literally billions of people who haven't seen Dave Foley give his penis a subtle twist and a tug (special thanks to Matt Clark for that).

Middle-aged male full-frontal nudity aside, the movie itself is also pretty assaulting on the senses. "Postal Dude," played by Zack Ward (previously known for his role as Scut Farkus in A Christmas Story) goes "postal" after a series of negative events destroy his already crappy life. The movie opens with a pair of terrorist hijackers piloting an airplane and arguing about how many virgins they'll be getting once they arrive in heaven. The cockpit is then breached by the passengers, who take control of the plane and crash it accidentally into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Now, I personally believe nothing is off-limits in comedy. Nothing. However, if you're going to try to make a joke out of what was the single worst act of terrorism on American soil, an event that launched a war now over a decade old, you need to at the very least make it funny. I found myself more offended by the crappiness of the joke and its set-up than I did by the subject. However, I may be an unfeeling monster with a really unusual sense of humor.

Postal is your typical gross-out fare, a sort of hyperactive journey where the roadmarkers are a series of juvenile jokes and Verne Troyer. Just an aside here, but I feel like maybe Verne Troyer's career has stagnated. Poor guy. He only appears in anything when the script specifically calls for a joke where Verne Troyer is both the set-up and the punchline.

Overall, Postal is really awful, but it has a bizarre shining moment where Boll appears as himself in a scene in the fictional amusement park "Little Germany." In the scene, Boll is being interviewed for television in a weird self-aware satire of, well, Uwe Boll. It's almost worth checking out, because it does seem like Boll is fully aware of everything he does and everything he's been called. Trotting out this scene in the middle of his own movie is... well, I hate to say "genius," because it isn't. But it is actually entertaining. If Boll could have harnessed the comic awareness he displayed in this one small scene, and employed it in the rest of the movie, Postal could have been a reasonably enjoyable, albeit idiotic, movie. But then again, there's the whole Dave Foley's dick thing, so probably not.

BloodRayne is Boll's movie based on the video game series of the same name. It differs from Postal in that it isn't a comedy, but instead is an action movie starring a half-vampire named Rayne. The original BloodRayne game was set in 1933, but Boll decided to set the film in the 18th century. Apparently this made some people mad, but they are probably the sort of people you wouldn't want to associate with, anyway.

The movie has some pretty big stars in it, most notably Ben Kingsley. If you don't know who Ben Kingsley is, in addition to starring in a Uwe Boll movie about a half-vampire who hunts vampires and is also not named Blade, Kingsley won an Oscar for playing Gandhi in the 1982 film of the same name. If you've ever seen Gandhi (the movie and not the guy in those old Apple ads), it is physically painful to watch an actor of his caliber play in a movie this bad.

That's not to say it's a terrible movie, however. As far as action movies go, it's dumb, forgettable nonsense with a semi-coherent plot and some pretty decent gore effects. The production values aren't great, but at the same time, they don't excrete the sort of dull-sludge of many other low-budget movies. Watching this movie, I couldn't help but wonder if 12 year-old me would have enjoyed it. In an imaginary other-universe, tween-me would have ate this movie up. I can see me now, sitting on the floor of a friend's house on a weekend sleep-over, stopping our channel surfing on HBO to see some boobs and some blood, or perhaps popping it into the top-loading VCR, and really liking it. It sets out to tell a story about a vampire hunter who kills a lot of bad people, and it completely succeeds. There really isn't much more to it than that, and the movie never really pretends to be anything more, with the exception of its all-star cast. Get rid of Gandhi and Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs and this is nothing more than a made-for-cable movie with nothing to prove. It's oddly entertaining.

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All of this makes me wonder: if we didn't all take it as a fact of God and nature that everything Uwe Boll does is going to suck, would these movies still suck? Yes. Yes they would. But to read the vitriol on the internet, especially from video game enthusiasts such as myself, his films are treated as if they are were individually crafted to piss off each and every gamer.

This is my real problem with Boll's films. Sure, they're bad movies and they're allegedly nothing more than a front for a tax-evasion loophole, but in what way does it affect us? To be perfectly frank, he isn't picking games that have truly compelling stories to begin with. Does it matter if House of the Dead is a crappy movie? It's an on-rails lightgun game. The fact that any sort of story at all was teased out of it should be considered an impressive achievement. In a world where the E.T. video game exists, should we really be so upset that someone takes games and anti-E.T.'s them by transforming them into crappy movies?

Boll makes movies to make money. It may seem like a shock, but any piece of commercial art you consume was created with profit in mind. Every critically lauded video game, every Academy Award winning movie, was made from an artistic vision that happened to also be profitable. Lots of people like to point to their favorite bands and the moment they "sold out," but art and profit are inextricably linked. Can you name a successful band that hasn't sold out? Maybe you can, but most of the time "selling out" equates to "reaching a broader audience," which in turn means "making money." While Oscar winning pictures and Game of the Year video games are artistically valid, they often use their artistic merit to hide the fact that they're also (most times) profitable. Boll doesn't even bother to pretend. There are no magic tricks with his movies. Their existence is purely for monetary gain, and he doesn't try to obfuscate that reality behind a cloud of artistic pretense. They are crappy movies because they are designed to be crappy movies. In many ways, Uwe Boll knows exactly what he's doing, and he's quite good at it.

Author

Seth Macy

Seth Macy has been shopping around a screenplay for a project based on Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom called "Janey Redfruit and the Salad Days of Summer." He imagines it will have a lot of indie cred once he gets The Shins signed on to do the soundtrack.

Comments (24)

1UP is my home
Posted: userComment.createdDate by krazay88

God Damn it ....

This was such a great article... Why does 1up have to end...

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Should've watched...
Posted: userComment.createdDate by lyfestory

... Rampage... that's the most interesting movie he's made, in my opinion... kinda like Postal, but more reality-based... and not based on any game... it even had one good review on IMDB... anyhow, for those of you interested, he does had a few more movies in the works... ( :

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So...
Posted: userComment.createdDate by Knightbayne

He makes horrible movies to make money? Why not make good movies and make more money? Too hard I suppose. Honestly I could care less about most of the VG movies he has ruined. The only one that bothered me was Bloodrayne. I loved the Game and could make a better Bloodrayne Movie in my sleep. Seriously how could someone fuck up that set-up. Half- Vampire Chic killing Nazis in a secret compound with lots of slow motion, blood and gore and cool bosses. Kinda of like a Vampire Matrix or duh Underworld. Pretty simple concept that could probably have been made with the same budget. I had hopes for The Third Reich but he completely fucked that up too. Same setting as the Game but complete shit with underwelming action otherwise. If I had the money to buy the rights and make Bloodrayne truly badass I would.

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- Apparently...
  Posted: 03/09/2013 by San_Andreas
  
  ...he exploits loopholes in the German tax system for money.
  
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Uwe Boll
Posted: userComment.createdDate by VelcroBoy

Rocks my nuts! I hope he makes hundreds more..FOREVER!!!!

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a wink to not take the games so seriously
Posted: userComment.createdDate by yuri_ha

...maybe

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So much potential squandered.
Posted: userComment.createdDate by Xocolatl

I think the problem with Boll films for me is that...they aren't complete crap. There is this glimmer of hope, a little something that says if he tries just a bit more, we would have had a real winner. The guy is certainly not dumb--his movies capture the feel of each video games better than most Hollywood movies ever did. The story, the acting, the everything--they were always beyond the kinda hopelessness I get from watching straight to DVD titles.
My first exposures to Boll movies were walking in a mall, and seeing them play on a screen in a movie shop. I paused to watch and thought to myself...damn, this is so close to being good...but wait, that person/vampire/thing looks...vaguely familiar. Then it dawns on me that these are game movies--they're Boll movies!

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Apparently
Posted: userComment.createdDate by propelledfoot

This guy lives in my town, I'd love to run into him. Scratch that, I wouldnt.

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- If you would
  Posted: 03/07/2013 by Alf_Alfa
  
  have put "With My Car" at the end of that, it would have been ok.
  
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Pathetic
Posted: userComment.createdDate by BlackMetal22

Clearly, it's a slow news day when someone even bothers to make an article about Uwe Boll's "merits."

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- 4 real
  Posted: 03/07/2013 by chi_chi_felipe
  
  What is this shit? 1up has really gone downhill.
  
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- Didn't hear?
  Posted: 03/07/2013 by 6StringSamurai
  
  The site is closing. They laid most everyone off a couple of weeks ago.
  
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- this is on theme
  Posted: 03/08/2013 by sunmofo
  
  for their cover story of movies and games, which, if you were any sort of regular visitor, you would have realized.
  also, yes, the site is closing down and they're basically just pushing out what writing they already had done and letting things wind down.
  
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It Is Good To
Posted: userComment.createdDate by Alf_Alfa

know that he is a doctor. I would now like to file a malpractice suit against him please. And I am sure it will be a class action one as well.

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Meh
Posted: userComment.createdDate by LordCool

If anything this is a good conversation starter lol.. His movies are made for tv plain and simple.. and i might be insulting some directors who have made some very good TV movies haha. If in fact he is legally playing the system making shit movies on purpose because you only have to pay taxes on earnings i would think movie studios would cut him off. I know you are suppose to take reviews with a grain of salt and make up your own mind but I find my self hard pressed to disagree with the many men and women who point their thumbs down.

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He has potential
Posted: userComment.createdDate by Reactant

Bloodrayne 1 pist me off. As you were watching the movie, i kept saying "Wait. What? Why!" It felt half fast.
Bloodrayne 2 a different story. U can tell lessons were learned. It turned out to be a decent movie with likeable characters, interesting art direction and good cinematography. Sure the movie was lower budget but you can tell more time was spent developing the characters. I turned out to be an okay film.
In short, i believe he does have the potential to make average films.

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Boll ain't bad
Posted: userComment.createdDate by BrokenH

I liked Blood Rayne 1 & 2. They are not the greatest films of all time but they are not as terrible as they were made out to be. I was pretty bored by the Dungeon Siege movie though.
I cannot be mad at Uwe considering the amount of drek Hollywood pumps out every year! Has anyone seen the movie adaptations of "The Smurfs" or "Yogi The Bear"? Now THAT'S CRAP!

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- I always
  Posted: 03/06/2013 by LordCool
  
  Remember the first time I saw the women playing Rayne in those movies.. thinking to myself the girl they had cosplay her at E3 that one year would have been SOOOOO MUCH BETTER....
  
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- LordCool
  Posted: 03/08/2013 by BrokenH
  
  Hmmmm! Perhaps. Good argument,sir! Sexy cosplay for the win?
  
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Assuming everyone with a doctorate in literature is a
Posted: userComment.createdDate by mixtape623

Genius? That's absolute lunacy. You can have all the pieces of post secondary certified paper in the world and still be an ass clown.

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....
Posted: userComment.createdDate by San_Andreas

...As Orville Redenbacher said, find your niche, and specialize in it. Boll has found his niche in making crap, and he's good at making crap. :)

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I went along with
Posted: userComment.createdDate by Dub_Z

all the Uwe Boll sentiment as a general consensus. I'd only ever seen House of the Dead and everything else seemed like it would be shit.

A couple of years back, with Netflix and Hulu being my only steady diet of video entertainment I ended up watching Rampage and Stoic. Two tasteless, but competent films that have nothing to do with video games. I didn't know they were Uwe Boll films until they were over.

They are pretty good popcorn killers. Not anything I would put anywhere remotely close to a Top 50 or even 100, probably, but somewhere right below most of the really cool, but fleeting Japanese and South Korean flicks I enjoy. The way I saw it, they were worth rating 5 stars so I could get similar quality stuff landing on Netflix more often.

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- Actually...
  Posted: 03/06/2013 by nipsen
  
  His House of the Dead film arguably makes too much sense. In the game, there's.. I've no idea what actually happens. There's something. And the villain is kind of evil, but maybe not really, perhaps he's sort of deranged and obsessed with bringing people back to life? Who knows?
  So in Boll's film (with Jürgen Prochnow playing a smugglerbarge-captain.. Duke Leto in Dune, or the Captain in Das Boot. Amazing actor). In the film, the villain has a backstory.. it's really a fictional backstory to the game. And it kind of makes sense, and it's exactly as silly as the game makes it out to be, if you think about it. And he has people run around acting that out. It's hilarious.
  Because what you see here is a movie production that just doesn't take itself seriously, doesn't have special effects, and where Boll makes complete fools of the actors who don't have laughing fits on stage that they're barely suppressing when they have their own lines.
  So I kind of don't see the problem here either. As I said, the film makes massively more sense than the game. They even put in some figurative explanation for the graphics in the game, and the teeth on the screen, and the weird lighting effects. A plot-point halfway is the gruesome juxtaposition in that specific hallway and with that particular ladder with the planks across, for example. Yes, the planks. I mean, if you've played the game, you're howling with laughter at that point, when you see it actually acted out.
  In a sense, I'm kind of wondering if some "gamers" are mad at Boll for having a better imagination than they have.
  If anything, I'd criticise Boll for being too meticulous. For not embracing the spirit of Ed Wood boldly enough, and just rolling with it. Because what's there in the final cut tends to be relatively reasonable as far as junk-film goes. Lots of "serious" movies that are made with less care than these. Never mind with less respect for the people who are going to watch them, who might be "fans" of the source-material. :p
  
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- I actually
  Posted: 03/06/2013 by Dub_Z
  
  never had any rage for House of the Dead. I saw it, it was a movie, and that was that. I just knew what the general consensus on Uwe Boll was.
  
  Don't even get me started on gamers and their inconsistent reality barometer.
  
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