If you don't know who Uwe Boll is, he's a German filmmaker who's snapped up the film rights for many videogames, already made some of them into films (House Of The Dead, Alone In The Dark, Bloodrayne, etc.) and plans to make more. This is a hell of a feat for someone whose entire output has been both critically and popularly mauled. If the people who like the games basically hate these films, what other audience is there?
On IMDB, the work of Uwe Boll consistently scores in the 2-4 out of 10 range with users, and the closest you'll come to seeing admiration expressed there for him is a grudging comment along the lines of, 'Okay, I'll admit this WASN'T the worst film ever, after all.'
Boll once challenged some film critics to a real boxing match, where he duly beat most of them up. As ridiculous sounding as this is, it's true, though it has no real bearing on this article.
Two days ago I saw my first Boll movie, 'The House Of The Dead'. And like some of those chaps on IMDB, I must say that this certainly wasn't the worst film ever made. It's still streets ahead of the vast amounts of absolutely godawful rubbish that has appeared to fill gaps in DVD rental stores since the demise of VHS and the boom in the DVD sales market. I speak of films such as 'Death Tunnel', 'Dark Asylum', 'The Dread', 'The Pool', 'Boo', et al.
House Of The Dead has great location photography and some blasts of stupid originality. The humans vs zombies gunplay carnage scene which kicks off at the one hour mark goes on for so long and is so repetitive that it almost becomes surreal and winning. 360 degree bullet-time pans repeatedly circle characters who'd never touched a gun before but are now performing Matrix-like kung-fu on the zombies. People who die get a 'fade to blood' 360 pan, ala the game.
Stuff that doesn't work are splitsecond inserts of footage from the game used as editing schticks, some idiotic dialogue (like when the sea captain, well into the film and the zombiedom, solemnly declares, 'Now I know why they call this the 'Isla De La Muerte'!) and general pacing and brainlessness issues. In the end, House Of The Dead is stupid, and often tiresome and braindead, yet it's also an extremely good-looking action film.
I will continue to investigate the work of Uwe Boll.
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Halon - March 09, 2008 (09:35 PM) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6laMuW27GQk He is seriously the coolest guy ever. |
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bloomer - March 10, 2008 (10:09 PM) He is pretty cool, but I was trying to work out what it was about the whole clip that was making me want to puke. Then I realised it was the skincrawling lickspittle host(s), and then I further realised I was watching Fox. |
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Halon - March 11, 2008 (11:54 AM) I agree Fox News sucks but then again all news sucks. The reason why Fox gets it worse than anyone else is because they actually claim to be "fair and balanced" (when they're obviously not) and other news networks, as opinionated as they might be, just accept that fact that they're biased and don't make any stupid claims to try and mask the fact. |
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