Help make the world a better place

As of today I'm adding a tl;dr segment to all my posts, regardless of length.

I'm not sure how many people in the world are familiar with a certain German director called Uwe Boll. He is responsible for some of the most unintentionally hilarious, comically amateurish, downright awful movies in the history of the multiverse. It should be noted that most of his movies so far have been based on videogame franchises, though none of them were what we call triple-A quality titles. His credits include House of the Dead, BloodRayne and the only movie to ever make me lose my appetite, Alone in the Dark. AitD was so depressingly bad, I couldn't find the will to speak, or even eat, while watching it. And as anyone who knows me will testify, there's precious few things that can make me lose my appetite.

As with most bad things, there's always some who will suggest that his movies are so bad that they're actually good, some weird sort of odd comical masterpieces. On that specific subject, I say bullshit. I'll admit I giggled at the train wreck that was House of the Dead, and during the first few moments of BloodRayne I thought the movie could be something of a dark, guilty pleasure, but it, along with the rest of his movies are just plain bad. Not good bad, Jesus-Christ-I-can-feel-my-brain-rotting-away bad. And there's so many of them!

It was funny the first time around, when House of the Dead was first released on the unsuspecting world, but the joke has gotten old now. In a sense, it was worth watching HotD just to see just how bad a movie can get, but with every consecutive movie it's becoming painfully obvious; Uwe Boll movies aren't worth watching, even if it's just for shits and giggles. It's like those jokes that people feel the need to continue on making, even though somebody killed it several minutes ago. Perhaps a 30 minutes long fart joke, if you will.

Not to mention that it seems like Uwe Boll himself is a colossal jackass. Back in 2006 he staged the "Raging Boll" event, where he, former light-weight boxer, could take on people who criticized his movies, i.e skinny Internet geeks. Naturally, it takes balls of steel to kick the living shit out of scrawny teenagers* but that wasn't the whole story. Boll was offered an actual fight by another former boxer, and creator of the Broken Saints series, Brooke Burgess, and the way he reacted to that, well... You should read the whole story as offered by Burgess himself in his blog, the article is called Raging Dickhead.

Now that you have a good idea of who we're talking about, let's get to the point. As mentioned in this article, Boll has claimed that he will quit making movies if one million people tell him to stop. Unsurprisingly, there's already an online petition about this, with a 5-digit number of signatures already. I have to confess I don't believe that Boll will go through with this, even if the petition reaches one million signatures, which in itself is also unlikely. I also hate online petitions, as I've probably mentioned in the past. But hey, this is a good cause, so get to it!

Also unsurprisingly, a number of Uwe Boll apologists have appeared throughout the Interwebs, claiming that if people don't like his movies they can just not watch them, and also that this is just gamers getting their panties up in a bunch because they're afraid that Boll will "discredit" their favorite medium. First of all, the "if you don't like it, don't bother with it" argument is as old as the counter-argument "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing" and both are equally shitty, so that's all I'm going to say on that one. As for fears of Boll discrediting games through his movies, that is completely unfounded. Not only because games and movies based on them are different entities, but more importantly, most movies based on videogames are already complete turds, regardless of whom they've been directed by.

It does seem that Boll has his own sort of fun while directing these atrocities of his, so I am not going to suggest he should stop making movies altogether, I'm not that mean. However, instead of finding inventive ways to fund his movies and luring good actors and actresses in them, effectively staining their names for all eternity, he should do what all other talentless amateurs do: Gather a bunch of friends, find a handycam and post the results on YouTube. He could even become a cult icon in that cesspool of humanity. Everyone's happy.

(Unless he becomes such a cult hit that he goes back to making movies. I doubt the world is that cruel, though.)

TL;DR version:

Douchebag German director says he'll stop making his shitty movies if enough people tell him to do so. Help prove that humanity isn't beyond redemption by signing this petition.

* That is to say, I don't condone the level of abuse some people have given Boll, which borderlines on stalking. I do think he needs to stop making movies though.