Did you see “House of the Dead”?
No? How about “Alone in the Dark”?
“BloodRayne”?
“In the Name of the King”?
Of course not. No one did. I’m actually going somewhere with this. You see, these cinematic gems were directed by this man:
Alright, I lied – some people saw those movies. How else could they have made 22 million dollars at the box office? Too bad they collectively cost over 100 million to make (I’m no accountant, but that looks like a loss of 78 million dollars). Oops.
But in a world where films like Norbit can rake in 95 million and Oscar winners don’t even make back their meagre budgets, we can’t judge films based on how much they make in theatres. Enter Rotten Tomatoes. Now, I love numbers, so a site that turns multiple movie reviews into a numerical score is brilliant in my eyes. How do Uwe’s films stand up there? Let’s see:
- House of the Dead – 4%
- Alone in the Dark – 1%
- BloodRayne – 4%
- In the Name of the King – 2%
Hm. No help for Mr. Boll there, but those are percentages. Let’s look at how many positive reviews those movies have gotten. Ok, of the 254 reviews for those four movies combined, six were positive. SIX. I want to make sure we all understand how bad that is. Little Nicky scored 24%. Waterworld got 38%.
So Uwe Boll is possibly the worst director in history. Actually, I would say that having three of his films on IMDB’s bottom 100 list garners him the crown. But enough about the past, let’s move on. Obviously he’s not allowed to make films anymore, right? What’s that? He’s slated to release seven more by 2010? O…..kay… but surely he’s making strides to redeem his name by distancing himself from those films and moving to more refined material. Hm? Two of those movies are sequels to BloodRayne? F*ck.
There’s a fair bit of buzz about his next film, Postal. Like almost everything he does, it’s a videogame adaptation, so we know the source material is just stellar. He’s really outdone himself this time though. While in the past he was merely insulting film goers with his work, this time around he decided to broaden his audience by using the events of September 11th as a joke to market his new movie (which is supposedly a comedy).
If that’s not bad enough, he actually defended the trailer after the resultant outcry.
Alright, I think I’ve made my case against this guy, now on to what actually inspired me to write about him. The man isn’t completely oblivious to what people think of him, and his latest response to the criticism was to say that if one million people signed a petition asking him to stop directing, he’d retire. As of April 12th, 2008, almost two hundred thousand people have signed it. I worry that hitting one million might be hard, because judging by the box office returns, there haven’t been that many people who’ve seen his work.
Now’s the time to do your part. Sign it. Please.
If you’re still not inspired to sign it, then watch his response to the petition (NSFW):
He…. calls himself a genius. I don’t think I even know how to respond to that. Oh, and the pro-Uwe Boll petition currently has a whopping 1585 signatures.
Seriously. We need to stop this guy from making movies. If not for me, and not for you, and not for the children, then for the critics who will have to review his future movies – they’re going to run out of synonyms for the word “excrement”.