Movies
Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead! Uwe Boll Announces Retirement From Filmmaking!
When it comes to video game-to-film adaptations, there is probably no one more reviled than Uwe Boll, the man who brought us Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, BloodRayne, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and Postal, as well as other original movies. Each of these films could conceivably become an ouroboros of “this one is worse than the others”, with no film able to distinguish itself as being particularly interesting or watchable. Honestly, it became somewhat of a joke whenever he got funding for a new film as none of his releases were profitable. Yes, House of the Dead earned more than its budget but we have to remember that theaters take a cut, marketing costs aren’t applied to budgets, and other factors come into play. Basically, he’s a colossal failure and the only thing he was good at was literally fighting critics in a boxing ring.
It seems that his constant string of failures have finally wore him down as Boll has told Metro that he will be retiring from filmmaking after the release of his upcoming film Rampage: President Down, the third film in the series he began back in 2009. He tells the site, “‘Rampage 3’ will be watched on Netflix, DVD or iTunes or whatever. They’ll say, ‘That wonderful movie! I liked it blah, blah, blah,’ then watch Avengers. With streaming everywhere there is just a big wave of movies flooding around and you have no impact.”
What it ultimately boils down to, Boll says, is that there is no money to be made doing this kind of work anymore:
The market is dead. you don’t make any money anymore on movies because the DVD and Blu Ray market worldwide has dropped 80 per cent in the last three years. That is the real reason; I just cannot afford to make movies. I can’t go back to student filmmaking because I have made so many movies in my life, and I can’t make cheaper and cheaper movies at my age. It’s a shame. I would be happy to make movies but it is just not financially profitable.
Boll hopes that his retirement will force critics to revisit his films with fresh eyes as he seems to still be very proud of his output. “Now when I don’t make any more movies maybe they’ll find the time to actually watch the movies, starting with Postal in 2005, the movies of the last ten years. They will see they were a lot of very interesting movies and a lot of movies that I think made sense and said a point about things. They deserve to be discussed bigger than they were,” he laments.
Still, he maintains a rather pompous attitude regarding his movies, going so far as to say that 2013’s Assault on Wall Street was a better film than Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2.
“It’s way better than Wall Street 2 by Oliver Stone. It’s better researched, it’s better written, it’s better, but it doesn’t have Michael Douglas. It’s not Jason Bourne or any bullshit movie where they make stuff up. My movies are real.”
Sure Uwe, you keep telling yourself that.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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