My Year of Flops (14 page)

Ford Fairlane
is perhaps the best possible vehicle for Clay. Harlin and cinematographer Oliver Wood, who went on to shoot
Face/
Off
and the Matt Damon
Bourne
movies, give the film an electric, neon sleaziness awash in lurid reds and cool blues. Joel Silver was so impressed by Harlin's work here that he hired him to direct
Die Hard 2: Die Harder
based on its dailies alone. If Harlin could make Clay look like an icon of swaggering masculine cool, then just imagine what he could do with stars who didn't personify doucheiness.

Ford Fairlane
is a live-action comic book sticky with the glitter and grime of the Sunset Strip and the sad glam-rock bastard child that was hair metal. It's a film of big hair and tight, tiny costumes; gleeful, unabashed vulgarity; and a charismatic hero with a certain cornball charm. It wasn't hurting for production values, either. It's a product of the Joel Silver adolescent-wish-fulfillment factory, so you better believe that shiny shit blows up but good, and that hired-gun scriptwriter Daniel Waters, well on his way to squandering the abundant promise of his script for
Heathers,
gives some of the dialogue a profane, pulpy panache.

Ford Fairlane
has one big flaw: It isn't particularly fun or funny. My inner adolescent wanted to surrender to its puerile charms, but the adult in me wouldn't let him. Turn off the sound, and
Fairlane
is a candy-colored feast for the eyes, but the film is too inextricably rooted in the machismo, misanthropy, and misogyny of Clay's stage persona to qualify as even the guiltiest of pleasures.

Clay had every opportunity to cross over from cult hero to mainstream superstar—a high-rated HBO special, comedy albums, sold-out tours, a concert film, and a big-budget, Joel Silver–produced vehicle—but
Dice Rules
and
The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane
are rare instances where people lost money underestimating the taste and intelligence of the American public. Un-fucking-believable. Ohhhhhh!!!!!

Dice Rules: Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

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.