Uwe Boll - Reception and Reputation

Reception and Reputation

As of May 2011, House of the Dead (for which VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever described Boll as a "cinematic train wreck") and Alone in the Dark appear on the Internet Movie Database's Bottom 100 films list. Three of his films (Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, and BloodRayne) also appeared on GT Countdown's "Top 10 Worst Video Game Movies"; all were in the top five, with only Super Mario Bros. (at number 2) preventing them all from being in the top three; BloodRayne was ranked number one. In a review of Alone in the Dark, Rob Vaux states that the movie makes other "bad" movie directors feel better in comparison: "'It's okay,' they'll tell themselves, 'I didn't make Alone in the Dark.'" Another reviewer wrote that Alone in the Dark was "so poorly built, so horribly acted and so sloppily stitched together that it's not even at the straight-to-DVD level." For example, in one scene a character who was "killed" can be seen getting up as the actor prematurely made the move to get off the set. One critic has dubbed him as the "Jonas Brothers of movie directors".

When rumors surfaced that Boll had expressed interest in a Metal Gear Solid movie, and claimed to have been given a script to read, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima responded in his audioblog HIDECHAN, "Absolutely not! I don't know why Uwe Boll is even talking about this kind of thing. We've never talked to him. It's impossible that we'd ever do a movie with him." Boll later stated that he only thought he was doing the film because he was tricked by someone named Scithe who claimed to work for Konami.

Boll also made a bid to direct the upcoming World of Warcraft movie, but was turned away by the owners of the Warcraft franchise, Blizzard Entertainment who said: "We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you." Boll responded "Because it’s such a big online game suc­cess, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongo­ing income, what the com­pany has with it."

Blair Erickson, a writer of a treatment for Alone in the Dark, has written a critical account of his experience working with Boll, in which Erickson alleges that Boll stole ideas from prior movies and wanted to add elements to the story that were not true to the tone of the source material. Uwe chose to not use Erickson's script, citing reasons such as it having "not enough car chases."

Boll has blamed the poor theatrical performance of his early video game adaptations on his distribution company, Romar, and has filed a lawsuit against them. Boll's films prior to the release of House of the Dead were more positively received. The New York Times, for instance, gave Blackwoods a positive review, although most reactions to the film have been negative.

On X-Play's "Gphoria" awards show, one of the categories was "Game Most Deserving of an Uwe Boll Adaptation."

Boll received a rare "Worst Career Achievement" award at the 29th Golden Raspberry Awards on February 21, 2009 for In The Name of the King, 1968 Tunnel Rats, and Postal. Boll has been nominated for Razzies three times in total.

Boll has begun to sue BitTorrent users for illegally downloading his film, Far Cry, as a way to generate revenue from money thought lost to illegal file-sharing.