I don’t run many Uwe Boll stories because, frankly, I hate writing them. The man is his own publicity juggernaut and, while I actually have more respect for him than someone like Shawn Levy, he doesn’t need our help. (And I think I got it all out of my system with that Dungeon Siege review.)
But the further details of his ‘art-house’ endeavors Stoic and Janjaweed are too absurd to pass up. The latter film is something we really don’t need at all: Boll’s take on Sudanese genocide. Stoic, meanwhile, is based on a true story from 2006 about “three German men arrested for nonviolent offenses (played by Edward Furlong, Sam Levinson and Steffen Mennekes) rape and tortured a cellmate (Shaun Sipos) for 10 hours before helping the victim hang himself to cover up their crime.“
Both are low-budget (Stoic, now in post-production, cost $2 million) and rely heavily on improvisation.
It’s the level of improvisation — some might say intimidation — on the set of Stoic that makes the story. The cast all slept in their cell for a month, and the situation, as Boll says, “all started with a game of poker, where the loser had to eat a tube of toothpaste. He refused and was forced to eat it, threw up and was forced to eat his puke, and things escalated from there.“
The toothpaste was real, the puke fake, but Boll claims his camera lingers on the Brundlefly meal for quite a while. That bolsters claims that the film will garner an NC-17. Is Boll concerned? Hardly. “What can I lose? I got so bashed for my video game adaptations I don’t care anymore.” I’ll admit that the exploitation fan within me is interested, but I suspect I’ll be more satisfied by proven puke-eating classics like Audition and A Hole In My Heart.
(Credit message board readers Amphibatron and InTheShadows with pressuring me into writing this up after all.)