Orson Welles once said that making a film was “the biggest electric train-set a boy ever had!” Dr. Uwe Boll is definitely among the pantheon of the great auteurs, the directors who took control of their films and made every aspect of production their own.

Boll (his first name should be pronounced ‘you-vaaa’) started out of film school directing thrillers but he made his name adapting videogames, starting with the arcade shoot-em-up, House Of The Dead in 2003; a bright and silly rip-off of every zombie movie you’ve ever heard of but with more teens and bullets. He followed this adaptation with Alone In The Dark in 2005, a broad bastard of H.P. Lovecraft, Aliens and Tara Reid.

Both films got execrable reviews, one reviewer going so far as to say that he serves as a benchmark for all purveyors of bad cinema.  Certainly popular opinion is damning: four of his films currently grace the Internet Movie Database’s mythic ‘Bottom 100’ list, a stratified voting chart of exactly how far below the bottom of the barrel it’s possible to scrape.  And yet, there is so much to love about the man they call The Master of Error. 

For example, my favourite piece of dialogue from the Boll-Cannon is from House Of The Dead. The scene: oh-so-disposable teen hero, Rudy faces off against the film’s boss, a 16th Century Priest-turned-Necromancer in a sword fight to the death.
‘You did all this to become immortal.’ He emotes, ‘Why?’
His ancient foe stares Rudy down and with the sort of gravitas usually reserved by actors for Lear or Macbeth replies: “To live forever!”

Clearly, anyone who could allow this exchange breath in the world obviously does not have English or irony as his first language. As such, it’s comedy genius. Boll’s dialogue is so glitteringly absurd it deserves its own terminology. I’d suggest Bollologue.

One of the more baffling things about the man is his unnerving ability to lure famous faces into his films. That can’t be Ray “Goodfellas” Liotta mugging away in Dungeon Siege, can it? Really? Can it? You keep pinching yourself to check whether you haven’t just imagined the film into existence. The actors know that it isn’t a good film but it is good money. Meanwhile Boll is now able to play at being James Cameron or Martin Scorsese because he’s got actors from their films at his disposal.

Some could well consider Boll’s tendency to adapt popular videogame franchises a cynical move to capitalise on an already popular phenomenon but I disagree. The man dreams big and in order to realise his vision he needs the broadest canvas possible. No one would have given Uwe the $7 million budget he got for House Of The Dead if it was just Zombie Teen Island Party (SUBTITLE: An Adventure WITH GUNS!).

He’s also thoroughly besotted with genre cinema and his films bear the weight of the artists who’ve gone before him. Bloodrayne riffs off Blade and Conan The Barbarian. The House Of The Dead explicitly invokes the “holy trilogy” of George A. Romero’s zombie films. It all shows more than just a little affection for what he’s pillaged. Boll also admitted that the use of Matrix-style “bullet-time” was extended in the fight-scenes in House of the Dead just because it looked “cool”. Not because it would contribute more to the art of cinema or make the film better. It just looked cool.

Two of this year’s most critically acclaimed comedies have been about people making homemade versions of blockbusters and just like the video-store chancers in Be Kind, Rewind or the kiddiwink Kotcheffs in Son Of Rambow, Boll is trying to make something that engages us as much as those films engaged him. He just doesn’t have the know-how. The truth is, I’ve actually seen worse movies; fewer that are more ham-fisted admittedly but many more with less ambition. His failures are so spectacular they make other men’s seem pathetic in comparison.

However, the main reason I will keep watching Uwe’s oeuvre is just because he’s a character. He never gives up, once going so far as to challenge four of his toughest critics to a “Put Up Or Shut Up” boxing match. Four men met his challenge and Raging Boll (who also just happened to be a semi-pro boxer back in Germany) put them all down in the ring as they had done to him in print. These are the actions of a man who is punching above his weight in every sense.