The Hall of Shame 05.29.08: Uwe Boll

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 05.29.2008

A man who has given the gaming community so much. Thank you Uwe Boll.

Dr. Uwe Boll, I'd like to thank you for giving the gaming community so much. You've given us the reason to never look forward to a video game movie. You've given us something so horrible that we can rag on it for hours upon hours. You make us laugh when you claim to be such a great director, call Micheal Bay a retard, and challenge the naysayers to boxing matches. The movies you make may not be entertaining at all, but you sir, certainly are.

For this Hall of Shame induction of Uwe Boll, we're going to take a brief look at the video game movies he made and why they're so horrible.

House of the Dead
Meta Critic Score: 15
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 4%

The Game: House of the Dead is a rail-shooting arcade franchise that's been around for about 10 years and has spawned four games. The plot of the first game was about a scientist named Dr.Curien whose research on life and death drives him mad to the point where he starts creating zombies and other horrible creatures in his mansion (because every horror game needs a mansion). In the second game, Goldman, the man who funded Curien's work, sends his zombies and other such mutants in Venice. The third game fast forwards twenty years later to when the world suffered an apocalypse and the protagonists reach a facility where they must destroy Curien's final creations. The fourth game goes back in time to when this apocalypse supposedly happened, with Goldman being the man behind this.

The Movie: Despite House of the Dead being very similar in story to the Resident Evil series, the only thing this movie has in common with the game is that the footage from the game is used in parts of the movie. Now if this was some kind of home made B-movie I can let it slide, but this was a motion picture being released in theaters nationwide. It's as if Uwe Boll learned how to make a film by watching Manos: The Hands of Fate. The plot involves a bunch of teens going to a rave party on some island, but it turns out the island has ZOMBIES! Every cliché you can imagine from horror films follows, and even cliches from video games like exploding barrels. Our heroes eventually get a bunch of high powered guns and a shootout with the zombies begins that involves lots of bullet fire, too many spinning shots ripped from the Matrix, and the spliced in game footage. After watching the fight scene, I was beginning to wonder if I was watching a movie or a commercial for the video games.

Watch it for yourself and tell me you don't get the same feeling:


Towards the end we get one of the worst exchanges of dialogue ever:
"You created it all so you can be immortal...why?!"
"To live forever."

Then a horrible final fight scene occurs, followed by the ending in which it turns out that the last surviving hero has the same last name as the villain of the first and third game. Whether this is actually Dr.Curien or his son is unknown, but really, who cares?

Alone in the Dark
MC: 9
RT: 1%

The Game: Before gamers were freaking out with the zombie dog bursting out the window in Resident Evil or fighting whatever the hell those things were in Silent Hill, there was Alone in the Dark for the PC in 1992. The game has you pick one of two protagonists to go inside a house and find out why the mansion's owner, Jeremy Hartwood, decided to commit suicide. What looks to be a simple mystery turns into a fright-fest as you now must defend yourself against the horde of monsters and zombies inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft that have suddenly appeared to kill you. The game was highly praised and had several sequels.

The Movie: The plot has nothing to do with the original game, but rather was supposed to be based around the latest game AITD 5, which got delayed to 2008. In the movie, Carnby is a paranormal investigator (the only thing similar to his game character) and was kicked out of 713, a Canadian paranormal investigation bureau, for reasons unknown. Before the movie actually begins, we get a text scroll read aloud to us for the first minute and a half. Now in Star Wars where the text scroll looks cool, here it looks completely stupid and seems pointless considering somebody is reading it for us. The rest of the movie consists of the typical bad everything. Some of the (very loud) action scenes take place in total darkness, with only the shooting of the bullets to provide the light. That might sound like an awesome idea, until you start hearing a heavy metal song play in the background which makes it look more like some kind of music video rather then some action sequence. Oh, and you can't tell what's going on half the time.

One big problem that a lot of people have had with this film is Tara Reid being cast as archaeologist Aline Cedrac, and considering that Tara Reid is basically like Paris Hilton, this was a stupid idea. The most embarrassing part is when she mispronounces "Newfoundland" as "New Found Land". Honestly that's how I would think it's pronounced, but wouldn't you make sure you had the correct pronunciation before saying it in a movie? Aside from the horrible action and CGI, there's also a sex scene between Carnby and Cedrac that literally comes out of nowhere while "7 seconds" by Neneh Cherry, a song about children dying, plays in the background. There was about as much "sex" in that scene as there was explicit nudity in Mass Effect. Now, if Carnby had asked Cedrac if he could take her home and eat her pussy like in Shark Attack 3, this probably would've been a lot more awesome.

There's really not much to say about Alone in the Dark aside from the plotholes, stupid ending, and some really bad lines from the script. This movie cost $25 million to make and didn't even make half of that in revenue. But hey, a sequel is in the work! Who actually approved of this?!

Bloodrayne
MC: 18
RT: 4%

The Game: Bloodrayne is a Dhampir (half-vampire and half-human, plus has none of the vampire weaknesses) who hunts down other vampires, because apparently that's what half-vampire heroes do. Oh, and the Nazis. You've always gotta kill the Nazis. She's so hot that she causes some men's ecomony to become stimulating, which may or may not be a metaphor for getting a boner, and was actually pictured nude in Playboy. And people thought hentai was only for anti-socialites. The gameplay mostly consists of you going around and tearing apart the Nazis and your vampire brethren limb by limb. Many fountains of blood soon follow. It wasn't the best of action games, but it was popular enough to warrant it a sequel.

The Movie: The plot stays somewhat true in that Rayne is a Dhampir who joins the Brimstone Society in order to kill vampires. But where the first game takes place in the 1930's and the second game fast forwards to modern-day, this takes place in a medieval setting. The movie also gives Rayne some origin story about how she was a carny freak as a child until she killed everybody and ran away. Everything else however is atrociously bad. The fighting is choreographed horribly and is editted poorly, just about all the actors and actresses phone it in, the costumes they wear are terrible, the story telling has more exposition and flashbacks then the entire Yu-Gi-Oh series; basically, anything that's supposed to make an action movie good is horrible.

But maybe the reason the actresses are phoning it in is because they aren't actresses to begin with. Uwe Boll admitted in an interview that he hired prostitutes for this one scene involving rock singer Meat Loaf. The scene, at least from what I understand in Will Helm's "Misunderstood Masterpieces," is basically an orgy scene that ends with Meta Loaf getting killed by Rayne. I'm willing to bet that the rest of the actors were people pulled off the street that aren't employed in the world's oldest profession.

Despite Bloodrayne doing horrible in theaters, a sequel is actually in the works. There's nothing quite as bad as a horrible movie getting an undeserved sequel in this industry.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
MC: 15
RT: 5%

The Game: Dungeon Siege is your typical medieval hack-and-slash action RPG where you must save the world from the forces of evil. While it sounds typical, it's actually quite good.

The Movie: Now, as to where all of Uwe Boll's movies up to this point were half-assed pieces of garbage, this one was taken a bit more seriously. It had a good budget! It was actually following the plot of the game! It had REAL actors! Maybe this would be the movie that redeemed Uwe Boll! Unfortunately, it still turned out to be bad. Why?

Well, because the usual Uwe Boll crap (Bollcrap?) remains consistent. Boll apparently became too lazy to give the main character a name, so he just named him Farmer because that's his initial job. Despite this movie having a $60 million budget, the effects in this movie look cheap. Some of the dialogue is questionable ("Wisdom is our hammer; goodness will be our nail"). The editing is once again atrocious. Some scenes are just blatant copies from other, more popular movies. The fighting is horrible. When the main hero goes up against the main villain, you'd think the main villain would use a powerful attack. Sadly, this villain uses the attack "Throwing Books." It works about as well as you'd think. Oh, and even though this is a medieval setting, there are ninjas.

NINJAS!!!

Really, this all you need to know about In the Name of the King: It's a third-rate Lord of the Rings clone with NINJAS! Stick to the PC games.

Postal
MC: 18
RT: 11%

The Game: The Postal games are FPS' where you go out and commit over-the-top satirical acts of violence in the city of Paradise. Well, you don't actually have to, but the game pretty much begs for you to shoot, decapitate, and piss on a lot of people. Because of this kind of gameplay, it was of course banned in some countries and blamed for violent incidents. Oh, and the games suck.

The Movie: Last year this movie caught some serious flack by using the WTC terrorist attacks as a joke. Boll has been quite political about the attacks, calling it a great TV moment because it shows how 3,000 Americans dying seems to be much more important then the thousands upon millions dying in other countries. I won't go into a political debate about this, but when you use the WTC attacks as your opening joke, Americans will tend to really hate you for that.

The plot involves Postal Dude helping his uncle Dave, leader of a religious cult, hijack a shipment of popular Krotchy Dolls to get much needed money. Unfortunately for them, Al-Qaeda also have their sights on the dolls, and so it becomes a war between the cult and Al-Qaeda for possession of the dolls. This movie basically tries to do every offendable thing imaginable to get people talking, and it fails because it seems to try too hard to do so. Bush and Osama walking together in a flowery field, children getting shot to death, midgets raped by monkeys, Uwe Boll himself directing a Nazi themed amusement park; it's basically such cheap shot after cheap shot. Basically, if you decided to take all the criticisms people have about America, believe in a couple conspiracy theories, and string them along with an absurd plot, you can make a movie exactly like Postal.

Unfortunately, when you've built up a reputation of making the worst movies possible as if on purpose, theaters begin to notice and decide not to carry your films. As of this column, only 21 theaters have decided to carry Postal, which is actually a big improvement from the initial 4 theaters that were going to carry it.

Yet despite all the hatred the world has against him, Boll plans to continue creating bad movie after bad movie. Thank you Uwe Boll. May you continue your path of absurdity so that we can all learn just what it takes to make terrible movies.