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Filmmaker Uwe Boll Found Dead
Online gaming and movie fans sought for questioning

Yanni Limbs, OP Contributor

German born filmmaker Uwe Boll (B/oodRayne, Alone in the
Dark) was found beaten to death in a Vancouver hotel
room yesterday morning while in town.scouting locations
for the upcoming video game to film adaptation, Hunter:
the Reckoning. Along with severe head trauma and multiple
contusions, an early coroner’s report suggests that an Xbox
controller was forcibly crammed into his rectum.
Additional details are pending police investigation,
although they also suggest that the crime may be the work
of the online video game community, coordinated with the
use of Internet message boards.

As a filmmaker, Boll was responsible for directing
numerous video game adaptations, including the aforemen-
tioned BloodRayne and Alone in the Dark, but also House of
the Dead and the upcoming In the Name of the King: a
Dungeon Siege Tale. The films that were released were heavily
panned by critics and were generally ignored by audiences.
Despite the general failure of his movies and his worsening
reputation, he had sufficient funding to produce all of
them.

  

 

Boll was especially demonized by the movie going and
gaming communities, given the overall poor quality of his
films. In one thread on the Internet Movie Database mes-
sage board (imdb.com), a message thread entitled, “What
would you do if you saw Uwe Boll in the street” invited
such replies as, “I would rip off his head and piss down his
neck, LOL,” and “I would strap him to a chair and say,
WTE, you are messing up our games, you freak before I
take a chainsaw and cut his arms off!!!!”

In interviews, Boll has been quick to blame the audi-
ence and critics for the failure of his movies. “Harry
Knowles is a big fat retart [sic],” Boll said in an E-mail
response to a scathing review of Alone in the Dark. “Harry
obviously doesn’t get it. I have a phD and I’ve already
made eight movies and I’ve been making my own movies
on 8mm [since] before you were born. How can you say
that?”

Many have suggested that Boll is permitted to make
films despite their failure due to a loophole in German tax
law, which allows his investors to still recoup a profit on

 

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films that fail miserably at the box office. Since the tax law
has been amended, this would have resulted in the end of
his directing career, although projects already in production
would be still covered by the previous tax law. These films
include Far Cry, Postal, and Fear Effect, all of which are
based on video games.

With Boll dead, it’s likely that the options for these
films will go back to their respective owners, although the
status of Hunter: The Reckoning remains in doubt, as a sig--
nificant amount of money has already been spent on it.
However, many video game fans have already lined up to
volunteer outside of the Vancouver film studio, expressing
interest in directing.

“It’s a tragedy, obviously,” noted Shaun Williamson
(White Noise, Jimmy Glick in Lalawood), who produced many
of Uwe Boll’s films. “Those films employed thousands of
people in the local film industry. While the movie fans
might not miss him, I certainly will.”

Uwe Boll was 40 years old.

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