Uwe Boll Lashes Out Over Rampage 3 Funding

Uwe Boll is fed up and ticked off (although he would phrase it in much stronger terms).  The German-born producer/writer/director who currently resides in the Greater Toronto Area recently went on YouTube to badmouth KickStarter, Hollywood, and movie fans in general.

Wasn’t House of the Dead enough of an insult to movie lovers?

The cause for this rant is Boll’s current KickStarter campaign to raise funding for his film, Rampage 3.  The campaign is winding down on June 12th and appears that it will fall far short of its 50,000 euro goal.  This will be the second failed attempt to crowd fund Rampage 3 and the third failed crowd funding campaign for Boll (an attempt to fund Postal 2 in 2013 was also unsuccessful).

The original Rampage is often cited as Uwe Boll’s best film…for what little that is worth.

You can see Boll’s reaction to the campaign in the video at the top of this article (viewer discretion is advised due to Boll’s known fondness for profanity).  His response can be summed up as:  I’m taking my ball and going home.  Boll claims he is done with crowd funding and has enough money to “play golf till [he’s] dead”.  He also criticizes fans who give their money to support Marvel/Avengers films or movies about a “wizard in the forest”.

A lack of wizards notwithstanding, I would have thought Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, would have fallen under his ‘wizard in the forest’ classification.

In a follow-up video on that same day, Boll’s rambling tantrum continued.  For close to five minutes, he attempts to portray himself as a martyr who truly cares about his movies while everyone around him is only in it for the money.  George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez, and other celebrities are all called out as phonies who only do charitable acts when the camera is on them.  As he disses the foreign backers of blockbuster films, some of Boll’s comments come across as vaguely racist.  And Boll continues his attack on movie fans when he calls the “young people of today” stupid for watching “absurd” films like Iron Man and The Avengers that are “not real”.

BloodRayne: The Third Reich – Because vampires fighting Nazis is as real as it gets.

Boll is best known for adapting video games into films.  House of the Dead (2003), Alone in the Dark (2005), BloodRayne (2005) and its sequels, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007), Postal (2007), and Far Cry (2008) were all based on video games, were all directed by Boll, and were all almost universally panned by critics and movie goers.

Postal is, according to Boll, intentionally offensive.

Boll has been compared to ‘Worst Director Ever’ Ed Wood Jr.  To me that seems completely unfair…to Ed Wood.  Whereas Wood may have been seriously lacking in talent, he loved movies and spent his life struggling against his own shortcomings in an attempt to find his niche in Hollywood.  Boll often tries to sell himself as the put-upon struggling artist but all indications are to the contrary.  It is theorized that the real reason he turned to crowd funding was due to a tightening of German tax law.  In the past, loop holes allowed German backers to make money on failed films even when none of the production occurred in Germany.

Boll is also known for controversial publicity stunts.  Back in 2006, he challenged many of his critics to boxing matches.  In 2008, Boll reportedly agreed to retire from film making if an online petition received a million signatures.  Perhaps this ranting is just another attempt at publicity to boost a struggling crowd funding campaign.  If so, I guess I’ve fallen into the trap.