Up until a couple weeks ago, I'd never seen a Uwe Boll film. The main reason for this is I heard his movies are complete garbage. Knowing I was going to run into him at Comic-Con, I took it upon myself to rent a couple of his movies. I was about midway through watching Bloodrayne when I decided there was a very good chance I would skip out on Alone in the Dark (which I had also rented).

I thought Michael Madsen's performance was lazy, Michelle Rodriguez's accent laughable and the narrative disjointed. It was hard to care about anyone or anything in the movie. But the movie had one great thing going for it … it was violent. It has some of the most violent scenes I've seen in a movie. One thing I noticed right away about Uwe … he feels there is a serious lack of swords being thrust through faces and he wants fix that problem right away.

It pains me to write what I just wrote because I think I love Uwe Boll, the man. The man is insane and I mean that in all the right ways. The good news I actually liked what I saw of the clips in Postal. It's at least more accomplished work. Two terrorists who are about the fly a plane into the World Trade Center start bickering over how many virgins they're going to get when they martyr themselves. It may cross the line, but I'm surprisingly interested in seeing the work as a whole.

Boll is a guy so fed up with constant bashing from critics, specifically the online community (he called Harry and Quint of AICN "retards" in an interview I read) that he actually challenged five of his harshest critics to step into the ring with him last September. Golden Palace sponsored the event which was called "Raging Boll" (Boll trounced all five opponents, by the way). Stepping into the ring with your critics means, of course, nothing but I knew I had to meet this man .

Boll was at Comic-Con this week to promote his latest film, Postal. This film is a departure from Boll's video game adaptations in that it is an unhinged satire that is sure to offend everybody.

The whole event was kind of sloppily handled to be honest. Boll was all over the place in the room and it wasn't until midway through the scheduled time that we were showed clips of Postal. Then a panel discussion was opened up. I was scheduled for a one-on-one but the way things were headed, I was going to be late for my Hatchet panel so I had to duck out but I got more than enough from the panel of questions.

Present at the panel were Uwe Boll and Postal star Zack Ward. I'm not going to present the questions but give you an idea as to where the answers were coming from.

When asked where the film sprouted from, Boll stated it was born from his frustration from everything from the Bush administration to censorship in general. " … This is why we have the full frontal nudity or we have a scene where we shoot nothing but children. Because it's so stupid, like … you cannot shoot a dog in a movie, you cannot shoot a kid in a movie … so we did it intentionally where we have a slow-mo shoot-out, where by accident we have the parents running around but by accident, only the kids are getting shot. "

When asked if he intended on releasing this film unrated, Boll said "No, we got an R rating. So the MPAA got the satire. And we were super surprised and now the distribution company is a little pissed about that because I don't have to cut it."

On offending families affected by September 11th: "I know, of course it may be offensive to people who were involved in September 11th and lost people there, I know, but you cannot treat people [differently] … and if you make a satire, you a satire. You have to be offensive."

I asked Boll about Lisa Schwartzbaum's recent comments in EW about skipping movies she refers to as torture porn. Boll did not respond kindly. "I think there are people that like genre movies. And a lot of 'serious' critics, not. So they like going to Sundance and seeing movies with people talking at a kitchen table and then idiots like the Weinstein Bros, buying those movies and they see later what pieces of shit they bought."

And there you have him. The man, the myth, the legend.

Related post categories: Comic-Con, Features : Postal, Uwe Boll

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