My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane: Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Trigger-Happy Teutonic Book-Exclusive Case File: Postal

  On a chilly day in January 2005 in Chicago, three Chicago-based film critics for The A.V. Club—myself, editor Keith Phipps, and film editor Scott Tobias—descended on the screening room to catch an early-morning preview of the videogame adaptation Alone In The Dark. There was no real reason for all three of us to be at the screening. There was little chance we’d find ourselves passionately agitating for Alone In The Dark come awards time. A culture-wide debate on its aesthetic merits seemed unlikely.

  Yet there we were all the same, inexplicably geeked about what was about to transpire. We somehow sensed that Alone In The Dark would be no run-of-the-mill crapfest. Our bad-movie Spidey senses were tingling uncontrollably with the promise that we were about to experience a film so spectacularly inept that it would instantly join Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and Plan 9 From Outer Space in the pantheon of anti-greats. A preposterous creature named Uwe Boll was sending out a trash-culture version of the Bat Signal, secretly alerting bad-movie aficionados that Dark was something special.

  Our collective hunch was instantly validated by an opening-credit crawl that incoherently laid out endless exposition about terrifying beasties, lost Native American tribes, and other convoluted gobbledygook that explains and explains without actually explaining anything. This opening-exposition orgy obfuscates rather than edifies. The guffaws began early. They never stopped.

  Boll got everything so wrong that it somehow felt right. It was perfect in its imperfections, like Boll’s delusional belief that putting Tara Reid’s hair in a schoolmarmish bun and covering her bloodshot, dilated eyes with glasses made her look like a Brown professor. Or the exquisitely redundant casting of Christian Slater and Stephen Dorff—the gold- and silver-medal winners in the Next Jack Nicholson Olympics—as the film’s male leads. Alone In The Dark affirmed the ascendancy of a great bad filmmaker.

  After stumbling giddily out of Dark, we were left to contemplate the enigma of Uwe Boll. The reality was far more spectacular than anything we could have imagined. If Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans and message-board geeks could have created the ultimate bad filmmaker, they couldn’t have come up with a more perfect figure than Boll.

  The Boll that emerges in the Alone In The Dark DVD commentary is a strangely hypnotic cross between Dr. Strangelove, a bizarro-world Werner Herzog, and a conspiracy theorist convinced that the American film industry exists solely to keep Uwe Boll down.

  Boll’s audio commentaries serve as Rupert Pupkin–like stand-up routines where, in a Teutonic bark, Boll rails against films that trumped his at the box office; accuses studios, actors, and theaters of institutional cowardice; makes casually racist comments; castigates Reid for not “losing her bra” for his film; and jokes about Owen Wilson’s much-publicized suicide attempt.

  In 2006, Boll didn’t merely lash out petulantly at his online detractors like a 10-year-old in the midst of a temper tantrum; he literally challenged a handful of his most ferocious critics to box him. Is there a better way to settle artistic differences than with fisticuffs?

  Given how terrible Boll’s films are, how the hell does he keep getting the money to make more movies? The answer is perfectly in keeping with his demented carnival-barker persona. According to a 2008 profile in the New York Times, Boll’s films have been funded through a loophole in the German tax system that allows investors to claim their investments as a write-off. And his films do much better at home than in theaters; according to the Times, theatrical grosses constitute only about 15 percent of their overall revenue.

  Dr. Uwe Boll—he has a doctorate in literature, bizarrely yet perfectly enough—really is The Producers’ Max Bialystock. Boll’s 2008 Postal was his answer to Springtime For Hitler, only instead of a gay romp with Adolf and Eva, Boll promised madcap shenanigans with Osama bin Laden, 9/11, mass murderers, and a rogues’ gallery of scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells, and glorified con artists that includes Dave Foley’s penis, Verne Troyer, and Boll himself.

  Postal was an adaptation of two notorious, vilified videogames (Postal and its sequel), but it was also an extension of Boll’s shtick as an angry outsider railing impotently at the Hollywood establishment, the compromises of the film industry, and propriety. True to form, Boll announced a big 1,600-theater rollout for Postal that magically morphed into a four-screen release when I was assigned to review it. Well, sort of assigned to review it.

  “You know, you don’t have to do this. I know it’s out of the way and playing at an inconvenient hour. We can always cover it next week, or on DVD. I’m giving you an out,” my editor Keith offered, mercy in his eyes. But the die had been cast long ago. You know the role friends, family, love, community, religion, and public service play in your life? That’s the role bad movies play in mine. I was born into this. Writing about ridiculous movies isn’t just a job; it’s a sacred calling. So the prospect of traveling an hour and a half to see Postal at a funky, only occasionally active repertory theater called the Portage was irresistible.

  When I arrived at the Portage for the five o’clock screening of Postal, the man selling tickets seemed bewildered. “How, uh, did you find out about this screening? I mean, it’s not even listed in [Chicago alt-weekly] The Reader.”

  “I’m actually reviewing this for A.V. Club,” I blurted defensively. “Incidentally, how did this come to play here? Did Boll rent out the theater or something?” “Damned if I know,” the ticket taker said.

  I bought a grape Fanta and popcorn and entered the theater. The Portage is huge; it seats about 1,500. The absence of any other patrons made it seem even bigger. There were literally three times more people working the showing than attending it. Moviegoing, that consummate group activity, had suddenly become weirdly private. Screening Uwe Boll’s Postal in a sacred cathedral of film was like a black-velvet Elvis painting occupying an entire wall of the Louvre: a terrible waste of a beautiful space.

  When I got up to use the bathroom halfway through the film, the guy working concession quipped, “Do you want me to stop it for you?” When I left the theater, the projectionist came down and asked me what I thought of the film. I told him I’d expected something far worse, and he confessed, “The opening scene, you know, where the terrorists are arguing about the exact number of virgins they’ll receive in paradise, it’s almost, you know, kind of—” and then, measuring his words very carefully, “—mildly amusing.” This mild amusement seemed to surprise him tremendously.

  Postal begins by making sport of the single darkest moment in recent American history. It opens with a pair of terrorists in the cockpit of a plane headed into the World Trade Center, contemplating the exact nature of the reward awaiting them in paradise. They agree that martyrdom is a small price to pay for an afterlife involving 99 or 100 virgins, but what about 50 virgins? Or 10 virgins? What if they had to split those 10 virgins? How long would that last them? They decide to call Osama bin Laden (played by Larry Thomas, Seinfeld ’s Soup Nazi), who regrets to inform them that due to an excess of martyrs, he can’t promise any more than 20 virgins. This is a deal breaker, but before the terrorists succeed in taking the plane on a detour to the Bahamas, a group of Americans storm the cockpit and accidentally steer the plane into the World Trade Center. Cue the opening credits.

  This opening is the closest any Uwe Boll film will ever come to capturing the wry verbal humor of a classic Bob Newhart routine. Boll then recalibrates the film’s comic tone from “surprisingly subtle” to “screamingly broad” as he introduces us to a parade of All-American freaks.

  Postal takes place in ironically named Paradise, Arizona, a white-trash hellhole where Job-like antihero Dude (Zack Ward) is leading a life that is almost like suicide. Settled into a trailer park with his morbidly obese, trash-television-obsessed wife, Dude inhabits the tawdry world of The Jerry Springer Show. His wife cheats on him, his neighbors detest him, and h
e steps into dog shit upon leaving his sad abode.

  Trying to retain your self-respect while acting in a Uwe Boll movie is like trying to keep your head underwater without getting wet. Postal marks a milestone battle in Verne Troyer’s ongoing war on dignity. He’s aided in his quest by a perversely game Dave Foley as con artist/cult leader Uncle Dave; within five minutes of being introduced, Foley has exposed his flaccid penis; fallen asleep in a pile of nubile, nearly naked followers; smoked pot; and taken a dump on-screen.

  Boll would not demand that his actors forgo their dignity without leading by example. He appears in Postal as himself, the lederhosen-wearing owner of Little Germany, a theme park funded by Nazi gold. Little Germany has come into the possession of a collection of sought-after dolls of a popular sentient-scrotum figure named Krotchy, which figures prominently in the plot. Dude and Uncle Dave want to abscond with the Krotchy dolls as a way of paying off Dave’s debt to the IRS. Osama bin Laden and his minions, meanwhile, plan to use them to spread avian flu.

  Whenever I visit Europe, I’m amused at how well movies depicting the United States as a cesspool of violence, lust, and insanity do overseas. Postal starts with the European conception of God’s own U.S.A. as an ultraviolent realm where everyone packs heat and gunfights break out every half hour, then takes it to comic extremes. During a single shoot-out, Boll is shot in the crotch, a missile destroys a coffee stand called Grind Zero, children are murdered indiscriminately, and Verne Troyer, playing himself, punches a young person in the penis before ending up locked inside his own suitcase with only a glow-in-the-dark dildo for company.

  Postal tops itself with every successive outrage. Soon, Troyer is forcibly sodomized by a thousand monkeys, and Uncle Dave is unceremoniously offed after discovering he’s gay en route to a climactic trailer-park shoot-out where Dude delivers a big speech to the assembled hate mongers: “It’s time to empty our hands of guns so we can fill our hands with hugs.”

  It isn’t enough for Boll to take down every American institution and kill half the populace of Paradise. He ends the film with Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush skipping hand in hand through a field before a nuclear apocalypse. In Postal, American society is rotting from the inside out. The film pushes Ward’s everyman to the point where grabbing a gun and killing a whole bunch of motherfuckers is the only sane, reasonable thing to do.

  I was pleasantly surprised by Postal the first time around, if only because my expectations could not have been lower. It’s less a film than a 100-minute-long juvenile prank, but it boasts a vulgar, confrontational energy that makes it surprisingly engaging. Of course, audiences don’t go to Uwe Boll movies to laugh with him; they come to laugh at him. Boll makes it easy by being such a juicy target. With Postal, Boll finally wanted people to laugh at his movie. Understandably, that confused the irony-damaged “fans” who don’t like Boll’s movies so much as they “like” his movies, ’cause they’re so “good” and their creator is such a “genius.”

  Postal reminded me why I love Boll even more than I hate him. There are plenty of bad filmmakers out there, but with the exception of The Room’s Tommy Wiseau, no contemporary creator of bad movies has cultivated such a strong cult of personality. Like Ed Wood before him, Boll lives his “art,” even if that art revolves around empty provocation and terrible videogame adaptations.

  At the risk of losing face in front of my fellow critics and readers, I have to admit that I, like the projectionist, found Postal almost, you know, kind of mildly amusing.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Dave Foley on Postal

  With his boyish good looks and laid-back charm, affable straight man Dave Foley emerged as the breakout star of beloved Canadian sketch comedy group Kids in the Hall on their eponymous television show. After the troupe broke up, Foley starred as a news director on the cult sitcom NewsRadio, provided the lead voice in the Pixar film A Bug’s Life, and appeared in the films Dick, MonkeyBone, and Sky High.

  Dave Foley: The original script I got reminded me of late-’60s/early-’70s satirical pieces like Little Murders, the Jules Feiffer play. I thought it was a nice, dark, weird script. By the time I got up to Vancouver to shoot it, they had added in all the 9/11 stuff. I kept trying to talk them out of it, saying, “You’re just going to kill the movie with this.” Postal was also, of course, my cock’s film debut. There was a scene where I was lying in bed with a bunch of naked girls, and I said, “When I watch movies where there’s some middle-aged guy lying in bed with a bunch of naked girls and he’s fully dressed, that just seems creepy. So if they’re going to be naked, then I should be naked too.” Otherwise, it just seems weird.

  Nathan Rabin: Were you hesitant about working with a director as infamous as Uwe Boll?

  DF: That’s one of the reasons I agreed to do it. I kept reading all these unbelievably angry postings on blogs by these Internet nerdy guys, pounding away at their computers writing [Adopts nerdy voice:] “He is totally destroying the integrity of this game! He must stop destroying the integrity of these wonderful games with his shitty movies!” You just think, “Here’s an idea. Why don’t you just tighten up your bathrobes and shut up?” They just hated him so much. That was also around the time he challenged all of his Internet critics to a boxing match, and a lot of them accepted, not realizing that he was a prize-winning amateur boxer and that he wasn’t kidding, he was really going to beat them up. So all these Internet nerds came up to box Uwe and were a little shocked when they got in the ring and he actually beat them up.

  NR: What’s it like being directed by Uwe Boll?

  DF: He’s actually a really, really sweet guy. He’s a really nice guy. I liked him a lot. His crew loves him, they’re very dedicated to him. But movies are almost secondary to him. His real art form is being Uwe. It’s almost like a performance-art thing. I think his real art form is the combat with fans and critics, and the movies are just artifacts of this creation that’s bigger than his movies. While we were working on the movie, he was constantly looking at cuts of his last movie and preparing his next movie. As he’s directing, he can’t wait for the movie he’s doing to be done. He’s not interested in the movie he’s doing; he’s more interested in the next one, and the one he did before it.

  NR: It’s almost a machine-type situation.

  DF: He’s much more interested in the controversy concerning the one he just finished and preparing the controversy for the next one. I’m sure when he was doing the movie after Postal, he was obsessed with Postal. He likes the conflict with the public. He likes pissing off the bloggers.

  NR: Postal, more than any of his other films, feels like a product of the confrontational Uwe Boll persona.

  DF: I think he really did want to address a lot of the bullshit post-9/11 mentality, the idea that everyone becomes a hero. Not everyone’s a hero. Being a victim doesn’t make you a hero. Being murdered doesn’t make you a hero necessarily; it makes you a murder victim. But people were talking about the people who died in the Twin Towers being heroes, and the country was going crazy. He did want to make a statement about that.

  NR: Do you think that hurt the film?

  DF: I think that crashing a plane into the Twin Towers at the start of the film hurt it. I said, “Look, even though I think a lot of that scene is funny, a lot of the dialogue in that scene is funny, if you do that, you’re never going to get on a screen in North America. So why do it?”

  NR: But presumably that was part of the reason he made the film, to be provocative, to deliberately piss people off.

  DF: Yeah. To me, as long as it’s funny, that’s fine, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot entirely, though God knows I’ve certainly done that myself in my own career.

  Kicking A Man While He’s Down Case File #132: The Love Guru

  Originally Posted June 19, 2008

  While researching this My Year Of Flops entry, I came across a 2006 New York Times article that time has rendered hilariously ironic. The article, titled “Mike
Myers: Intentional Man Of Mystery,” depicts Myers as the Stanley Kubrick of lowbrow comedy, a master technician who’d rather disappear from the spotlight for years than compromise his meticulous comic vision. Like Gallo Wines, Myers will serve no pee, masturbation, or nutsack joke before its time. The article describes Myers’ lengthy hiatus from appearing in front of movie cameras “as a bid to recharge his creative batteries as well as a reflection of his perfectionism and high standards.”

  Though Myers declined to be interviewed for the piece, it paints a flattering portrait of him as a consummate artist methodically planning his next masterpiece, while less-talented peers like Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Jim Carrey flood theaters with product. The implication is that they aren’t nearly as devoted to their craft as Myers.

  Myers fans had reason to be optimistic, however, as the prickly superstar had already begun road-testing his latest genius creation in comedy clubs throughout Greenwich Village. The character was a smiling, beatific, bearded guru named Pitka, who would eventually become the focus of 2008’s The Love Guru.

  Though infinitely less flattering, a scathing Entertainment Weekly profile of Myers from 2008 reiterates the Myers-as-genius-perfectionist line. EW’s Josh Rottenberg writes that Myers’ “humor is based on artful contrivance, every detail machine-tooled with painstaking precision,” then quotes Love Guru producer Michael De Luca as arguing, “Just because it’s comedy doesn’t mean it’s not as important to Mike as There Will Be Blood is to Paul Thomas Anderson.”

  A smart, talented, accomplished writer-actor like Myers spending years meticulously creating, rehearsing, and refining an obnoxious one-note cartoon like Guru Pitka is like a group of brilliant scientists working around the clock for a decade to build a malfunctioning fart machine. Yet Myers and his agent were so confident about the commercial prospects of his latest creation that they began discussing sequels with Paramount more than a year before filming began. Though less prolific than his peers, Myers was a central component of three of the most successful comedy franchises of the past 25 years: Wayne’s World, Austin Powers, and Shrek. The stakes and expectations were extraordinarily high for 2008’s The Love Guru, his first foray in front of the cameras in five long years. If The Love Guru was even half as successful as Shrek or Austin Powers, it would mean a fortune not just in ticket sales but also in merchandising.