We Have a New Enemy

I like bad movies, or rather fantasy movies people consider bad.

Dungeons and Dragons 1 sits proudly on my DVD shelf with it's £2.99 bargain sticker unremoved. I wish I had the Region 1 DVD with all the games and stuff on it.

Dungeons and Dragons 2 is on a DVD-R as a XViD file. I might even make a trip to playusa.com and get the DVD this month.

Hawk the Slayer was not rubbish. Krull is a masterpiece IMHO and its soundtrack is one of James Horner's best.

The only "bad" fantasy film I view as an abomination against man is the Sword and the Sorcerer, a film so terrible it is like watching a Clockwork Orange brainwashing video with your eyes being removed from your sockets whilst dunked in a vat of lemon juice and with fire and acid coat various important parts of your anatomy.

Also Earthsea was kind of like Sword and the Sorcerer but only with the fire and acid if you read the books.

Surprisingly I'd never heard of Uwe Boll until I caught word of his latest "masterpiece", In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Movie.

As this article explains Uwe Boll is a director/producer who makes games based off B-level computer games. Like House of the Dead or Bloodrayne. Or Alone in the Dark, which if it had been based off the original Cthulu-inspired Alone in the Dark game could have been a masterpiece. House of the Dead is apparently actually "Beach of the Dead" (Uwe gets a good deal on using this particular beach in all his movies). In fact this beach appears in all his movies in some form. I'm told watching this movie is less fun than watching someone else shoot their way through the game.

Uwe Boll funds his films by a loop-hole in German law meaning that if the movie tanks the investors get a massive tax-break. It's like the Producers - they actually want the movie to be bad.

Uwe Boll somehow manages to get A list actors like Ben Kingsley or Jason Statham into his movies by casting literally 2 weeks before the movie begins shooting and getting them at bargain basement prices because they have a hole in their schedule.

Uwe spends most of his interviews writing in pigeon-English about how he compares himself to Speilberg or Tarnatino.

Anyway Dungeon Siege The Movie is his latest effort to make a film in the style of Peter Jackson. It sounds similar to the game (which was just Diablo in 3D) - a young farmer (called Farmer by some twist of fate) finds his farm has been devestated by Krugs and his family taken. Fortunately (as I thought when playing the game) said Farmer is also a pretty good warrior/wizard/rogue and proceeds to go on a bender of violence, killing lots of Krugs and stuff.

And look at the cast - Burt Reynolds, Ron Perlman, John Rhys-Davies, Matthew Lillard, Kristanna Loken, Leelee Sobieski, Will Sanderson, Jason Statham, former NFL star Brian J. White, and German supermodel Eva Padberg. Not exactly the Lord of the Rings cast (except Rhys-Davies), more like the cast of a really odd British/Goodfellas gangster movie. The action is choreographed by the guy that did Hero.

Here's where the Tarantino analogy fits in - the film weighs in at 4 suspiciously LotResque-length hours and Uwe was threatening to split it into 2 parts a la Kill Bill. He's no longer doing this for the cinema release, probably given that

a) the tax laws in Germany he was exploiting have just been changed.
b) most folk who paid to see part one wouldn't make the same mistake twice.
c) he can do an "extended cut" DVD.

Now I know that certain persons who read this blog also like bad movies. I expect to see Dungeon Siege on their DVD shelves before long. I know I will probably buy it, if only to laugh for 4 hours or so.

In the meantime I plan on seeing decent fantasy flicks like Narnia, Sword of Xanten and so forth. In the meantime I will let IMDB influence my views on Uwe Boll.