While his movies are absolutely terrible, I am beginning to enjoy Uwe Boll as a personality. Boll is the universally reviled director of such terrible video game movies as House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne. While his films are financially successful, they are widely regarded as some of the worst movies ever made.

As reported all over the place, but probably first at Skewed and Reviewed, Boll has issued a bizarre press release challenging his top five critics to a fight. Quote: "Towards the end of the filming of the “Postal” the 5 most outspoken critics will be flown into Vancouver and supplied with hotel rooms. As a guest of Uwe Boll they will be given the chance to be an extra / stand-in in “Postal” and have the opportunity to put on boxing gloves and enter a BOXING RING to fight Uwe Boll."

Best yet the fights will be streamed live over the Internet and some of the footage may make it into the film. What is even more impressive is that the fights will be ten rounds each over the period of two days. I have done a bit of boxing conditioning in the past and fifty rounds in 48 hours is a LOT. Heck, I am assuming Boll plans on knocking out his opponents quick.

Anything to hype up a movie release. Even if he loses every round, this will get so many people interested and paying attention to Postal, that he'll make a ton off the movie, no matter how bad it is. It's all a matter of PR.

I wonder if this guy will end up being the next Ed Wood...the worst movies ever made can end up earning one a cult following!

With these cheap attempts at drawing attention, he sounds more like the next John Romero. Or Derek Smart.

Too bad there isn't a next Erik Wolpaw to stand up to him.

How pointless... those critics should be taughting him directing lessons instead of fighting it off. Maybe he could learn one or two tons of knowledge from those guys.




I think he HAS already a cult following: videogame fanatics and fanboys. There will always be a market for those, myself included :-P

First of all, Ed Wood is not the worst director who's ever made a movie and carrying an MST3K nickname you should know that. (manos.). Ed Wood is however pretty infamous, but as terrible as his movies are, at least there's a sense of trying to get them done for the love of moviemaking.... even if he's thrown out plot, continuity, acting and sets on the way there.

For Uwe, it's hard for the average gamer to believe that he's doing this for any reason but to cash in on a "big name" based on the console sales figures for a random month from the industry. Because of this, I don't think they'll contain cult status, at least the ones I've so far won't. He'd definitely have to "weird it up" to make folks show it to all of their friends and send it over the Internet to one another. That might happen if Ed Wood were directing these, but not Uwe I don't think. Sure it would be just as terrible, but would probably focus on the strangest aspects of any game which makes it endearing. For instance, a Doom movie might be less about the marines and more about the giant mechanical spider bosses. I don't know. it's hard to get into that mind set. Mr. Wood would probably just make movies based on Daikatana and Slave Zero.

"Manos" does have a reputation for being the worst, but some days I wonder if it really is..."The Incredibly Strange Creatures etc etc etc" could surpass it for example.

Ed Wood is however pretty infamous, but as terrible as his movies are, at least there's a sense of trying to get them done for the love of moviemaking.... even if he's thrown out plot, continuity, acting and sets on the way there.
Mmm, good point...actually I think I was more using Ed Wood as an example as he is so famous; I think there's worse out there for sure, but most people (including myself!) don't even remember who.

I actually haven't seen any of Uwe's movies yet...but for whatever reason his name does seem to be becoming well known, so who knows...kinda surprised his movies weren't complete financial flops though, Bloodrayne played at my local theater for one week in the smallest auditorium; not a sign of huge financial returns!

Bloodrayne cost $25M but only made $2.5M in the US. I wonder why studios still finance his "movies".

...tax laws in Germany mean that any wealthy Germans who invest in a movie can write-off the production cost, delay paying their taxes and generally reduce their tax burden...the German investors in a movie only pay tax on any RETURNS the movie makes, their investment is 100% deductible...the investors can actually borrow money to put towards investment and write that off too.

Add to that that video game licenses can be loosely used (publishers don't care that much) and it still holds appeal to a wide audience familiar with the story or characters.

So in Germany, you can make money from bad movies. Actually, that goes for Hollywood as well, in another sense.

Oh come on, Slave Zero was not that bad.

Well... since you brought it up....

I pick on Slave Zero based on my experiences with the Dreamcast version. Basically we had all kinds of bugs ruin the experience. For instance, somewhere on the 2nd level we managed to get the mech to fall through the floor into the "non play area" but were able to move around. Strangely, after finishing the level this bug made the mech invincible through the rest of the game. During multiplayer games, the mechs would occasionally become lodged in the walls and unable to move. Also occasionally, weapon fire (missile weapons I think) would pass through obstacles and destroy the player when they shouldn't have. I would write a review, but I've forgotten almost everything else about the game's experience.

I've also heard rumors that the PC/Windows version of the game is also full of bugs. Among them, an inability to even play the game if the cdrom isn't set to D:\ as a drive letter.

P.S. In another thread, some folks were mentioning that because consoles don't have patches, it puts pressure on the developer to get the product right before it's released. In my experience, it didn't seem to have happened for this game

Frankly, this is the first time I hear about Slave Zero being a bug ridden game, I've read many reviews (also some that were supposed not to be biased) and not one of them mentioned bugs. I've bought it myself, played it for three/four hours and found not one bug; the only problem being that Saferom prevents you from playing the game on Windows XP and so you have to crack it (cracking an original game, that's one experience we'll all soon be used to). Or so I've read, maybe the game did not launch because of the cd not being in D:, but even so that's not the only game that does that unfortunately!

Not that I enjoy defending Slave Zero, since I found it to be an average shooter, but there are worse things out there.

He reminds me like a little kid who cant compete with his enemies. Its like "hey I can't make good movies but I can kick your ass so >:-P."

It feels to me like hes trying to compensate for his setbacks by trying to justify with his existence that he can fight better than the critics.

Thats just my take though.

The problem is that there seem to be enough idiots out there who buy his movies on DVD. He once said that his movies couldn't be as bad as everyone says because he always gets a truckload of cash out of the DVD releases. BloodRayne will sadly be no different but the main reason for that is that the movie box also contains the full version of BloodRayne 2 (I'm glad I bought the retail version of BR2...).

The sad thing about all this are the very good actors he is always able to contract. He seems to brainwash them because I don't think that Kristanna Loken needs the money so desperate. And even if the actors need the money, I don't think that a Uwe Boll film looks very good on the ol' résumé anymore.

Looks like one of the people he's going to fight will be Lowtax!