Blubberella (2011)

No discussion can be had about bad movies without certain names coming up.  Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, and Lloyd Kaufman are mentioned whenever people talk about bad movies.  Another name that frequently appears is Uwe Boll.  The guy is known for bad movies.  He once promoted a petition to have him stop directing movies, because people hate how bad they are.  That didn’t stop him from pumping them out, though.

This week’s movie, Blubberella is the fourth movie directed by Uwe Boll that I’ve covered, and it is the most Uwe Boll a movie could be.  A half vampire, half human woman named Blubberella (Lindsay Hollister) joined a group of German rebels led by Nathaniel Gregor (Brendan Fletcher) and his gay sidekick Vadge (Willam Belli).  They worked together to take down Nazis, including The Commandant (Michael Paré), The Lieutenant (Steffen Mennekes), and Doctor Mangler (Clint Howard), who were creating an army of vampires.  Hitler (Uwe Boll) also made an appearance.

Being an Uwe Boll movie, you have to expect insanity and bad filmmaking.  However, Blubberella wasn’t any Uwe Boll movie.  It was an original concept.  It wasn’t based on a video game.  Blubberella was an action comedy written by Uwe Boll.  This means that the humour in the movie came from Boll’s comedic sensibilities.  If you know anything about the man (which you should since I wrote a whole post about him), you will know that he seems insane.  The comedy in Blubberella was as insane as he is.

What I’m getting at here is that I’m going to write post where I highlight the crazy things that happened in the movie.  It’s the perfect kind of post for Blubberella.  There was more than enough in the movie to sustain an entire post’s length.  If you had walked in on me watching Blubberella, you would have thought there was something wrong with my face.  I would have been sitting here, staring at the movie, with my jaw on the floor.  When you asked me a question, I would have turned to you and remained silent with my mouth agape.  That’s what this movie did to me.  It made me unable to speak because I was stunned.  Here’s why.

Blubberella’s Introduction

Blubberella was introduced through voiceover while she prepared for her day.  It started with Blubberella waking up and jumping out of bed.  There were a bunch of dildos on the bed when the sheets were thrown off.  That didn’t matter.  That was an unfunny visual gag, but it was immediately surpassed by the freeze frame title card for the character.  The title card set up who she was in six words.  “Half human, half vampire, mostly dough.”  You know, because she’s fat.  That’s what most of the movie was.  Jokes like that.

The Setting

Let’s ignore for a second the bad “Jew-y part of town” joke in the setting title card.  The movie was set in 1940 Germany, during Hitler’s reign.  This was a World War II movie, without any real war or battle scenes.  Although the movie was set in 1940 Germany, there were many modern details.

The opening of the movie had Blubberella searching for love on the internet, using a laptop.  This blending of modern technology and the World War II setting could be an interesting stylistic choice, but Uwe Boll is a bottom of the barrel kind of guy.  He will go for the lowest jokes he can possibly make.  Instead of using the modern technology in a non-modern setting to do something interesting, Boll uses this melding to push offensive jokes on the audience.  He doesn’t care to make something good.  He cares to amuse himself with his own poor taste in humour.

Willam Belli

From Wikipedia: “Willam Belli is an American actor, drag queen, model, reality television personality and recording artist, who is known for his recurring role as transgender woman Cherry Peck in Nip/Tuck and for being a contestant on the fourth season of RuPaul's Drag Race, for which he remains the only contestant ever disqualified from the series, as well as being the only contestant to vomit on the main stage.”

This description of Willam Belli is relevant because it gives his history, which can enlighten his role in Blubberella. (I’m using he as the pronoun because that’s what Wikipedia uses.)  Willam Belli played a gay character named Vadge.  Get it?  Because Vadge is the short form of vagina and Vadge is gay?  The character was so over the top that he bordered on and sometimes crossed into the offensive range.  I’m sure Belli was in on the since he was playing Vadge and because he got a writing credit.  That doesn’t make the character any less offensive.

The main joke regarding Vadge was that he was attracted to his partner in rebellion.  He spent the majority of the movie coming on to Nathaniel and competing with Blubberella (who was always alluding to having sex with people) for his affection.  It wasn’t an actual love type of thing though.  Vadge wasn’t fawning over Nathaniel because of any emotional investment.  He just wanted to bone… hard.  The character had no other traits than wanting to sex up Nathaniel.  That is not a real character.  That is a gay caricature.  It does a disservice to that section of our culture, and the character only perpetuated stereotypes.  Uwe Boll isn’t someone known for subtlety.  Blubberella only helped to prove the lack of subtlety, and Vadge was a large part of the bluntness of Boll’s comedic sensibilities.

Meta Humour

Blubberella didn’t shy away from self-referential and meta jokes.  There were three big, semi-memorable moments that had this kind of comedy.  The lesser moment was when they pointed out how bad the German accents were, particularly Michael Paré’s.  At no point did he sound German.  The Commandant ended up sounding like a bad Marlon Brando in The Godfather impression by the end.  The movie pointed that out though, so it’s okay, right?  Not really.  The accent didn’t bother me because of the style of the movie, but pointing it out didn’t help at all.

That joke got surpassed by the second big meta joke.  There was a scene where Uwe Boll’s voiceover kicked in and he discussed how boring the scene was.  He said that because the scene was so boring, he was going to play music from his movies to make it a little better.  It didn’t help.  The scene was still pretty bad.  At least the voiceover was the slightest bit amusing, especially when Uwe Boll referred to himself in the third person.

The other big meta moment a scene written as a not-so-veiled attack on film critics.  When The Lieutenant first met with Doctor Mangler, the doctor had a vampire on a slab in his laboratory.  He mentioned that before it turned into a vampire, it was either a gypsy or a movie critic.  He also stated that if The Lieutenant had met a movie critic before, he wouldn’t be alive.  This seems to be a shot at the critics who harshly (and rightfully) throw negative reviews on Uwe Boll’s movies.  Boll wanted to toss a quick shot at these critics into his movie as a way to get back at them for the negative reviews.  Since, you know, he didn’t get to beat enough of them up in the boxing ring.

Blackface

There were multiple incidences of blackface in Blubberella.  Both Willam Belli and Brendan Fletcher wear blackface at some point.  It isn’t played as an “Oh, people in the 1940s thought it was okay to dress in blackface.”  It was played straight.  They were in blackface for the sole purpose of being in blackface.  In Willam Belli’s case, he portrayed a spoof of Mo’Nique from the movie Precious.  This kind of racial insensitivity is to be expected out of Uwe Boll.  This is the same movie where he said they were in “a Jew-y part of town” and where they repeatedly said “faggot.”  You can’t expect Uwe Boll to write a movie that isn’t offensive to different races.

There was a lot of absurd, crazy stuff in Blubberella.  The movie was the most Uwe Boll that a movie could ever be.  The only Uwe Boll thing that it didn’t have going for it was that it wasn’t based on a video game.  That doesn’t make it any less Uwe Boll.  It might make it more Uwe Boll, actually.  Instead of being confined to having to tell the bare bones of the video game story, he was given complete freedom with what he was writing.  That freedom created a trainwreck that I couldn’t look away from.

Blubberella was the worst Uwe Boll movie I’ve seen.  It’s only the fourth Uwe Boll movie I’ve seen, but that’s still saying something.  I don’t know what his other movies have in store.  They can’t get much worse, unless they end up have no budget and non-actors.  That’ll never happen though.  With Uwe Boll, you always get people you recognize in some form, and he somehow always has money.  So this may be the worst of his work.  I don’t know.  Only time will tell.

Now for some notes:

• Blubberella was suggested by @1stTimeWatchers.  They have also suggested Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.
• The three other Uwe Boll movies that I’ve watched as part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies are House of the Dead, Blackwoods, and Alone in the Dark.
• Blubberella featured Clint Howard, who was also in House of the Dead and Blackwoods.
• Michael Paré, who played The Commandant, was also in Blackwoods.
• Brendan Fletcher was in Alone in the Dark before he was in Blubberella.
• Have you seen Blubberella?  Have you seen any of the other Uwe Boll movies that I’ve mentioned?  Have you seen any Uwe Boll movies?  If you want to discuss them, there is a comments section below.
• The comments section can also be used to suggest movies that I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If you think there are bad movies out there that I should check out, let me know about them.  Twitter is another place to get a hold of me.
• I am on snapchat with the username jurassicgriffin.  If you want to see snapchat stories of the bad movies that I watch, you can find me there.  Just add me.
• Next week, I will be covering the three Sharknado movies.  Why?  Sharknado 4 comes out at the end of the month and next week is a franchise week for the blog.  I thought it was good timing.  Also, you can’t have a bad movie blog in the current day without bringing up the Sharknado movies.  They’re some of the most popular bad movies.  Come back next week.  It’s sure to be a pretty good post.