He has been a figure of enduring charm since the early days of the internet. He deserved contempt, ridicule and even involuntary respect. It is the answer to the question “What if Ed Wood was an angry German who beat people with his fists?” From Bloodrain to Mail, his films are widely known for their low quality, poor taste and simply incomprehensible performance. There are many lousy directors, but there is only one Uwe Boll.
Part of what makes Uwe Boll such an intriguing figure is that despite what you’re about to learn about him might suggest, there’s more to him than meets the eye. Born in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (pronounced “oo-veh” as his name), he holds a Ph.D. in literature, and one critic who interviewed Ball described him as “a man who absolutely adores cinema, knows its history and truly lives in what he does”. This, to put it mildly, is not the impression that you get from watching his films.
“I hate video games!”
For a long time, everyone knew that any attempt to film a video game was doomed to failure. The success of films such as Detective Pikachuas well as upcoming Movie Super Mario Bros.change that somewhat, but the stigma has been around for as long as there have been video game movies, and it’s largely Uwe Boll’s fault.
house of the dead. Alone in the dark. Bloodrain. In the name of the king. Mail. Big difference. In the 2000s, it seemed that nothing could stop Ball from making terrible films based on video game franchises: not terrible box office performance, not scathing critical reviews, not a crowd of angry gamers outraged by his indifference to the source material. These films were terrible, but for the most part they were terrible in this particularly dull style of the mid-noughties: ordinary and ugly, only occasionally bizarre castings (Tara Reid like a brilliant scientist Alone in the dark) or knowing the stan(Ben Kingsley have the ball in Bloodrain) to revive the situation.
Ball took these films far beyond the point at which they made any sense. A German tax loophole (since closed) meant he could make money even on a flop, but soon even that had its limits. Petitions were circulated demanding that he be banned from making films; in golden raspberry gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award; when he claimed the rights to World of Warcraft movie, Blizzard stated, “We won’t be selling the rights to the movie, not to you… especially to you.” Those more conspiratorially inclined began to wonder if this was really Ball’s way of getting revenge on video games as an art form that Ball had mocked in Mail, where he played a Nazi pedophile amusement park owner who yelled “I hate video games!” after being shot in the dick. (This more or less sums up everything you need to know about Mail.)
Uwe Originals
Ball’s original films usually fall on the action-horror-thriller continuum, with a lot of edgy violence and socio-political button-pressing - some of them focused on plot (as is the case with Darfur and Wall Street attack), some of them are extraneous (for example, Seed, a creepy torture porn that features industrial animals being abused in the opening credits for reasons only Ball can understand). Most of these films are not very good and some are just nauseating. Take Auschwitz, which pretended to show the horrors of the Holocaust to a new generation, but in fact fell into rough exploitation. However, there is something oddly compelling about his dark, low-budget world, and since the beginning of his career, he has always managed to find interesting actors (such as the school shooting drama). Heart of Americawhich included a young Elisabeth Moss).
And then there is Rampage, which, after its release in 2009, was met with surprise and bewilderment: Uwe Boll made a good film! Not necessary a great the movie, of course, but good one: a surprisingly tense, nasty action thriller about a nihilistic mass murderer and his efforts to reduce the Earth’s population. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, and his politics are horribly outdated, but the craft is solid and the killings are horrendous (it only takes one bite in a bingo room to elicit dizzying, incredulous laughter). It’s like a deal. -bin S. Craig Zahlerand there are worse things for cinema.
Boxing, Bay and Bauhaus
Perhaps more than his films, Ball is known for his, shall we say, belligerent attitude towards critics. The most famous incident happened in 2006 when Ball, after telling his critics to “get it right or shut up”, challenged them to a series of real damn boxing matches. The fact that Ball beat all five of his opponents didn’t reflect as well on him as he might have thought, given that Ball was significantly larger than his opponents; as was the fact that he refused to fight other critics such as Sean “Shonbaby” Reilly, who suited him both in size and combat experience.
To draw attention to MailBall posted a video in which, among other things, he called Michael Bay and Eli Roth “damn retarded.” This brought him a new round of condemnation, because even in the borderline 2007s it was impossible to just say such things. Bay who just released the first transformers film, reacted with confusion and annoyance, making it one of the few times Michael Bay was sensible, level-headed half confrontational.
However, all this has a happy ending. In recent years, Ball has moved away from filmmaking (although he has also announced a comeback), focusing instead on a career as a restaurateur, in which he appears to be much better at it. His first restaurant, Bauhaus, has been named one of the best restaurants in Canada, and he plans to expand his culinary empire soon… and he didn’t even have to get into any fights to make it happen.
Source: Collider
