Uwe Boll is going to make Schindler's List look like House Party 2!

Subtlety. Nuance. Talent.

These are all qualities indisputably absent from German piece-of-shit, Uwe Boll. To call him a filmmaker is an insult to filmmakers; he’s more like a natural disaster with access to a camera. Not only is the man responsible for multiple films in imdb’s Bottom 100 films of all-time, but he has single-handedly put the videogame adaptation back another generation or so.

Not that every game needs to be adapted into film (Dungeon Siege, really?) but for every decent property trying to get off the ground – like Halo – it has to contend with the fact that Boll has made the genre a laughing stock, and financially worthless.

Yet, I was content to Boll continue to destroy the careers of B-List actors and hope that the law of diminishing returns would eventually lead him to boxing Internet critics as a full-time career. Y’know, there are only so many mid-level videogame franchises someone can destroy, and I was pretty sure that well had run dry with Postal. It was just a matter of time until he became just another footnote in the textbook for Shitty Filmmaking 101.

Boy, was I was wrong.

I saw the teaser trailer for Auschwitz (which is tasteless, a bit disturbing and not safe for work) a few days ago, but I didn’t know how to put my thoughts into words until this morning. Blind typing in a rage never makes for a good blog post.

[I should preface all my criticism by admitting that I am a non-practicing member of the tribe. I eat pork, I don’t keep kosher, I’ve never had a Bar Mitzvah, and the only full-on Jewish female I would ever sleep with is Sarah Silverman. And, as you can gauge from my post history, I’m not particularly sensitive about film content.]

The teaser was obviously done on purpose, and Boll’s motives are completely transparent – he wants publicity. And he wants it now. Controversy generates clicks, and clicks generate attention. I am sure he is just ecstatic that he has resurrected his good name from the bowels of the Internet in one fell swoop.

My main criticism of the teaser boils down to this: Uwe Boll is just a piece of shit.

To those that enjoy his filmography in a so-bad-it’s-good way, Boll’s aggressive persistence that he is making great art seems likable in a cutesy, modern day Ed Wood kind of way. Except I know Ed Wood, and Uwe Boll is no Ed Wood.

Ed Wood really did think he was making great entertainment. He was naive and determined and incompetent, but he had moxy. Whereas Boll is fully aware that he is making toxic heaps of shit printed on celluloid, engineered from the ground-up to lose money and fill his bank account by taking advantage of some generous tax laws.

Anyone that pays money to see his flicks is a sucker, the victim of a well-accomplished scam artist. The dog-and-pony show that accompanies each production is just for Boll’s enjoyment. He’s nothing more than a circus act, and his ridiculous, Golden Palace-sponsored boxing match against Internet bloggers was proof of that.

Which is why it infuriates me that he is attempting to tackle the Holocaust with any kind of self-proclaimed sincerity.

I’m sorry, you don’t spend the better part of a decade churning out pure, undiluted shit on film and then tell me with a straight face that you are attempting to make an artsy, historical period piece. I’m supposed to somehow believe the person behind BloodRayne is not going to take an epic shit on one of the greatest human tragedies of the past century?

C’mon, what do I look like, someone that bought a ticket to see Alone in the Dark?

The fact that Boll has the audacity to put his smug face in the goddamn teaser trailer is strike one through three for me. I can only imagine that anyone involved in this project is only doing so as a form of self-flagellation, because at this point, Boll’s presumptuousness is just painful - giving the man film gear is a license to kill brain cells.

(… Just hyperlinking to his stuff hurts my head.)

Look, anyone that knows me on a professional level will attest to the fact that I’m all for brave filmmaking and that I adore over-the-top, campy material, neither of which can be affiliated with Boll. And if he wanted to ruin his career with shitty videogame adaptations, that’s all fine and dandy, but let’s not shit on the grave of eight million dead Jews with some god-awful cinema.

So, Dr. Boll, if you’re reading this – and you are the type of person that would, given your penchant for Google searching your own name – I have something to say directly to you:

Fuck off.

That's-a spicy a meatball!

[Editor’s Note: Today’s blog post comes with a Parental Advisory warning on account of all the gory hyperlinking.]

After consuming a scrumptious plate of scrapple – which, oddly enough, looks and tastes like something you might see in a Lucio Fulci film – I finally decided to write down my thoughts on last weekend’s film du jour, Demons, which had been stirring in my mind for the past several days.

Now, I’m no virgin to the Italian greats of horror – I know my Fulci from my Mario Bava, I have a special section on my microSD card for Goblin soundtracks, and consider me giddy at the fact that it looks like Darren Aranofsky is channeling Dario Argento with Black Swan, if not ripping him off wholesale.

But, faithful readers, I was unprepared for how awesome Demons is, which is like Satan’s love letter to the cineplex (and ‘80s pop culture), as imagined by Argento and Mario Bava’s son, Lamberto. It encapsulates everything I love about Italian horror – the violence, the lighting, the atmosphere, everything.

The idea is simple - kids go into movie theater, but kids do not come out. Well, they do, but by the time the last two survivors literally climb their way out of the AMC 7 Circle of Hell, the world has been overrun by demons. And just when you think you might have been granted a reprieve from dread and despair, Bava and Argento toss a figurative Eff You to the audience as the credits roll.

(Suckers!)

It was earlier this year when I finally watched Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, as part of a lengthy research effort. What struck me then (and now), is that a lot of Italian horror sensibilities - namely the emphasis of style over logic and use of surreal imagery - seem to trace their way back to Lamberto’s father as a shared reference point.

For a lot of Americans, the Italian horror legacy is simply not in their wheel house; too gory to enjoy, too mean-spirited to tolerate and too misogynistic for our politically correct tastes. What gets lost in our particular Judeo-Christian translation of Italian horror is that Fulci, Argento, Bava, etc. have no interest in dealing with realism.

The Italians, in my humble opinion, are simply the best at making nightmares with feature-length running times. Y’know, the ones where you wake up in the middle of being eaten alive or trapped with no way out. Where the abrupt and unsettling nature of such jarring ethereal escapes permeate the rest of your thoughts for days.

Our recollection of how such events begin and end are hazy, but we always seem to remember the graphic imagery in vivid detail. The overwhelming sense of dread is so potent that it creates a lingering effect that rattles us long after the nightmare has ended.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like a good, ‘ole Italian horror flick?

Americans make horror films where characters are punished for violating an ideal set of principles: don’t drink, don’t engage in pre-marital sex, don’t do drugs, don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. The protagonist’s mortality is usually tied to their morality, and there is often a sense of hope – no matter how bleak – somewhere near the end. We are driven to resolve situations, even the scary ones, and survive.

In contrast, the Italians conjure up surreal, and graphic imagery that seems to insinuate that anything that could go wrong, will go wrong – and then some. There is no rhyme and reason to the terrible situations characters find themselves in, because – shocker! – there is nothing realistic about them.

The best part about the absence of morality from Italian horror is that being an upstanding citizen doesn’t really help your odds, nor does being a complete tool make you a shoe-in to get knocked off first. Heck, one of my favorite characters from Demons, Tony the Pimp, doesn’t meet his maker until half a dozen or so have already been brutally murdered. And he’s a pimp!

(Editor’s Note: Wouldn’t Tony the Pimp be an awesome cereal box mascot?)

Yes, the Italians end up sacrificing linear logic (and some restraint), but the sooner you stop trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, the sooner you end up coming to the conclusion that these guys are just in the business of filming our nightmares – the graphic violence is entirely separated from realism (unlike our own, fucked-up brand of filmmaking).

And in that respect, Demons is very much Bava and Argento’s visual confirmation of that. It’s violent and gory and ugly and mean and grim, but then, so are my dreams.

The beginning of the end of the beginning

And then there was silence.

If you had been wondering – all two of you – where I had been hiding this past summer, rest your troubled minds with the knowledge that my life has been a series of planes, trains and automobiles. A cross-country trip, an Oceanside vacation and a 107-page screenplay have stripped my weary body of most of its free time. Blogging, it seems, is one of a handful of activities that fell to the wayside.

Coincidentally, my pal, confidant and producing partner, Mike Knowlan, has abandoned his inferior, but oddly enjoyable blog. Could this lull in activity from both prolific bloggers be connected? If Scott Pilgrim is released in theaters, and nobody is around to see it, did it even really exist?

(Sorry, Edgar. Still love y’ah.)

It’s hard to describe the summer of two-thousand and ten, an enjoyable creative and spiritual odyssey for myself, without delving into details. But details are scarce in this business and readers shall receive none. Instead, you shall receive a synopsis:

I flirted with romance, I conquered the road, I got some behind-the-camera experience, I ran on the beach, I lost a small person in body weight, I saw Christopher Nolan run a clinic on how to direct a blockbuster, I finished a book, I bought two CDs, I reconnected with nostalgia, and most importantly, I finally completed the first draft of my feature-length screenplay.

Now the important work begins.

I must turn a waffling, mediocre first draft into something fun. Something - as the Hollywood lingo goes - “electric”. Something that my brother would pay good money to see, and my mother (a woman who asked me to write a romantic-comedy starring that “lovable” Zac Ephron instead) would avoid like the plague.

For once in my non-existent writing career, I feel relatively confident about a project. Not necessarily because of the people involved (or in spite of them), but rather because the material is flexible and capable – two prerequisites when dealing with an unknown property with absolutely no capital.

Ideas are brewing. Previous etchings are being erased. And October, the birthing ground for most of my creative ideas, is just around the corner. And who knows, maybe some blog posts will be written.

Shots fired, Mr. Knowlan.