I watched three of the crappiest films by Uwe Boll, the world’s worst director, so you don’t have to

By Steve Newton

Between 1987 and 2019 I reviewed over 350 horror movies that were released theatrically in Vancouver. Most of them were shite, but the worst ones, by far, were helmed by German director Uwe Boll (shown above expressing how he feels about my opinion).

I didn’t get the opportunity to battle Boll in the boxing ring like other film critics who slagged him, but it sure felt good to mercilessly bash his work after suffering through it for 90 minutes at a time.

Here’s three of his godawful “adaptations” of video games that you would be wise to avoid at all costs.

House of the Dead (review originally published on October 16, 2003).

One night a few years back, I was hanging with a few friends on Granville Mall, killing time before a concert, when we decided to saunter into a nearby arcade. After blowing a few bucks on the extreme road-race games, I found myself drawn to the House of the Dead console.

The images of marauding zombies being blasted by gunfire gnawed at my dark side, and before long I was pumping loonie after loonie into the hungry machine. The computerized killing spree was highly addictive and a ton of fun, even if the zombies splattered me as much as I splattered them.

It was definitely a lot more entertaining than this tedious big-screen version of the game.

House of the Dead takes place during spring break, with your typical gaggle of smart-ass bimbos and bozos hell-bent on getting to a big rave on a remote island near Seattle (it’s B.C., actually). After missing their scheduled boat ride by 15 minutes, these dimwits desperately try to charter a vessel from a freaky, uncooperative dude named Salish (perennial weirdo Clint Howard, Ron’s bro).

He tells them to get lost, but then the boat’s intense captain, Victor Kirk (Das Boot’s Jurgen Prochnow), agrees to get them to the island for a mere thousand clams.

During the crossing, one of the guys gets seasick and vomits directly into the face of a skanky blond, which gives her a good reason to go below, wash her top, and display her tits—much to the delight of the freaky dude.

When they get to the rave site, it’s totally deserted, and not just because someone let Bif Naked be the deejay. Seems the place is teeming with bloodthirsty zombies who’ve wiped out almost all of the gyrating partiers and are primed to chomp on the latecomers.

When the battle begins, it’s like an extended trailer for S.W.A.T., as the would-be ravers arm themselves with Capt. Kirk’s smuggled stash of high-powered weapons. But the novelty of seeing rampaging zombies get shot in the head wears off after 40 minutes or so.

And no amount of supposedly cool, Matrix-style slow-mo effects can change that.

I suggest you skip the House of the Dead movie, take the 10 bucks you’d have spent to see it in a theatre and blow it all on one trigger-happy session with the exhilarating game.

But be careful. Recent studies show that prolonged exposure to violent video games can lead to actual violence. And I’d hate for anyone to get so wrapped up in exterminating the undead that they snap and go off on a real zombie massacre.

Certain politicians in Victoria wouldn’t stand a chance.

Alone in the Dark (review originally published on February 3, 2005)

Alone in the Dark is a terrific horror flick–at least the one from 1982 is. It stars stalwart acting vets Jack Palance and Martin Landau as psychopathic escapees from a mental hospital who go on a murderous rampage. The flick comes recommended for Palance and Landau’s gleefully demented performances, and–partly because it’s based on a believable premise–it’s also scary as hell.

Then there’s the new Alone in the Dark, a Vancouver-shot chunk o’ junk based on an Atari video-game series. It stars Christian Slater as Edward Carnby, a “detective of the paranormal” who, as a kid, was one of 20 children taken from an orphanage where bizarre experiments, including having centipedelike thingies implanted on their spines, were conducted.

When we first meet Carnby, he’s flown into YVR with an ancient artifact from Chile, but before he can get his ex-girlfriend, museum curator Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), to check it out, his Yellow Cab gets waylaid near Quebec Street and 2nd Avenue by a chrome-domed assassin. (In the first of many ridiculous scenes, this guy doesn’t flinch when repeatedly shot in the chest, yet reacts big-time to one of Carnby’s karate kicks.)

The bad baldie has been dispatched by sinister Professor Hudgens (Mathew Walker), who needs the relic so that he can he use it to open a passageway to hell (the Britannia Beach mine) and unleash the hordes of hokey, dinosaur-like CGI demons gathered there.

Because anything allegedly based on a video game has to have lots of gunfire, Stephen Dorff (Pamela Anderson’s new boyfriend!) shows up as Carnby’s nemesis, Commander Richards, leading a group of heavily armed soldiers who inevitably become demon chow. The convoluted, terribly written film–which sports lines like Reid’s “The hairs on my neck just stood up!”–blatantly rips off Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, Tremors, 28 Days Later, and The Hidden, but never in a good way.

The most entertainment comes from watching Slater and Dorff and trying to figure out who’s got the biggest forehead.

I wouldn’t agree with the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) forum contributor who started the “Kill Uwe Boll” thread, but somebody should definitely confiscate the German director’s work visa.

He previously shot the ludicrous zombie flick House of the Dead in B.C., and, judging by the horrifically inept Alone in the Dark, there’s no telling how much damage Boll could do to the credibility of the local film biz if he’s allowed to go for three.

Bloodrayne (review originally published on April 5, 2006)

After his last movie, Alone in the Dark, director Uwe Boll had nowhere to go but up, and I mean that most sincerely. That shot-in-Vancouver stinker earned a record one of out of 100 at Rottentomatoes.com, with terms like “dreadful”, “terrible beyond belief”, and “worse than you can imagine” typical among the commentary. Of the 109 Alone in the Dark reviews collected on the Web site, only one was positive, and I fully expect that reviewer’s career as a film critic for Eclipse Magazine abruptly ended with its publication.

So how does a filmmaker bounce back from an almost universally reviled action-horror mistake? Well, if your name is Uwe Boll, you don’t. You license another video-game title and head over to budget-friendly Romania to bang out a lousy medieval adventure-horror flick called BloodRayne, about a swordfighting half-vampire babe out for revenge against the undead creep who killed her mom. You make sure to geyser enough fake blood around the set that gore hounds will be impressed. And throw in Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley, in case any members of the Academy are watching.

Kristanna Loken, the Terminatrix from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, supplies the babe quotient as the vengeful but goodhearted bloodsucker Rayne. After escaping from a sadistic circus freak show, she sets out to kill the evil vampire king Kagan (Kingsley), while hot on her blood-drenched trail are Kagan’s cruel henchman Domastir (Boll mainstay Will Sanderson) and three swashbuckling members of “the Brimstone Society” (Michael Madsen, Matthew Davis, and Lost‘s Michelle Rodriguez).

In keeping with the convoluted gibberish of Alone in the Dark, the plot of BloodRayne requires our foxy heroine to do flips to acquire the hokey body-part talismans to fulfill her deadly quest. Extreme silliness unfolds against a swelling orchestral score.

As awful as it is overall, there are a couple of things about BloodRayne that are pretty cool, one being the bug-eyed performance by Meat Loaf as a lunatic playboy vampire in a big blond wig, the other the stunning Lord of the Rings-like shots of horsemen galloping across picturesque vistas.

But these rare moments are whittled away by countless scenes that boast the TV-type production values-though not the quality writing-of Xena: Warrior Princess.

To read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018 go here.