UWE BOLL is often referred to as the worst filmmaker in the world.
\nThis seems to pain Mr. Boll, a gregarious 42-year-old German whose best-known movies are based on video games. So he has shared the pain with his critics, literally, challenging several to a series of boxing matches in 2006. Mr. Boll, a former boxer, thumped them handily.<\/p>\n
But what he really wants is respect.<\/p>\n
There is a Web site called StopUweBoll.org, with a petition demanding that he stop making movies. The petition had drawn only 18,000 names until last month, when Mr. Boll told the horror-movie Web site FearNet.com that he would quit making films if a million people signed. With his own version of \u201cbring it on,\u201d the list has now grown to more than a quarter of a million.<\/p>\n
Why play along? \u201cI have to live with it,\u201d Mr. Boll said with an unhappy smirk. \u201cIt\u2019s better to make fun with it,\u201d as an alternative to \u201cbeing depressed, sitting at home, slowly crying.\u201d<\/p>\n
We won\u2019t even talk about UweBollIsAntichrist.com.<\/p>\n
During a lunch interview in New York, he pressed a freshly copied DVD into a reporter\u2019s hands. It was a rough cut of a serious film he\u2019s been working on, about a brutal prison rape in Germany in 2006. \u201cI would be interested to see what you think about it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also noted that there are counterpetitions urging him to keep making films. At least part of what is going on, he argued, is an online pile-on, a \u201ccan you top this?\u201d game with Mr. Boll on the bottom.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it the movies are all so bad?\u201d he asked. \u201cSomething is not fitting together in the story, that I\u2019m the worst of the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll\u2019s most recent film, \u201cPostal,\u201d might not be the best vehicle for winning respect. The first sequence of the film, which opens on Friday, portrays 9\/11 hijackers squabbling over the precise number of virgins who will be awaiting them after their martyrdom. The scene switches to a World Trade Center\u2019s-eye view of an oncoming jet.<\/p>\n
As the movie\u2019s scattershot plot rocks along, the audience gets a long full-frontal look at a nude Dave Foley, the boyish comic best known for his work in the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe and on the television show \u201cNews Radio,\u201d who portrays a sleazy satyr of a cult leader. By the time the film\u2019s protagonist, played by Zack Ward, uses a cat for a silencer, the boundaries of good taste have been left so far behind that the Hubble Space Telescope couldn\u2019t spot the border signs.<\/p>\n
Considering the gross-out and sexual-humor quotient of many recent films, \u201cPostal\u201d could well find an audience. The raucous crowd at a screening presented by the New York City Horror Film Festival last month erupted in laughter for every startlingly transgressive joke. As a couple left the theater, a woman told her date, \u201cIt made no sense, but it was hysterical.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPostal,\u201d like Mr. Boll\u2019s \u201cBloodRayne,\u201d \u201cAlone in the Dark\u201d and \u201cIn the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale,\u201d originated as a violent video game. Many of the reviews for those films have been startlingly negative. A reviewer for Entertainment Weekly wrote of \u201cAlone in the Dark,\u201d which starred Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff, \u201cFar be it from me to dismiss a man\u2019s effort in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value.\u201d<\/p>\n
As vicious as many of the professional reviews have been, video gamers\u2019 online critiques are even more vituperative, and largely unprintable. Some of their complaints sound a bit like those of Jane Austen fans who decry adaptations that miss the essence of their beloved author\u2019s canon. Except that instead of lamenting, say, the way the filmmakers behind \u201cNorthanger Abbey\u201d completely misunderstood the importance of the humorous references to Anne Radcliffe\u2019s masterpiece, \u201cThe Mysteries of Udolpho,\u201d they excoriate Mr. Boll for shifting the story of \u201cBloodRayne\u201d from Nazi Germany to 18th-century Romania. They also think Rayne\u2019s outfit is not hot enough.<\/p>\n
The reaction of gamers is not based solely on the faithfulness of the way the games are interpreted, said Daniel Morris, publisher of the world\u2019s best-selling PC-games magazine, PC Gamer. \u201cOne thing to understand is that gamers face a certain geek stigma,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s certainly not helped when movies come out based on games, and the movies are just no good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll\u2019s defenders do not claim that his films are great art. But they do say he\u2019s not that bad.<\/p>\n
Sam Beddoes, a freelance Web designer in England who has a Web site, HooplaNet (hooplanet.co.uk), that runs reviews and humor, said in an e-mail interview, \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody deserves the kind of abuse the Internet gives Uwe.\u201d (It\u2019s pronounced OO-veh.) Although he called Mr. Boll\u2019s \u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d \u201claughable (Sorry, Uwe!),\u201d he said he found his other films \u201cfar better than anybody has given credit for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll\u2019s films have been compared to the output of Troma Entertainment, which includes \u201cThe Toxic Avenger\u201d and \u201cSurf Nazis Must Die.\u201d Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder of Troma, said he found \u201cPostal\u201d \u201cpretty funny\u201d and called it \u201ca kind of Troma fromage\u201d \u2014 or, rather, hommage. Mr. Boll, he said, is \u201cheroic, and a genuine independent spirit,\u201d but also safe for reviewers to attack because he is not tied to the big Hollywood companies and the advertising dollars they wield. \u201cThey can\u2019t say that Michael Bay is a no-talent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The film industry is certainly not helping Mr. Boll. Earlier this month he received an e-mail message from the chief buyer for the Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater chain in the country, informing him that Regal would not be exhibiting \u201cPostal\u201d: \u201cWhile I have respected your past work this film falls short of the type of product the Regal Theater Group would consider commercial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll denounced the decision as politics. (The film portrays President Bush as not only in league with Osama bin Laden but also in love with him.) \u201cWe still aim for 1,000 screens,\u201d he said. (Mr. Boll\u2019s own company is distributing the film.)<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll said his business model can take such disappointments. The films may perform modestly at the box office (\u201cIn the Name of the King,\u201d for example, has brought in $11.8 million worldwide), but that represents about 15 percent of his revenues, with television, DVD rights and video on demand bringing in the rest. Provisions in the German tax code allow his investors to benefit through write-offs. And he stays away from the Hollywood system, producing the movies himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I don\u2019t have in-between people,\u201d he said, \u201cI make more money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll\u2019s defense of his work is equally straightforward. \u201cI don\u2019t make political decisions that can destroy the earth,\u201d he said. \u201cI make movies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which is not to say that he won\u2019t wallop those who ridicule him. The boxing matches, in September 2006, left one of his opponents vomiting and sucking oxygen from a tank. One of the people he fought, Rich Kyanka of the comedy Web site Something Awful (somethingawful.com), complained at the time that Mr. Boll had suggested the match was only for show.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kyanka, via e-mail, declined comment. \u201cThe guy\u2019s essentially a real life troll,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBoll wants people to talk about him so he can get free publicity.\u201d He added, \u201cI\u2019m not going to feed him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those who have worked with Mr. Boll say they see a different man. Mr. Foley said he found him, in person, to be \u201cquite a sweet guy\u201d but tough.<\/p>\n
Why work for the director called the worst in the world? \u201cI knew nothing about Uwe Boll\u201d at first, Mr. Foley said. He watched \u201cBloodRayne,\u201d he said, and found it so over-the-top gory that \u201cit made me laugh.\u201d It had, he said, the absurd feel of a Terry Gilliam film.<\/p>\n
Mr. Boll is \u201clike a quintessential German intellectual artist who has almost taken film arbitrarily as the medium he\u2019s going to work in. The art form is, almost, in being hated,\u201d Mr. Foley said. Comparing him to the comedian Andy Kaufman, he added, \u201cIt\u2019s his relationship with the audience that is his creation, his relationship with the critics, more than the movies.\u201d<\/p>\n
What, then, does that make an actor like, say, Dave Foley?<\/p>\n
\u201cA pawn, I suppose, a bit of pigment on the canvas,\u201d Mr. Foley said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is either going to be the worst movie I\u2019ve ever been in, or it\u2019s going to be brilliant,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s not any middle ground.\u201d Of course, he added, \u201cI hope it\u2019s brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n
The creator of the StopUweBoll.org petition is Bert Harvey, a 29-year-old game designer at Flying Lab Software, near Seattle. \u201cI really think that he is the P. T. Barnum of our generation, and even bad press is good press for him,\u201d Mr. Harvey said.<\/p>\n
If Mr. Harvey\u2019s petition tops a million signatures, Mr. Boll says, he will insist on a careful examination of the results. \u201cI cannot accept that this is, like, a hundred thousand people voting 10 times,\u201d he said. But if that total isn\u2019t reached, critics will still have the consolation that Mr. Boll will appear as a character in the upcoming video game Postal III.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can kill me every day of their life,\u201d Mr. Boll said. \u201cAs long as I\u2019m able to make movies, I\u2019m happy.\u201d