On DVD/Netflix streaming: BLUBBERELLA (2011)

BLUBBERELLA
(Canada - 2011; 2012 US release)

Directed by Uwe Boll.  Written by Uwe Boll, Michael Christopher, Lindsay Hollister, and William Belli.  Cast: Lindsay Hollister, Brendan Fletcher, Michael Pare, Clint Howard, William Belli, Steffen Mennekes, Uwe Boll, Annett Culp.  (R, 86 mins)

I've toughed out every Uwe Boll movie since 2003's HOUSE OF THE DEAD.  I actually paid to see IN THE NAME OF THE KING in a theater.  I applauded him when he actually made a good film with STOIC.  I've stuck with him though the last few years when he no longer had German tax loopholes to rope in big names like Ben Kingsley, Jason Statham, Burt Reynolds, and Ray Liotta and all he could afford were the likes of Edward Furlong, Billy Zane, Michael Pare and Clint Howard. My point is that I know this filmmaker.  I know him better than he knows himself.  As the pre-eminent Bollologist of the Mobius Home Video Forum, it's my job.  It's...what I do.

And that more than qualifies me to say that Uwe Boll has hit rock bottom with BLUBBERELLA.

Shot in Croatia at the same time and on the same sets as BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH and Boll's still-unreleased drama AUSCHWITZ, BLUBBERELLA feels half-assed and was probably made up as it went along.  It's got numerous bits of stock footage recycled from BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH.  The outtakes during the closing credits even show a clapboard with "BLOODRAYNE 3" written on it! With the exception of stars/co-writers Lindsay Hollister and William Belli, and absent BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH star Natassia Malthe, the cast and crew of both films are identical.  They're even playing the same characters.  Boll conceived BLUBBERELLA as a spoof of the third BLOODRAYNE film, with largely the same plot, but with an emphasis on crude humor that fails to be funny.  Boll's done the shock comedy thing before with POSTAL, and that had a surprising number of legitimate laughs in it.  But BLUBBERELLA is just laziness of the lowest order, bringing to mind the inane and depressingly lucrative "just making the reference is funny enough" comedies of the loathsome Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (DATE MOVIE, EPIC MOVIE, MEET THE SPARTANS, etc).  How bad is BLUBBERELLA?  There's probably snuff films with more laughs.

"If anyone wants to greenlight EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS III, I promise to clear my schedule."

Blubberella (Hollister) is the sizable hero, a half-human/half-vampire superhero in 1940, "in a Jew-y part of town" as a caption states.  Voted most likely to marry a black man, Blubberella tries to find a nice guy on a dating site, but instead ends up taking on Nazi evil when she falls in with a crew of Resistance fighters, led by diminutive Boll regular Brendan Fletcher.  All of these actors/characters are holdovers from BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH except for the flamboyantly gay Vadge (Belli), who prompts Blubberella to say "Homosayswhat?"  Blubberella and crew take on a vampirized Nazi commandant (Michael Pare) and a mad doctor (Clint Howard) who have hatched a plan to make Hitler (played by Boll himself) immortal.

The humor is either outrageously offensive (Vadge spraying air freshener in a train car packed full of Jews bound for Auschwitz; Belli and Fletcher each playing a scene in blackface; jokes about rape) or intentionally anachronistic (Blubberella checking e-mail on a laptop and mentioning pilates).  The Friedberg/Seltzer comparison is apt considering that the references to things as varied as AMERICAN IDOL, PRECIOUS, CITIZEN KANE, Lindsay Lohan, Mickey Rourke, Michael Jackson, Corey Haim, and Heath Ledger's Joker just to name a few, are apparently supposed to be funny in and of themselves.  Now, you can make offensive jokes about race and Jews and whatnot and still have it be funny.  Mel Brooks is proof of that.  And even Boll made a joke about 9/11 in the opening scene of POSTAL and yes, I admit, I laughed at it.  But BLUBBERELLA is a lazy, throwaway piece of work, with 11 minutes of closing credits (!) required to pad it to just 86 minutes. Nobody's trying, every joke falls with a loud thud, and really, other than Uwe Boll, was anyone clamoring for a spoof of BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH?

Uwe Boll captured in a pensive moment on the set.