Cynical Cinema

Uwe Boll does have a sense of humour.  It may not be a very good one, but it exists.  After all, he can laugh at himself to the point where he inserts himself into his movie Postal in a scene where he says his movies are funded with Nazi gold.  He then makes what he must think of as a joke about being aroused by children, and pays Verne Troyer his salary in Nazi gold teeth.  If the idea of any of this makes you laugh, then Postal is the movie for you.  Actually, no.  Postal is still not the movie for you, because I have just described the funniest scene in the film.  Postal is a movie for nobody.  No one should ever see this movie.  But I do have a few extra copies lying around.  The first four people to send me an email, at eric.bollman@ottawaradio.rogers.com will get a copy of this DVD.  But you would have to be a masochist to do so, and I will make fun of you if and when I receive that email.

The rest of the “humour” in this “comedy” comes from an effort to be as offensive as possible.  Nazi jokes, holocaust jokes, dead children jokes, Uwe-Boll-gets-shot-in-the-balls jokes.  At the very least Boll acknowledges that he is reviled in the critical community and attempts to make light of it, but his sense of humour really sucks.  It’s like he received and Offensive Joke Book from 1989 and threw it all up on screen.  “After I’m done with her, she’ll look like she’s been hit in the face with a mayonnaise truck”.  “I had to roll her in flour and look for the wet spot”.  Then there’s Dave Foley doing a very creepy full-frontal scene. 

The basic premise is that some kind of weird cult gets mixed up with a terrorist cell led by Osama Bin Laden, and a bunch of hot babes, Dave Foley, and Zack Ward pull out a bunch of guns and massacre men, women, children and terrorists.  The gun battle scenes really do look like they are straight out of the video game, which I guess is supposed to be the point.  But this video game must have been a really bad, really stupid, lowest common denominator type of game, if this is the movie that it spawned.  There is a scene where Uwe Boll fights the creator of the video game Postal, a man who is furious at what Boll has done to his game.  You kind of wish they had killed each other off and the movie had stopped at the 20-minute mark.

There is a special feature on the disc where we get to see Uwe Boll in the famous publicity stunt where he boxed his critics.  It’s virtually identical to the Raging Boll featurette on the “director’s cut” of Alone In The Dark.  And it’s still the most original thing on this DVD.  Postal came out August 26th from Peace Arch Entertainment.

First came House of the Dead.  Then Alone in the Dark.  Then Bloodrayne.  And now comes Uwe Boll’s absolute best film!  On the heels of several of the most putrid, stinky directorial efforts in the history of cinema, Boll has managed to create a film that is merely putrid and smelly.  I recognized just about every actor in this movie, which stuns me.  How is this guy, the most villified director working today, able to convince people to appear in his films?  Well, it provides a pretty decent barometer for actors.  Which ones actually care about their craft, and which ones are in it only for the money.  In The Name of the King features the following actors who are in it only for the money:  Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Lelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Kristanna Loken, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard and John Rhys-Davies.

 Why do you need a name actor (albeit not BIG-name actors) in every major role in a film?  When you have an inexplicable budget of 80 million dollars and no idea how to spend it.  What costs a lot of money?  Name actors.  Perfect.  So…we still have money left?  Good.  Let’s spend it on swooshy foggy special effects.  We can use that like forty times in the movie before it irritates people!  And since we have more than two hours to tell our story, but only six minutes of actual story, let’s have super-long battle scenes.  Each thirty-minute battle scene ought to have at least four thousand jump cuts, since it has been proven that movie audiences are unable to focus on a given image for more than one tenth of a second.  And they HATE knowing what’s happening in a battle.

Given the fact that one and a half hours of this two hour plus movie is taken up with sword fighting and battleaxes and creepy evil creatures killing innocent villagers and children, giving it a PG rating is bonkers.  By the standards of the MPAA, this movie does in fact fit into the PG area.  There is no real blood, and what blood there is is some kind of black smokey stuff.  Boll seems so intent on getting that rating, however, that the fighting is boring and sanitized and very confusing.  Which means three quarters of the movie is boring and sanitized and confusing.  Getting name actors at the very least means that you are getting fairly decent actors.  Which also means that when you cram them into this pile of garbage, it’s even more painful watching them struggle to make something interesting out of the horrible dialogue and idiotic set-pieces.  They literally have nothing to do, and no opportunity is given to them to make this any better.

The non-name actors, however, seem to think they are in a Shakespeare play.  They deliver their lines with stage-actor pomp and pretension, projecting their lines at some non-existent audience.  And at the beginning, the movie is written as though someone thought he was Shakespeare.  “Respect doth need be earned by the mass of men.  Mine be my birthright!”  What?  Mercifully, this ends fairly quickly and the movie forgets about it’s pretensions to the Bard by Minute Twenty-one.  Then the movie gets into painful, through-the-eyeball-into-the smoky-swirly shots, and slow-motion camera work that follows every object around as it is carried from  place to place. 

The movie is more than two hours long, and yet, plot points pop up incredibly abruptly.  You are the son of the king!  Wait…what?  Couldn’t there have been some kind of buildup there?  This leads to the film having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever.  Burt Reynolds seems to be channeling his lackluster performance from Striptease, there are multiple bizarre shots straight out of Tremors, there are ninjas.  Ninjas that do everything in a synchronized fashion, as though they are competing in the new Olympic demonstration event, synchronized ninja-ing.  The soundtrack music is awful and intrusive, there is a scene where Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds hold hands - in slow-motion!  Hundreds of “why did that guy do that”, or “what happened to that guy”, or “how did that guy get there” moments, and the grand finale involves a swordfight where the swords are controlled by the minds of magicians and - fight themselves!  There is nothing in this movie worth watching, nothing worth mentioning, and nothing that didn’t make me angry.  But it IS the best one Uwe Boll has ever done.

At the beginning of Alone in the Dark, there is the standard DVD warning. “Any reproduction, or broadcast of this movie for anything other than home viewing is punishable by fines and prison time and so forth”…what it should really say is that “any reproduction of this movie for reason other than home viewing will cause people to question your taste, reject you as a friend, and hold a grudge against you for their entire lifetimes.” Alliance Films releases Alone in the Dark - the director’s cut today, and it is one of the worst movies you will ever see. It is directed by Uwe Boll, who is considered by most internet pundits to be the worst director working in movies today, possibly worse even than the immortal Ed Wood. This is not true. Uwe Boll is NOT the worst director working today. That distinction belongs to the guy who directed Epic Movie and Date Movie, a guy whose name I can’t be bothered looking up because I don’t want to give him any more publicity. A case could be made for Michael Bay as well. You see, these are guys who do movies with big budgets for both production and promotion. And in doing so, they don’t care about the movie at all, they just care about the cash. So they make idiotic “jokes”, or blow a bunch of stuff up, and watch the cash come in.

Uwe Boll is a different breed. He loves movies. He loves making them. He is not about the cash. He just happens to be quite bad at making these films. He buys the rights to video games, and makes films based on those games. Terrible films that include Bloodrayne and House of the Dead. He somehow manages to get massive amounts of financing out in Eastern Europe somewhere, and with that financing he hires quasi-name actors to appear in these terrible crapfests. But at least you can feel his love for the movies when you watch. There is plenty of soul, just no craft or skill or ability. Alone in the Dark is no exception. This 2005 movie is getting it’s release on DVD today courtesy of Alliance Films, and it’s almost worth watching for how hilariously awful it is. Whether it’s Tara Reid attempting to wrap her head and her tongue around her super scientific dialogue, or the introduction by a narrator that is so long that the movie starts from a grinding halt, there is something charmingly amusing about anything so bad. Like that dog that keeps winning those “ugliest dog alive” contests.

The narrator intro is two minutes long and makes virtually no sense at all. It has something to do with an ancient civilization called the Akbani. Before long, Christian Slater shows up, in a cab, and some guy shows up to attack him like Spiderman. Everything alternates between hyper-kinetic jump cuts and slo-mo bullet’s eye view shots. The dialogue is on a par with a high school Screen Ed class project, and there is smashing glass everywhere. If there is a fruit stand to be knocked over or glass to be smashed, Boll will find it. I was watching with my 13-year-old stepson, and he began to count the glass smashes. We lost track after 16. There are some orphans (it’s always orphans, isn’t it?) Who have been programmed for…something…to help the…darkness? And light will fight dark, and the monsters will rise! All this amid lousy monsters, third-rate fake-smart Star Trek dialogue, and a constant voice-over narration from Christian Slater that seems to explain more about this Akbani legend, but only serves to muddy things further.

Slater is a former member of uber-governmental agency “713″. No idea what they do, but it sure sounds cool, eh? Paranormal research, and so forth I gather. I think they are meant to be a very well-funded, superpowerful version of the Ghostbusters. Stephen Dorff is the current commander in charge of that agency, and for some reason that is never explained, they hate each other. Oh, and Slater is…or was? Dating Tara Reid. Who is a scientist. They all come together when some non-descript monsters-of-darkness attack their museum. This scene is full of flickery, jump-cutting, mostly useless footage. All of a sudden this scene becomes a music video, set to some kind of heavy metal. And it gets worse. Throughout the movie, there are bizarre noises on the soundtrack. A guy puts on a coat, it has to make a whooshing noise, because it’s dramatic. There are whirs and whizzes and pops and rattles throughout the movie that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot (what little there is) or the scene itself!

Then the zombies show up. Then they go to the abandoned gold mine, which looks like the Chills For CHEO house, only worse. There are scenes taken directly from Aliens, tiny little underground Tremors worms, and army-monster battles that are NOT meant to be ironic. But that are. More crappy dialogue…and a bunch of walls made of skulls. Tiny little skulls, like bricks, only scarier! You never really understand what Christian Slater’s job actually IS - the back of the box explains more than the movie does. The back of the box also explains that this is the director’s cut. This is one of the few instances where that is not a good thing. Uwe Boll works fairly autonomously, which means that every time you see one of his movies, it is already the director’s cut. Maybe the idea is that people have seen this in theatres, hated it, and they might think that a Director’s Cut edition would somehow explain things and make them better. It doesn’t.

The one thing that makes this DVD worthwhile is a special feature called “Raging Boll”. It’s a little 15-minute piece on the director, who acknowledges the vitriol that is spewed against him in the internet and around the world. It talks about the boxing matches he has had against his detractors and critics, in a sort of bizarre publicity stunt. It shows that he really is just a man in love with making movies. The fact that he likes and enjoys his own movies merely shows that he is a little deluded when it comes to the appraisal of quality, but it certainly is a fun ride. And I would like to state, for the record, that if Uwe Boll reads this on the internet and decides that he would like to fight me also, I am in. If only Michael Bay would do the same.