In the Name of Uwe Boll: A Financial Wreck Tale

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, the $70 million fantasy epic, bombed magnificently at the box office, drawing only $3 million in its first weekend, and the circling vultures know that infamous director Uwe Boll is running out of extra lives.

This isn’t the first time Boll’s big budget future has been questioned, but news reports now seem certain that he won’t be making more mega-million movies. His recent comments to the Hollywood Reporter suggest he’s thinking the same thing.

This could signal the end of Boll as a byword for bad films. Two of the most frequently disastrous (and hilarious) aspects of Boll films are symptomatic of their budgets: special effects and casting. The former includes “clever” POV shots, unbelievably derivative bullet-time editing, and similarly exhausted post-Matrix techniques. The latter stuffs his films with slumping B-list actors who sometimes don’t even seem to conceal their disdain for the material. With these two cash-bloated albatrosses lifted from his neck, Boll will just be left with his lethally banal scripts and static direction. That would still mean bad movies, but not Uwe Boll-bad. He would still have a lot of obstacles to conquer, but he would be well on his way to making a bearable film.

COMACC Cage Match: Cloverfield

Dave and Erick take on each other in a battle of inflated egos in COMACC’s first-ever Cage Match. Today’s subject is the latest entry in the monster movie genre, Cloverfield.

Dave: After deciding to give in and see Cloverfield this weekend, I was sincerely hoping the experience would make me eat my words. Unfortunately, that was not the case, as the film pretty much met my rather low expectations for it. The only statement I regret making was that I hoped the influence of Abrams wouldn’t result in the monster remaining almost completely obscured throughout the film. After viewing the globular, spidery mess of a monster, I almost wish director Matt Reeves hadn’t given us any clear glimpses of it. The monster definitely would have been more impressive had it been left to our imaginations as opposed to a shoddy special effects team.

But it would be naive to think a film such as this wouldn’t include some sort of payoff in that department, and perhaps that would have been fine had the film shifted its focus entirely toward the monster. Instead we’re treated to nearly a half hour of character development centered around some of the most obnoxious human beings ever conceived. As I watched them pursue their selfish little quest, I couldn’t help wondering how much better the film would have been if Reeves had set them up in the early parts of the film as film students at NYU. At least that would have given us some decent shot structure instead of this nausea-inducing chaos that makes The Blair Witch look like a slick Hollywood production by comparison. Reeves could have learned a lesson or two from last year’s The Host, a film that exceled in just about every area that this film failed in.