Uwe Boll and Alone in the Dark (2005)

There are certain directors that are on nearly everyone’s lists of their favourite directors.  These are your Spielbergs and Hitchcocks.  They’re your Tarantinos and Finchers.  These are the directors that inspired film fans to be film fans and inspired filmmakers to be filmmakers.  The directors put out classic after classic and put their stamp on the movie landscape in an undeniable way.  It is with good reason that when people discuss movies, these same directors always pop up.  Can you imagine a world without Martin Scorsese?  That would be a world without Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Wolf of Wall Street, or Goodfellas.  We would lose out on a good chunk of filmmaking that has helped lead the way for other artists to do other great work.  That is why these people are beloved.

But with the good comes the bad.  That’s the reason I write these posts every week.  You can’t only have a landscape of good.  You need mistakes in order to learn.  Great work can inspire.  Terrible work can teach.  As with good directors, everyone has their list of directors that they dislike.  Most of the time, these are big name directors who usually take on studio films and don’t really put any originality or artistry into what they do.  You get people naming directors like McG, Brett Ratner, and John Moore.  It essentially boils down to people not liking how the directors handled beloved franchises, I think.  McG made Terminator Salvation and the Charlie’s Angels movies.  Brett Ratner made Red Dragon and X-Men: The Last Stand.  John Moore made The Omen and A Good Day to Die Hard.  These are all studio franchises in which they made lesser entries.

One name that frequently comes up, yet isn’t someone in the studio system making big tent pole franchise films, is Uwe Boll.  The guy doesn’t make the blockbuster movies that get released every summer into thousands of theaters.  Only five of his 30 movies are listed on Box Office Mojo as having come out in theaters, with four of those five being released in under 2000 theaters.  The most recent of the five, 2008’s Postal was only in 13 theaters across North America.  That’s the level of filmmaking we’re working with here.  Uwe Boll is not a blockbuster director.  But his name comes up whenever people are talking about bad directors.

There are a few reasons for that.  First and foremost is that his movies tend to be bad.  From House of the Dead to Blackwoods to Alone in the Dark, Uwe Boll’s name is synonymous with bad filmmaking.  I mean, I could point out a lot of things in Alone in the Dark that prove that he’s not the best director.  The action scenes are terribly cut.  They have a sense of what is going on, but look bad enough to make you sick to your stomach.  The acting is over the top to the point where it can’t be taken seriously.  Not to mention there are miscast characters, such as Tara Reid unconvincingly playing the assistant curator to a museum.

The second reason that Uwe Boll comes up in discussions about bad movie directors is because a large amount of his filmography revolves around video game movies.  Movies based on video games have rarely found any critical success.  Most of the time, the movies are subpar and get remembered for how they weren’t able to adapt a video game to film.  The two mediums tell stories in such different ways that there is a real difficulty in translating one to the other.  Since Uwe Boll delves into the video game well so often when making movies, the stigma that either of them has goes hand-in-hand.

A more prominent factor in the infamous notoriety of Uwe Boll is his attitude.  The guy is filled with hate for the people that dislike his work.  He is seething with it, ready to lash out at anyone who does not support his every move.  The vitriol comes out in big swathes and people pick it up and run with it.  Why?  Because how angry he gets is humorous most of the time.  It’s an over-the-top rage that few other people seem to have, especially when it comes to criticism.  To be fair, there isn’t much constructive criticism when it comes to Boll’s work.  It mostly boils down to people outright disliking his movies and offering no option other than “stop.”  That could get tiresome.  But Uwe Boll outdoes any of the criticism he gets with the way he handles it.

An example of his outbursts comes from the year 2006.  This was the year where Uwe Boll had taken enough crap from critics and challenged them to boxing matches.  That’s right.  Uwe Boll actually fought some of the critics who disliked his work.  He went up against five different critics in a boxing ring and had some fisticuffs.  The end result was that Uwe Boll won all five matches.  None of the critics believed that Boll was actually going to fight them.  It was an apparent public relations event.  But Uwe Boll started beating on them and they all went down.  He was fighting for his credibility as a filmmaker, as little sense as boxing makes in relation to his movies.

The next example comes from 2008.  This time, things were a little less physical, and a little more mocking movie fans.  Instead of challenging critics to a fight, Uwe Boll decided that he would allow a petition for him to stop being a director.  If the petition could reach one million signatures, he would no longer direct movies.  He let everyone know that he was doing this.  The challenge was set for the public.  After three years and a few hundred thousand signatures, Boll proclaimed that he won and would not be ending his directing career.  It was taking too long for the signatures to reach a million.

Another, more recent outburst from the man known to go overboard when defending his craft happened earlier this year.  Crowdfunding has become a big talking point when it comes to making movies.  Movies such as Wish I Was Here and Veronica Mars have found success by asking fans to donate a little bit of money to them.  Uwe Boll decided to try crowdfunding, specifically through the website Kickstarter, to fund one of his movies.  The movie would be Rampage 3, a movie about a man on a rampage.  The campaign didn’t succeed so Uwe Boll put up a video on YouTube titled “fuck you all.”  In the video, he quickly discussed how it was his third failed crowdfunding campaign then continued by blaming crowdfunding as an institution, claiming it was a way for people to make a quick buck off of his movies.  Then he complained about other crowdfunded movies and the Marvel movies.  It was a fit of anger from a man hoping to make a movie about a man with a fit of anger.

Uwe Boll is an interesting man to watch and read about.  He has directed a lot of movies with many of them being less than stellar additions to the film landscape.  Yet there is something in him that will defend each movie he makes, if defending them kills him.  He will not back down from what he believes and he will fight anyone who doesn’t share his high opinion of his movies.  The man is the most entertaining kind of nuts.

Is it Uwe Boll’s personality that makes him so popular when it comes to thinking of the worst directors in the business?  Is it the lack of quality in the movies he makes?  Is it his never-ending association with the video game movie industry?  It would be easy to say that the distaste for him comes from a mixture of all three of those qualities.  Uwe Boll is a unicorn.  He is one of a kind.  Love him or hate him (mostly hate him), he does make things interesting.

Perhaps not as interesting, here are some notes:

• Alone in the Dark was suggested by @JaimeBurchardt.
• Uwe Boll has directed two other movies that I have featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies: House of the Dead and Blackwoods.
• Ona Grauer was in Alone in the Dark.  She was also in House of the Dead.
• Sean Campbell and Sarah Deakins were both in Alone in the Dark and Blackwoods.
• Will Sanderson has been in all three movies: House of the Dead, Blackwoods, and Alone in the Dark.
• Matthew Walker was in Blackwoods, Alone in the Dark, and New Year’s Eve.
• Mike Dopud made his third appearance in the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Alone in the Dark.  He was previously in Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever and SkinTrade.
• John Fallon has returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Alone in the Dark.  His first appearance was in Death Race.
• Finally, there is Darren Shahlavi.  He previously appeared in The Marine 3: Homefront.
• Have you seen Alone in the Dark?  What are your thoughts about Uwe Boll?  Did you know about how crazy he is?  Use the comments section below if you want to talk about anything.
• The comments section is also a place for you to recommend movies for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.  If you don’t want to suggest there, you could always use my Twitter timeline.
• Next week’s bad movie is going to be Die Another Day, just in time for the release of Spectre.  James Bond hasn’t been featured on the Sunday “Bad” Movies until now, so this is the start.  Madonna, invisible car, ice castle… This is going to be an interesting rewatch.  See you next week.