What is the deal with Uwe Boll?

To make a truly great movie you need to have someone with a strong vision that will see that vision through. Good adaptations aren’t impossible. Examples of this would be American Psycho or Fight Club, movies based on novels which understand what makes their source material work and what about them works in other media.

 

It is hard to make a good adaptation. What works in one media doesn’t necessarily work in a different media. This is about the devil of video game movies, Uwe Boll.

 

The first knock against video game movies is that they are almost always adapting popular products into content. Very few are out there trying to turn Super Mario Bros into cinema. Nearly all of them are just trying to wring a few bucks out of merchendising.

 

And one devious monster was out there trying to turn popular product into tax breaks. But I do need to set the stage.

 

Super Mario Bros was the first video game adaptation in movie form. This was a weird situation where someone was actually trying. The directors had a strong idea for a movie and they squeezed Super Mario into the shape, regardless of how it fit. It was a bleak cyberpunk post-apocalyptic story about plumbers facing off against dinosaur Donald Trump. It is both interesting and kinda good, but because it was such a twisted take on Mario it is not remembered fondly.

 

Most of the other video game movies for the first decade were utterly forgettable; games like Mortal Kombat with balderized violence, Tomb Raider with mediocre action scenes, or Street Fighter which was pulled in like five different merchendising directions and the only enjoyable bit is watching Raul Julia ham it the fuck up as M. Bison. They were essentially an attempt to squeeze more money out of the hands of teenagers without any real intention toward making them any good.

 

Wing Commander is probably the next most interesting artifact, because it was directed by the creator of the original video game itself. This was a relatively obscure PC game compared to the merchandising juggernauts of Nintendo, Sega and the various arcade companies. Ultimately it is a curiocity because, well, just because you could direct the cheesy FMV cut scenes in a PC game doesn’t mean you know how to direct a feature motion picture.

 

But as bad as it was at least that game designer wasn’t Uwe Boll.

 

Uwe Boll was the most reviled figure of the late 2000’s internet. He was as hated as Chuck Norris was beloved. He was the movie director responsible for House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne, all legendarily awful movies. I think all of these games could have been adapted into halfway decent films. House of the Dead was a video game where you shoot guns at zombies. Any competently made zombie movie would adapt that well enough, though that obviously has a low upper bounds for how good it could possibly be. Alone in the Dark was a more niche title, a Lovecraftian horror adventure game. Out of the three I think this has the most potential for making a serious horror movie that really delves into the psychological and cosmic horror. Bloodrayne would be a little more difficult but doable. Bloodrayne was a half dracula who killed full draculas, during the mid twentieth century leading up to WW2. This would obviously be more difficult, requiring more elaborate sets and special effects. I could conceivably see this making a decent B movie in exactly the right circumstances.

 

And being some kind of weird scam for Uwe Boll to fleece the German government was not that circumstance.

 

They’re filmed like a amateur music video. The actors are rushed through their lines without proper prep, not that that would help too much with Uwe Boll himself writing the scripts. He actually tends to have pretty decent actors in his movies, look at the cast list of BloodRayne and look in shock and horror. The special effects are cheap CGI if you’re lucky. The sets are whatever that can be found that more or less fits the vibe, or whatever at all if there isn’t enough time. The staging and editing borders on incomprehensible.

 

I’ve ended up talking a lot about bad movies here. I am a subject matter expert. There are the kinds of movies that are so-bad-they’re good, such as say Hard Rock Zombies, and a lot of bad movies can be a lot of fun. Uwe Boll movies are more embarassing and tedious to watch. I don’t know how you make giant action scenes with tons of zombies boring or giant battles between magic draculas tedious but Uwe Boll found a way. If they were riffed by MST3K or RiffTrax these would still be basically unwatchable.

 

It is impressive that Boll managed to fund these movies at all. In those dark early internet days it was accepted wisdom that Boll made extensive use of a German tax loophole that allowed him to make expensive horrible movies that never turned a profit and this would somehow benefit the investors in his films in some arcane way I don’t fully understand. The internet didn’t’ really understand it either, but one thing to keep in mind is that Germany did in fact spend money on the arts to bolster the creation of media by Germany companies.

 

A more likely scenario is that this was the age of slop DVDs. These movies didn’t’ make shit at the box office, but home media had suddenly become a booming business, and schlocky so-bad-it’s-good movies were one of the prime genres of film back then.

 

I don’t remember the fandom for House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne being particualrly strong, but the hatred for these movies was all over the goddamn internet in the mid 2000’s. In that time internet culture was sequestered across myriad forums, most of which were some form of micmicry of Something Awful. Something Awful was a blog started by Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, then a writer for Gamespy who injected his coverage of the Quake series of games with strange characters and bizarre comedy. He spun this off into it’s own website and forum, and this became the source of internet culture.

 

If you saw a funny image on the internet before 2010 then almost certainly it was made by one of the “goons” on Something Awful. SA’s mutual hatred of Uwe Boll was no different than the rest of the internet.

 

Uwe Boll is one of the most prolific directors I can think of. He has directed as many as four movies in a single year. He had been at it for a very long time, even by the time he started on the video game movies. But they must have made him good money because that dominated his output through the 2000’s. His next few movies were based on Dungeon Siege (an obscure computer RPG), a sequel to BloodRayne and Postal.

 

Postal and Uwe Boll is kind of a match made in heaven. Postal is a game series made up of transgressive humor and mass shootings, two of Boll’s favorite themes. You can piss on anything, you can use cats as silencers, you fight with al-Qaeda for some reason. It both makes perfect sense and also why the hell would you do that? In the movie The Postal Dude (yes, that is the main character’s name) gets into a conflict with Osama Bin Laden over stuffed toys. I think the real problem with the movie is that it’s an intentional attempt at comedy from someone whose idea of a joke is 9/11. Literally, that’s the joke that starts the movie off, I didn’t make that up. There’s nothing harder and more embarrassing to watch than a failed attempt at a joke. An intentional turn toward comedy for a bad director is a death knell.

 

As part of the marketing campaign for the movie Uwe Boll invited critics from his previous movies to an exhibition boxing match. He had rules about who he would allow but then completely ignored them and allowed representatives of the various websites that hated on him to come box, instead of the specific writers who had wronged him. Most famous among those illustrious people at the time was Lowtax.

 

I won’t belabor the point. Uwe Boll was a long time amateur boxer and all the website representatives were “tomato cans,” the kind of goofballs that boxers fight to fill out their score card with victories. Uwe Boll clobbered the shit out of them. Lowtax claimed that he had been told this was just a publicity stunt and in good fun, but then Boll took it deadly serious and was out for revenge on the behalf of his unfairly maligned films.

 

Is Uwe Boll a violent maniac? He’s made a lot of movies and they tend to have a lot of violence in them. His first attempt to break into the North American film scene was in 2000 with a movie called Sanctimony that was little more than an American Psycho mockbuster. Soon afterward he made Heart of America, a movie about a school shooting. After his video game period he directed three movies in the Rampage series, not the kaiju video games, actually, a movie series about a mass shooter who keeps doing larger and more improbable mass shootings. He also made a movie called Assault on Wall Street about an assault on Wall Street. I can’t look into his soul.

 

Although honestly setting up an elaborate trap to beat up his critics is way more troubling than directing like a half dozen movies about mass shooters.

 

After the video game movie period he moved on from traditional funding mechanisms and began to attempt to crowdfund his movies, but being such a reviled figure in cinema he didn’t see much success. He completely failed to fund a sequel to Postal (a sequel would be an impressive feat because, spoilers, the movie ends with George W. Bush and his buddy Osama bin Laden nuking the entire world and killing everyone for some reason, teehee, isn’t that transgressive and funny?). It is not nearly as funny as it sounds.

 

It’s hard to tell what I should actually include, because he still made a shitload of movies through the first half of the 2010’s. He made BloodRayne 3 as well as a parody of BloodRayne 3 called Blubberella where the only joke is “what if BloodRayne was fat?” He also released a movie called Auschwitz that same year. Thankfully it was actually about Auschwitz being bad, but especially with his more recent output you have cause to worry.

 

Most of what he produced was exploitative slop, horror movies and “dramas” turning mass shootings into pornographies of violence. From his output I think he probably enjoys making horror films, they make up the biggest chunk of his filmography, but those are commercial and fun. There are films where you get the impression that he was actually trying and the video game movies were the the loss leader to give him a chance to make a gritty war movie about Darfur or Auschwitz. Darfur won best international film at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2009. That seems to be a quarterly film event in NYC, so not exactly prestigious, but not an award created by Boll for Boll.

 

Otherwise his films have been perpetual presences in the Golden Raspberry Awards.

 

After 2016 he retired to run a restaurant. By all accounts this was an actually good restaurant. He hired a good chef. It got good reviews. So it’s a happy ending. No need to worry about any new movies Uwe Boll directs, right? The restaurant went out of business in 2020.

 

Around this time Lowtax was experiencing a critical reappraisal of his life and impact on the world. Details of his relationships with his ex-wife and current wife came out. The ultimate result of this was that he sold Something Awful to a forums user then blew the money to keep it out of the hands of his wife and children and died by suicide.

 

One of the weirder side effects of this was that it became a meme that actually Uwe Boll was a hero to beating the shit out of Lowtax and that he deserved to get clobbered. Somewhere, somehow, Uwe Boll heard that he was being presented in a positive light. He would not let that stand.

 

After the collapse of his restaurant Uwe Boll set out to set the record straight. His return to directing was a “documentary” Hamau (Deutschland im Winter – Part 1). This was about a mass shooter in Germany. I’m not going to watch this one. The families of the victims didn’t want it made and it doesn’t seem to be respectful to the gravity of an event such as this. It sounds like basically an exploitation film that reads off a mass shooter’s manifesto to make some kind of important point about something or other. Ultimately that exact scenario is why these mass shooters write manifestos, so that credulous fools will advertise them, so they can become a 4chan saint, so they can put an exclamation point on their worthless lives and have something people will actually remember them by.

 

So Uwe Boll is back at it. He made a couple other films I am not going to bother with. The two films I want to highlight are his two most recent, at time of writing (he has two more films in post-production).

 

A lot of the discourse about Citizen Vigilante is about how Uwe Boll has gone full Nazi now. That seems pretty easy to defend in light of Hamau and Citizen Vigilante. I actually think that Uwe Boll doesn’t have any coherent politics, but he’s a canny showman. And the main thing that makes me think that is the movie he made the year before: Run.

 

Run is a white savior movie about African refugees trying to escape the horror of their lives and live in safety in Europe. We start off with refugees on a boat being carried across the Mediterranean by a couple Arab coyotes. There’s a fight on the boat and one of the refugees is stabbed, which causes one of the coyotes some level of horror (the coyote that did the stabbing doesn’t seem to care).

 

They reach a beach in Italy. We are introduced to the cast. There’s a put upon Italian cop who wants to do the right thing. There’s a family of MAGA chuds that operate a failing boat tour business who blame the refugees for their business’ failure. There’s also Amanda Plumber as an American boomer who wants to save all the refugees.

 

The refugees make it to shore and scatter to escape the police. Most of them fail and are apprehended and brought to a refugee processing center that doesn’t have enough resources to deal with them all. One heavily pregnant lady manages to escape, eventually running into Amanda Plumber, who attempts to hide her and keep her safe. She attempts to bring the refugee to one of her family members who works at a restaurant in the area but there’s an accident and the refugee gets arrested by the put upon brave good nice well meaning police officer. I was pretty shocked when the refugees cousin showed up and didn’t immediately flip out, but immediately they begin trying to figure out a way to free the refugee. There’s a bunch of little vignettes with other refugees, the coyote that felt guilty that the other coyote stabbed a dude, and a guy who hid from the police in a closet.

 

The guy who hid in the closet gets outed and takes someone hostage to try and avoid getting arrested. Then the MAGA chud’s daughter shoots him with a speargun for some reason and while dying he accidentally slits the hostage’s throat. This leads to the MAGA chud’s daughter getting arrested. That makes the MAGA chud go ballistic. He proceeds to do a terrorist attack on the immigrant center for some reason? It’s portrayed as bad. The MAGA chud is portrayed as deranged and horrible and the refugees as sympathetic.

 

It feels like a maudlin crying clown white guilt movie punctuated with brief moments of an exploitation movie. The tone is weird. The little vignettes that aren’t directly tied in to the main story don’t really go anywhere. They’re just little scenes that feel strangely isolated. There’s a sub plot where the murderous coyote tries to get the guilty coyote to join a criminal gang and at first he balks but then months he just kinda shrugs and goes “whatever, fine.” Uwe Boll’s approach to shooting action is normally very bad but the fast cuts and bad pacing kinda works for an event that is supposed to be chaotic and traumatic. It’s a bad movie but it gives the impression of Uwe Boll actually trying.

 

And that brings us to Citizen Vigilante. It stars Armie Hammer, who was canceled for domestic abuse and cannibalism fetish (not vore, that’s goofy and funny, cannibalism fetish is a sub-type of sado-masochism and uh, a little bit grim, let’s say. I don’t kink shame much but damn!). It fits cleanly into Uwe Boll’s milieu. It’s a filthy, badly constructed exploitation film about a mass murdering landlord who wanders around, is an asshole, murders Muslims, police and judges. He’s The Postal Dude but a little more racist. He’s the main character from the Rampage series but less politically invested. It is kind of implicitly drawing on the current racist mania against Muslims in Europe. It pretty much ends with Armie Hammer telling the interpol agent who has been tracking him to post his manifesto or something. The way it’s written isn’t super clear, and that’s one of the things that makes me think this is a more cynical move by Boll to try and drum up a far right audience.

 

Beyond the content, the construction of the film is generally pretty bad. Uwe Boll is a bad action director. This can work in extremely specific contexts but in a movie where a cool guy is supposed to be doing cool murders it’s mostly just incomprehensible and hard to follow.

 

I think the most likely interpretation of events is that Uwe Boll is scamming the Nazis into watching his movies, and I think that’s hilarious. Any artist is going to want to find an audience for their art. The fash have to pretend to love this awful, poorly constructed movie is a titan of cinematic genius. I really want to trick them into watching Run somehow.

 

Most likely Uwe Boll will try to chase down as much of an audience off this shit as he can and that’s unfortunate. As I said above, I don’t think Uwe Boll has coherent politics, neither the white guilt liberal nor the gibbering maniac fascist. He is a consummate edgelord and as time has gone on that has become more right wing coded. If one side will keep his belly full, well, I expect he’ll figure out what side his bread is buttered on. I hope I’m wrong. But also I would love to see Uwe Boll bilking these idiots out of everything they own.

 

Sources

Man, I’ve been on the internet since the 90’s. My recollections of Boll and Lowtax are my own.

 

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/uwe-boll-and-the-german-tax-code/

 

https://letterboxd.com/gamegeek/film/hanau-germany-in-winter/