The 5 Uwe Boll Ball Movies Ranked


Before we start, two observations that apply to all of these films and need to be addressed.

Firstly, they all look very good. Both in terms of production values and how they are shot, all of the movies show a surprisingly high level of technical ability within the crew. The cast are, mostly, similarly talented. Whilst there are a couple of bad performances, most are quite good IF you ignore the material they have to deal with. These are multimillion-dollar productions, and they have the look and feel of multimillion-dollar productions that don’t sap your will to watch. As such, any and all criticism has to be placed directly at the feet of the director and producer, Uwe Boll, for the active decision to make such god-awful movies when they could so very easily have made perfectly okay ones.

Secondly, the sex scenes are atrocious. They are not sexy, most of them are not needed, there is next to no chemistry between anyone involved, and even the ones that you can just about accept as part of the plot are excessively long to the point of dullness. These films were obviously made with a predetermined boob quota and the assumption that showing a breast is, in and of itself, erotically charged. The most pointless was in Along In The Dark, as it could have been cut from the film and made zero impact on any of the story even though it involved two of the main characters. The most offensive was in BloodRayne 3; wherein the hero and unconscious heroine in a van taking them to a concentration camp, with zero romantic build-up, decide to have wild, freaky sex because he groped her whilst she was unconscious. Everything else is somewhere between those two points, and all are down to “artistic” decisions Uwe Boll made.
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Exterminators Of The Year 3000 (1983)


It would be a lie to say this film was selected purely on its title. The cover and the trailer both suggested that there was a highly enjoyable Mad Max 2 rip-off to be experienced. The expectations were set to “all the violence, all the post-apocalyptic wasteland couture, but with none of the plot getting in the way”. When it became readily apparent that it was an English script performed by a mostly monolingual Italian cast the joy and hope that this was going to be cinematic mayhem, unfettered by any artistic responsibility, was just added to. With the bar set that low, how could we possibly be disappointed?
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New Rose Hotel (1998)


This film is driven by the utterly devastating double act of Willem Dafoe as “X” and Christopher Walken as “Fox”, in what are their only co-starring roles on-screen (because otherwise, the world would collapse from the combined weight of their awesomeness). Both are involved in the seedy world of corporate espionage; Walken the work-orientated master and Dafoe the experienced but more money-focused journeyman. They have managed to get a job extracting Hiroshi, a highly valuable R&D scientist (played, mostly through video surveillance and sci-fi filters, by  Yoshitaka Amano) from his current job to a new place of employment. To do this they have recruited Sandi (Asia Argento) to seduce him.
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X – The Unknown (1956)


When Hammer Films decided to break away from the dramas and comedies that were the staples of their first twenty years of ripping off Ealing Studios, they did so with “The Quatermass Xperiment”; a remake of the 1953 BBC Television series written by Nigel Kneale. The studio was over the moon when it got an X rating for all it’s terror and tension, ensuring that everyone would want to see it and that the press would hate it. Combined with ground-breaking special effects, the cultural excitement of the then-not-even-named “Space Race”, and the marketing genius of putting it in cinemas the same weekend as when the BBCs Quatermass 2 series started, it was an amazing financial success. Thus, Hammer immediately started work on a follow up film, with only the slight snag of Nigel Kneale telling them they couldn’t use any of his work or characters because Hammer had changed so much with the first one.
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Starcrash (1978)

StarCrash is a 1978 space opera written and directed by Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi, and you’ll work out within the first two minutes that this is a blatant Star Wars cash-in. It was filmed in and around Rome, using an extensively Italian cast and crew, but it’s technically an American movie because the money came from the Wachsberger Brothers, and Roger Corman was the distributor. Today we would probably call it a Mockbuster, but, unlike everything churned out by companies like Asylum, this is actually quite a fun watch.
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Upgrade (2018)


Upgrade starts out as a “by-the-book” bit of cyberpunk sci-fi. I-Could-Swear-That’s-Tom-Hardy, burly house-husband and committed future luddite, and his charming wife, Succesful-Generica, live in Now, But With Self-Driving Cars And Police Drones (population: lots). Fifteen minutes in, they get ambushed in their fancy car, him getting paralysed and her getting fridged in an unnecessarily sexual manner. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Tom Hardy then broods over being paraplegic and widowed, until Jared Leto-Lite offers to implant him with Legally-Not-The-Venom-Symbiote, later upgraded with Siri: Ultimate Fighting Championship Edition.
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R.O.T.O.R. (1987)


I remember this film from back when I was a nerdy kid, desperate to rent any sci-fi and horror movie I had never heard of and that the local store only had one copy of in. The cover of the box was amazing, simply staggeringly bold and enticing. It promised adventure, horror and shock, beyond belief. It was intimidatingly cool, so I never got around to renting it and stuck with safer options like Brain Dead and Fortress. Turns out that my adolescent brain may have made the right decisions though, as this is an absolute rust bucket of a film.
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These Are The Damned (1962)


Once upon a time, mostly before they could get a steady supply of really good blood effects that would wash off of diaphanous nighties, Hammer Films did a lot of business with its Sci-Fi horrors including the renowned Quatermass series and the mostly forgotten X The Unknown and Spaceways. Unfortunately, they didn’t make Village of the Damned, so they released These Are The Damned as frightening children were in at the time. Directed by Joseph Losey, in exile from the USA for being a card-carrying communist, and reasonably based a book by H.L. Lawrence, it was applauded by The Times upon its release and has been recognised as a highpoint of British Sci-Fi cinema.
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The Last Days of American Crime (2020)


There’s been a lot of hype going around Netflix’s latest action-adventure, The Last Days of American Crime; mostly that it’s a terrible movie and that Netflix should be ashamed of themselves for making it. But, having sat through its 148 minutes run time (138, if you discount the solid 10 minutes of credits), I believe that it’s not that bad a movie. It’s just a bit too long, a bit undercooked, and nihilistic in an unfashionable manner.
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RobotJox (1990)


It seems such a simple concept; meld cold war tensions with a bit of post-apocalyptic dystopia and a whole load of massive robot combat. It has everything a 1990 audience could want: sinister and cynical futurism, the chance for a bit of “USA! USA!” optimism, and the timeless wonder of hundred-foot steel homunculi beating the tar out of each other. Yet somehow what should have been Stuart Gordon’s directorial mainstream breakthrough, after writing Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, became a by-line in his filmography. But was it as bad as the critics made out? Well, two out of three decent acts ain’t bad!!
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