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.

Gnome Alone (2015)

There are a few homes in the movie landscape for actors who are on the last legs of their careers, and actors who never really had careers.  Lifetime and Hallmark will always take in actors whose stardom has faded.  SyFy and The Asylum will do the same.  Then there is low budget horror in general, where you can find pretty much anyone you can think of.  If you took any actor who had one famous role, then disappeared off the face of the Earth, chances are good that they ended up in low budget horror.

One such actor is Verne Troyer who was in a 2015 horror movie called Gnome Alone.  A long time ago, a witch stole some gold coins from a leprechaun (Travis Eberhard).  The leprechaun branded the witch for her misdeeds.  To get revenge for the branding, the witch summoned a gnome (Verne Troyer).  Now in the present day, the gnome is tied to any person with that brand on them.  It will kill anyone that the person feels bad about.  A woman named Zoe (Kerry Knuppe) ends up with the brand and her life is thrown upside down because of her new guardian.  If you want the basic story without all of that background, it is that there is a gnome killing people.

Like any other movie I’ve watched for this blog, Gnome Alone had some wacky moments that you would only find in a movie of this caliber.  The movie isn’t high art of any sort.  It’s a low budget horror flick that has problems that other low budget horror movies have, while being uniquely its own.  It has moments within it that you wouldn’t find in most mainstream movies.  I feel that it is my duty to point these things out for you so that you can make the decision for yourself about whether or not to watch this movie.  So, without stumbling over my words and thoughts any longer, I will give you five things that make Gnome Alone into the movie that it is.

The Casting

In the introduction to this post, I mentioned actors whose stardom was rather short lived.  Two such actors appear in Gnome Alone.  The first, and the biggest star of the movie, is Verne Troyer.  The guy is known primarily as Mini-Me.  He was the miniature version of Dr. Evil in the sequels to Austin Powers.  Outside of that, he was in The Love Guru, and nothing else that is memorable.  Gnome Alone is a starring role for Verne Troyer, and one that he takes every opportunity to relish in.

The other actor of note in the movie is an actor named Ross Bagley.  You might not recognize the name.  Surely you’ll know who I’m talking about when I tell you he was in Independence Day.  No?  He was the kid.  He was also Nicky in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.  And he played Buckwheat in the 1994 film version of The Little Rascals.  Ross Bagley was a child actor prominent in the mid-1990s.  He hasn’t really done much since then, with Gnome Alone being his first film since Independence Day and one of the only two acting jobs he has had since a 2004 episode of Judging Amy.  His star is long faded.

The Opening Story

Gnome Alone begins with a ten minute segment telling the story of what happened with the leprechaun in the past.  It shows the witch taking the leprechaun’s gold.  It shows the witch being branded.  And it shows the witch summoning the gnome in order to get some sort of revenge.  That summoning occurs while two naked women sort of wrestle and sort of make out while standing in a muddy pond.  You know, start your movie off with some good old fashioned dirty fun.  That will surely keep the guys watching the movie during the introduction.

The opening to Gnome Alone suffers from the same problem that many movies with this kind of introduction suffer from.  A few things are shown, but most of this part of the story is told.  It is much more interesting for an audience to be shown an unfolding story than to be told what happened.  When you don’t get to experience it happening before your eyes, you disconnect from it.  You have no investment in it because it is essentially a legend.  It is a story within itself.  The writer felt the need to tell the story without getting into the story.  It is the difference between book summaries and the actual books.  It’s not the same, will never feel the same, and makes for a less enjoyable journey.

The Rampant Female Sexuality

There are a lot of scenes in Gnome Alone that involve the sexuality of women, both with men and other women.  The opening sequence, as I have already stated, featured two naked, mud covered women.  It was completely unnecessary to the story of the movie.  The two women could have been excised completely and not changed the movie in any way whatsoever.  It was a little bit of titillation added in to get the male viewers hooked in the movie.  Or it was the director getting his rocks off because he wanted to see two naked women in front of him.

Later in the movie, there is a professor at the college who takes sexual advantage of her students.  She’ll call the students to her office then start feeling them up in the hopes of getting sex from them.  It’s wrong in many ways and the professor ends up dying because of these actions.  We get to see her make out with one of her students and we get to see her get denied the sexual gratification of another.  The thing that makes these scenes acceptable is that they factor into the story.  They aren’t as superfluous as the gnome summoning scene that didn’t need the women.

The final third of Gnome Alone features some more sexually influenced scenes.  The first is the death of two characters who are about to have sex.  The man goes to his bedroom, which is basically a sex dungeon, to get a toy and please the woman he left tied up in bed.  He ends up being beaten with a dildo and electrocuted before the gnome heads off to kill the woman.  I’ll get back to that in a second.  The final sexual moment in the movie is when Zoe retaliates against her abusive stepfather.  This ends up involving Zoe and her mother hanging out in the living room in nothing but their underwear.  I’ll get to that in a few minutes too.

The Laugh

I brought up the scene in which the man is killed with a dildo and electrocution.  What about the other half of that, where the woman is killed?  The gnome showed up while she was tied to the bed and blindfolded, and began frisking her.  It got to the point where the gnome gave the woman an orgasm before taking off her blindfold.  She freaked out and screamed while he scalped her and played with her brains.  Then she died.

What followed her death was one of the most ridiculous things I have witnessed in a movie in a long time.  As she was dying, the gnome complained about how she wasn’t dying.  When she finally did pass on, he mercilessly laughed for about fifteen seconds.  He pointed his finger at her and giggled.  He said how she was dead and he kept laughing.  It was a very strange fifteen seconds of laughter at the expense of a now dead person.  All I could do was sit and watch with my mouth agape.  As I did with the ending of the movie.

The Ending

Yes, there will be spoilers in this portion of the post.  Gnome Alone ends with Zoe murdering her abusive step father after he attempts to have sex with her.  Well, that’s not the ending.  There’s still one scene after it.  But I consider this the ending.  When the police show up to the crime scene that is Zoe’s house, she and her mother are in their underwear.  Zoe stands up, holding the severed head of her step father.  The imagery is solid, yet it’s another instance of the movie sexualizing the material more than it needs to.  The sexuality adds nothing to the movie except for eye candy.

The ending also involves no resolution to the problem that the movie set up.  Absolutely zero resolution.  The gnome never goes away.  Zoe gets shot numerous times, survives, and the gnome is still there.  The final moment of the entire movie is the gnome about to fight with the leprechaun.  So, not only did it not resolve anything, the movie also started a final fight that it never followed through on.  The movie has no real ending, even though the credits start.

Gnome Alone is a crazy movie.  I’ve only scratched the surface through this post.  It brings some faded stars back into the limelight for a low budget horror slashfest.  It doesn’t stand out as a great movie, but it is semi-entertaining at least.  There are interesting moments that are worth watching.  The movie as a whole isn’t.  There are many, much better things that you could spend your time on than this movie.

You should spend your time with these notes:

• Gnome Alone was suggested by @Mimekiller, who also suggested Gymkata.
• Kerry Knuppe played Zoe in Gnome Alone.  She was also in a movie called The Craigslist Killer, which I watched a long time ago.
• Have you seen Gnome Alone?  What did you think about it?  What do you think about actors going into low budget horror?  Use the comments section below to talk about this stuff.
• Want to suggest a movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movies?  Suggest away in the comments or on my Twitter page.
• Next week’s movie is a movie called Alone in the Dark.  It was directed by Uwe Boll, and it was based on a video game.  So I’m basically going to be reliving the House of the Dead week.  I’ll let you in on my experience next week.