By Uwe Boll, a director of shitacular direct to video movie adaptations of video games, has announced his retirement from making movies following the release of his upcoming dumpster fire of a film: Rampage 3: President Down. Until today I had no idea that two entries of a Rampage franchise existed, and I felt much better for it.
Boll might be best known for challenging critics of his “art” to strap on boxing gloves and settle their difference man to man. Since, as we all know, the only way to defend the integrity of masterpieces like Bloodrayne: The Third Reich is to pummel people around the cranial region until the ensuing brain damage makes Boll’s work palatable.
Boll blames the recent shift from physical media to subscription streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime as the reason for his retirement. In a year where the movie industry has reported record breaking box office numbers and competitors Netflix, Amazon, HBO and Hulu are spending money to acquire new content like drunken horny teenagers on their first expedition to the strip bar, Boll is claiming poverty. As he tells Metro:
“The market is dead, you don’t make any money anymore on movies because the DVD and Blu Ray market worldwide has dropped 80 per cent in the last three years. That is the real reason; I just cannot afford to make movies…I can’t go back to student filmmaking because I have made so many movies in my life, and I can’t make cheaper and cheaper movies at my age. It’s a shame. I would be happy to make movies but it is just not financially profitable.”
Boll hopes that time will be kinder to his movies, and when the time comes to give the video games made in to films genre its proper due, future generations critics will look back at his work and smile fondly on the time Tara Reid was asked to play a scientist (Alone in the Dark for those of you that aren’t masochists).
Never one to shy away from effusive self praise-though if we’re being fair if Boll’s not going to extol the virtues of his work, no one else for damn sure is-the German filmmaker complimented himself on the gritty realism of masterworks like Postal. You may remember this as the film with the wacky, comic take on 9/11 and Flight 93. Great stuff, of which he has to say: “It’s not Jason Bourne or any bullshit movie where they make stuff up. My movies are real.”
So RIP the film career of one Uwe Boll. It takes a special kind of talent to bilk investors out of millions only to deliver the kind of returns that could lease you an SUV thirty times over, and the world is worse off for the loss.
