UWE BOLL IS OFTEN REFERRED TO as the worst film-maker in the world. This seems to pain Boll, a gregarious 42-year-old German whose best-known movies are based on video games.
So he has shared the pain with his critics, literally, challenging several to a series of boxing matches in 2006. Boll, a former boxer, roundly thrashed them.
What he really wants is respect. There is a website called
stopuweboll.org, with a petition demanding that he stop making movies. The petition had drawn only 18,000 names until last month, when Boll told horror movie website fearnet.com that he would quit making films if a million people signed. The list has now grown to more than a quarter of a million.
Why play along? "I have to live with it," Boll says with an unhappy smirk. "It's better to make fun with it, as an alternative to being depressed, sitting at home, crying." We won't even talk about uwebollisantichrist.com
During an interview in New York, he presses a DVD into my hands. It is a rough cut of a serious film he's been working on, about a brutal prison rape in Germany in 2006. "I would be interested to see what you think about it," he says. He also notes that there are counter petitions urging him to keep making films. At least part of what is going on, he argues, is an online pile-on, a "can you top this?" game with Boll on the bottom. "Is it the movies are all so bad?" he asks. "Something is not fitting together in the story, that I'm the worst of the worst."
Boll's latest film, Postal, which opened in the US earlier this month, might not be the best vehicle for winning respect. Its opening sequence portrays 11 September hijackers squabbling over the precise number of virgins awaiting them after their martyrdom. The scene then switches to a World Trade Center's-eye view of an oncoming jet.
As the movie's scattershot plot rocks along, the audience gets a long, full-frontal look at a nude Dave Foley, who portrays a sleazy satyr of a cult leader. By the time the film's protagonist, played by Zack Ward, uses a cat for a silencer, the boundaries of good taste have been left so far behind that the Hubble space telescope couldn't spot the border signs.
Considering the gross-out and sexual humour quotient of many recent films, Postal could well find an audience. The raucous crowd at a screening presented by the New York City Horror Film Festival last month erupted in laughter for every startlingly transgressive joke. As one couple left the cinema, a woman told her date: "It made no sense, but it was hysterical."
Postal, like Boll's BloodRayne, Alone in the Dark and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, originated as a violent video game. Many of the reviews for those films have been startlingly negative. A critic for America's Entertainment Weekly wrote of Alone in the Dark, which starred Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff: "Far be it from me to dismiss a man's effort in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after three days drinking possesses more cinematic value."
As vicious as many of the professional reviews have been, video gamers' online critiques are even more vituperative, and largely unprintable. Some of their complaints sound a bit like those of Jane Austen fans who decry adaptations that miss the essence of their beloved author's canon. Except that instead of lamenting, say, the way the film-makers behind Northanger Abbey misunderstood the importance of the witty references to Anne Radcliffe's masterpiece, The Mysteries of Udolpho, they attack Boll for shifting the story of BloodRayne from Nazi Germany to 18th-century Romania. They also think Rayne's outfit is not hot enough.
The reaction of gamers is not based solely on the faithfulness of the way the games are interpreted, according to Daniel Morris, of PC Gamer magazine. "One thing to understand is that gamers face a certain geek stigma," he says. "And it's certainly not helped when movies come out based on games, and the movies are just no good."
Boll's defenders do not claim that his films are great art. But they do say he's not that bad. Sam Beddoes, of reviews website, HooplaNet (hooplanet.co.uk), says: "I don't think anybody deserves the kind of abuse the internet gives Uwe." (It's pronounced oo-veh.) Although he called Boll's House of the Dead "laughable", he found his other films "far better than anybody has given credit for".
Boll's films have been compared to the output of Troma Entertainment, which includes The Toxic Avenger and Surf Nazis Must Die. Lloyd Kaufman, co-founder of Troma, found Postal "pretty funny" and called it "a kind of Troma fromage" – or, rather, homage.
Boll, he says, is "heroic, and a genuine independent spirit", but also safe for reviewers to attack because he is not associated with the big Hollywood companies and the advertising dollars they wield, whereas "they can't say that Michael Bay is a no-talent".
The film industry is certainly not helping Boll. Earlier this month he received an e-mail from the chief buyer for the Regal Entertainment Group, the largest cinema chain in the USA, informing him that Regal would not be exhibiting Postal. The message explained that, "While I have respected your past work, this film falls short of the type of product the Regal Theater Group would consider commercial."
Boll denounces the decision as politics. (The film portrays President Bush as not only being in league with Osama bin Laden, but in love with him.) "We still aim for 1,000 screens," he says; Boll's own company is distributing the film and he says his business model can take such disappointments.
The films may perform modestly at the box office – In the Name of the King, for example, has brought in almost $12 million worldwide (£6m), but that represents about 15 percent of his revenues, with television, DVD rights and video on demand bringing in the rest. Provisions in the German tax code allow his investors to benefit through write-offs. And he stays well away from the Hollywood system, producing the films himself. "Because I don't have in-between people, I am able to make more money," he says.
Boll's defence of his work is equally straightforward. "I don't make political decisions that can destroy the earth," he says. "I make movies." Which is not to say that he won't wallop those who ridicule him. The boxing matches, in September 2006, left one of his opponents vomiting and sucking oxygen from a tank. One of them, Rich Kyanka of comedy website somethingawful.com, complained that Boll had suggested the match was only for show. Kyanka, via e-mail, declined to comment. "The guy's essentially a real-life troll," he wrote. "Boll wants people to talk about him so that he can get some free publicity."
Then he added: "I'm not going to feed him."
Those who have worked with Boll see a different man. Dave Foley says he found him, in person, to be "quite a sweet guy", but tough.
But why work for the director called the worst in the world? "I knew nothing about Uwe Boll, at first," Foley says. He watched BloodRayne, he explains, and found it so over-the-top gory that "it made me laugh". It had, he says, a feeling of absurdity, like a Terry Gilliam film.
Boll is "like a quintessential German intellectual artist who has almost taken film arbitrarily as the medium he's going to work in. The art form is, almost, in being hated," Foley says. Comparing him to the late comic Andy Kaufman, he adds: "It's his relationship with the audience that is his creation, his relationship with the critics, more than the movies."
What, then, does that make an actor like, say, Dave Foley? "A pawn, I suppose, a bit of pigment on the canvas," Foley says. "This is either going to be the worst movie I've ever been in, or it's going to be brilliant. There's not any middle ground." He adds: "I hope it's brilliant."
The creator of the stopuweboll.org petition is Bert Harvey, a 29-year-old games designer at Flying Lab Software, near Seattle. "I really think that he is the PT Barnum of our generation, and even bad press is good press for him," Harvey says.
If Harvey's petition tops a million signatures, Boll says, he will insist on a careful examination of the results.
"I cannot accept that this is, like, a hundred thousand people voting ten times," he says. But if that total isn't reached, critics will still have the consolation that Boll will appear as a character in the upcoming video game Postal III. "They can kill me every day of their life," Boll says. "As long as I'm able to make movies, I'm happy."
Is Uwe Boll really the worst film director in the world?IF YOU type the words "worst director in the world" into Google, the result will be numerous stories about Uwe Boll. This does not, of course, prove that he is the worst director in the world, just that he is in the news just now. If you'd done the search a few months ago, the chances are you'd have come up with stories about Ed Wood, the spectacularly inept director of Plan 9 From Outer Space, frequently voted the worst film of all time.
The problem with a question like this, of course, is the lack of clarity over what "worst" actually means. In these media savvy, ironic times, bad directors are often celebrated almost as much as good ones.
Ed Wood, for example, was clearly incompetent; then again, he made his films on a budget of virtually nothing, in a few days, would give roles to anyone who would give him money, and would cover up problems in the clumsiest way imaginable (most famously, he replaced Bela Lugosi, who died during the filming of Plan 9 From Outer Space, with a body double who was much taller and looked nothing like Lugosi).
As a result, when people refer to Ed Wood as being the worst director in the world, it tends to be meant affectionately. He may have been hopeless, but he was hugely enthusiastic about what he did – which is an endearing quality in an age when thousands of happy amateurs post home-made movies on YouTube, for the whole world to see. Ed Wood even had his biopic made by a very good director, Tim Burton, and one of the world's biggest movie stars, Johnny Depp. Whether this ever happens to Uwe Boll perhaps depends on how much goodwill exists towards him. He probably doesn't help his case by regularly referring to his critics – not to mention other film directors – as "f***ing retards".
He also has stiff competition – Paul WS Anderson (inset), for example, the man who took two much-loved film franchises, Alien and Predator, and combined them in the most cackhanded, brainless way imaginable with his Alien vs Predator movie. When Anderson is referred to as the worst film director with the world, it is generally said with real, unironic venom.
AE