Stop Uwe Boll!

Have you seen this man?

Every time I mention Modern Talking on this journal, at least one of my friends in Germany is quick to point out that they're not considered valid music there at all, but instead more of a national embarrassment (like the Spice Girls, although considerably more feminine). Uwe Boll must surely be another personality that Germany would rather forget about.

For those who don't know who he is, he's a filmmaker, and is considered by many to be the worst currently producing and directing - he has been described as a new-style Ed Wood, who was the man responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space. Uwe Boll focuses on game-to-film conversions, which are usually bad enough without his help, but some truly awful pieces of cinema have come from this man. His most recent work was based on a script that he had to rewrite because in his view it "didn't have enough gunfights and car chases in it". The script in question happened to be for Alone in the Dark. Nuclear Blast apparently spent about $30,000 to promote their bands in that disaster, but at least that means the film has Nightwish in it. Critics' reactions to the film were pretty uniform - they included the comments "Supremely idiotic", "Inept on every level", and "So mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality."

Such abject stupidity of the director (car chases? Alone in the Dark?) would usually result in at least being refused the rights to make any more films, and ideally being locked up in a nice quiet dungeon somewhere. However, just like in The Producers, the man has found a gaping loophole in some German funding law that allows badly performing films to make more money than successful ones. What's different about this situation is that he doesn't plan to make his films bad - he genuinely can't write anything decent. After being told that its plot was confusing, he blamed the failure of The House of the Dead on the viewers being "too stupid to understand it", obviously not having quite mastered charm towards his audience. These are the people who were treated during the film to such memorable scripting as shown in the infamous line "This book, it's pretty old. Maybe it'll help us". I do like mindless action films, but I think this is going too far as far as mindlessness is concerned.

This man is one of the many reasons why so many people think games shouldn't be taken seriously as a valid entertainment form (see the news article that e_to_the_ipi posted a week ago) - because the results when they're converted to a different medium and in to the mainstream are as bad as this. When non-game-players are exposed to them, they think the reason for the dreadfulness is because it's from a game rather than because of the incompetence of the producer. The awfulness of his films has so far not deterred him at all, but you can look at www.uweboll.com to see how eager some people are to stop him before he butchers Dungeon Siege and Farcry as well.

Let's hope that the upcoming Silent Hill film isn't as bad as his efforts (they've kept him well away from that one). As a game magazine recently put it, "The only positive thing about Uwe Boll is that he will die at some point".