Thus far in his shameless career, Uwe Boll has mostly pissed off the kind of nerds who care about either video games or movies—basically, the kind of people who write for this site. If you didn’t play the Alone in the Dark video game, you didn’t care that the movie sucked. And if you don’t know that he’s a pompous ass who challenges critics to boxing matches, you don’t hate him with a fiery rage.
But now Boll might be about to tangle with the public at large, and the result may not be pretty. His next two planned projects are both based on true events, and one of them tackles the Sudanese genocide, one of the prominent social justice issues of recent years. He told The Hollywood Reporter, “What can I lose? I got so bashed for my video game adaptations I don't care anymore."
Yeah, get ready to see how bad it can be for all of us when even Uwe Boll stops caring about Uwe Boll. The first film, which has already wrapped production, is called Stoic, and its based on the true story of three German cellmates who tortured a fourth one before helping him hang himself to cover up his crimes. One of the torture incidents involved making the guy eat a tube of toothpaste and then eating the resulting vomit. Boll assures us, “When the actor licks his puke off the ground, he will be seen eating it for a minute, not just a little bit.”
I’m almost too grossed out to move on to the next movie, but let’s try. The second film will be called Janjaweed, named for the Arab militias who have conducted much of the genocide that has ravaged the Darfur region of Sudan in the last few years. Boll says he’ll film the movie using the same improvisational techniques that he used for Chaotic, and it will be about American journalists caught amid the carnage.
The upshot: Maybe Boll will infuriate so many people with these movies that he really might have to stop making films. The bad part just continues to be what Boll represents about the human race, and the fact that, somehow, he has not yet been shot. Of course these movies will be awful. The worst part will be that some people will have to watch it, and even worse, some people will choose to.
