Actually, he is most definitely the shittest thing ever to have happened to cinema. Truth. And I’m actually trembling as I write this, because Dr Uwe Boll is the kind of guy who would appear on my doorstep on a rainy evening and beat the crap out of me for dissing him.

I’d read scathing reviews of the German scheiße-meister’s (spelling lesson) movies (mostly adapted from fantasy/horror video games) before, but it wasn’t until I actually sat down with a head-full of smoke and a bucket of trifle to watch Bloodrayne that I realised exactly how bad a movie can be. I need to make this clear. Seriously. It is so, so bad. Bad, bad, abhorrent. Offensively kak. I reckon that if they’d given a five-year-old Bloodrayne’s $25m budget and a cast that includes Kristianna Loken as the eponymous heroine (the T-101 from Terminator 3), Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Billy Zane, Meat Loaf, Michelle Rodriguez…and even Udo Kier…he’d hand in something at least twice as good as Boll’s bioscopic blasphemy. Hell, the production values in Emannuelle 2000: Emannuelle Pie put Bloodrayne’s to shame.

Breathe. Breathe.

That’s one movie. I haven’t seen the others, but I understand they’re all cast from the same mould. Alone In The Dark features Tara Reid, Christian Slater and Stephen Dorff ($8m budget) – it grossed $2m. In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (check this out!) features Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Kristianna Loken (again!)…and Burt Reynolds and Ray Liotta. Quite a cast, isn’t it? The movie had a budget of $60m…and grossed $10m. There are others, but I’m not inclined to get into more detail here. It’s too depressing.

His latest movie (and the one that has sparked quite a bit of commotion on the tinterweb – and which prompted this post) is based on the Postal video game and, thankfully, only features Zack Ward, Dave Foley, JK Simmons and Seymour Cassell as participatory idiots. The movie will be released in May and has been pulled together on a far more modest, but still totally unnecessary, budget of $18m. People actually seem interested in this one, though. Amazing how slowly we learn!

I urge you: watch one of Boll’s movies. See what I mean. Understand how I feel. You’ll come out of it with a new appreciation for movie-making and you’ll find yourself discovering positives in even the most bilious flicks (discounting Boll’s trash).

What bothers me most…and I can’t seem to get my mind around it…is how he manages to attract such impressive casts. There can be no doubt that each actor knows what he or she is signing up for (and signing away) when choosing to work with Boll. So why do they do it? Please, please – somebody find out for me. They can’t all just be ginormous whores. Can they?

Thankfully, movies aside, Uwe is quite a character. He justifies his “art” on the grounds that he utilises advantageous German tax breaks in financing it (like something out of The Producers), and then pretty much writes, produces and directs his trash himself. Like a little film Nazi. Amazing.

And he’s notoriously aggressive with his critics. Which is a tall order, because “critics” pretty much means “the rest of the world”. But, credit to him, Uwe takes them on:

Boll made headlines by challenging his critics to “put up or shut up”. In June 2006, his production company issued a press release stating that Boll would challenge his five harshest critics each to a 10 round boxing match. Invitations were also open to film directors Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary.

The online gambling site GoldenPalace.com decided to sponsor this event, dubbing it “Raging Boll”. The list of five critics to step into the ring with Boll was drawn up in late August 2006, and featured Kyanka, Rue Morgue magazine writer Chris Alexander, webmaster of Cinecutre Carlos Palencia Jimenez-Arguello, Ain’t it Cool News writer Jeff Sneider and Chance Minter, amateur boxer and website critic. Boll fought and won against all five participants. (more)

“Raging Boll”. It’s just so fucking awesome. You can’t make this shit up.

Alexander bluntly told Boll that his movies were “bloated, expensive and incoherent attempts at aping American genre pictures and sport some of the most boneheaded casting choices in filmdom” but that Boll was an “insane, two-fisted rogue, and a shockingly HONEST one at that, someone who absolutely adores film, knows its history and truly lives for what he does.”

Alexander referred to the event as “the weirdest pop culture bizarre journalism stunt I’ve ever been involved in.” …Boll praised the contestants in a post fight press conference, stating “I like now the critics… Everybody who was in the ring showed (guts). Nobody dived.”

Course, when the world is busy getting its rocks off by bollocksing everything you do, even the meanest among us have our moments of weakness. And in Boll’s case, when the going gets tough, the tough get immature.

An online petition to get Boll to stop making movies was started recently, and when FEARnet put it to Boll that 18,000 people had already signed up, he boasted that it would take a million signatures to get him to stop. This was on 4 April this year. When I “signed” the petition yesterday, I was the 178,509th signatory. Things are looking good. True to character, Boll has responded to what has turned into a viral freakshow:

Wow. Imagine Scorsese pulling a stunt like this? Or the Coen Brothers? Terrifying. And it’s clear testimony to his class that Boll compares himself with Michael Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Transformers) and Eli Roth (Hostel). I’m inclined to agree with you, Uwe – they’re both fucking retards. But that’s as far as I’ll go. Because they’re still watchable fucking retards.

Hate him, loathe him or find him disturbingly attractive, you’ve got to admire Boll’s tenacity. And his public relations acumen. If there truly is no such thing as bad publicity, Uwe Boll is a marketing anomaly – a modern day Ed Wood. I will never forget his name, nor (sadly enough) will I ever forget his movies.

Incidentally, there is now a rival pro-Boll petition which you can sign if you like. But you’re an idiot if you do.