Postal
Unrated Edition
Directed by Uwe Boll
Starring Zack Ward, Dave Foley, J.K. Simmons, Verne Troyer, Erick Avari, Seymour Cassel
Vivendi Entertainment
Release date: August 26, 2008

Of all the filmmakers that have had cults spring up around them, from M. Night Shyamalan apologists to people who think Michael Bay is the savior we’ve been waiting for, none have deserved it any less that Uwe Boll. He found out one day that he had talent in the negative integers, and tried turning THAT into a marketing ploy. But even at this level of self-awareness, he gets all bent out of shape and starts fights (both verbal and physical) with people who don’t automatically agree with the sub-amateur shit he opts to pump out. At the drop of a hat, he turns into a kind of Teutonic Yosemite Sam.

So, sure enough, a bunch of quasi-retarded, uber-ironic film geeks have surrounded him, calling him “honest” and “a rogue.” In the Cult of Boll, the actual movies he makes become secondary. Wow… I guess you can’t underestimate the power of stupid people in medium-sized groups, either.

So now we have Postal, which is Boll’s first (intentional) comedy. Needless to say, Postal is not funny in the slightest, as Boll fails at everything he sets out to do. He’s quite splendid at being rancid and boring the living shit out of me, but I don’t think that was the plan.

Postal centers on a guy known only as “Postal Dude” (Zack Ward, whom Boll seems to have a crush on). He lives in a trailer park, his obese wife cheats on him, his dog shits everywhere, and he tanks his job interview. He has an uncle (Dave Foley) who runs a cult that gets in deep shit with the IRS, so he and Postal Dude decide to steal a bunch of rare children’s show stuffed animals and auction them off on eBay.

The Taliban releasing avian flu also enter into this, as the stuffed animals are how they’re smuggling them. IMDB tells me that most of the Taliban members are played by Jewish actors. How that’s funny, I have no idea, being as it isn’t pointed out within the movie.

Indeed, that’s the whole problem with Postal. Boll, in addition to not knowing that suspense is needed to make a horror movie, is also unaware of the simple fact that in order for a comedy to be funny you need… Um…
FUCKING JOKES IN IT!

Bush and bin Laden are all buddy-buddy, and skip hand-in-hand into a mushroom cloud. There’s a German-themed amusement park with Nazi overtones. Dave Foley walks around with his dick hanging out. Verne Troyer gets raped by monkeys. Is all this stuff aggressive? Punkish? Yes, it is. But you need more than the will to be shocking to actually be funny. This is the lesson that the South Park guys didn’t even need to be told to learn.

While watching this attempt to be funny by being outrageousness, I felt something other than my white-hot hatred for Uwe Boll. Granted, it’s still there, but I felt something elbow it out, however, momentarily.

And it’s pity.

More than anger towards his work or boredom with his silly little publicity stunts, I actually felt sorry for Uwe Boll. Here’s a guy throwing everything but a shit-encrusted kitchen sink into a failed scatological enterprise in a doomed bid for attention. Far from being honest or roguish, Boll is a small child, throwing a tantrum, hoping everyone pays attention to him. Hoping that he can use taboo imagery like planes going into the World Trade Center and children getting shot in a sad kind of acquiescence to the fact that he has no talent. It’s an eighteen million dollar exercise in self-loathing. He even cameos as himself, in lederhosen, getting shot in the balls. For someone who hates his work as much as I do, it should have provided some kind of catharsis. Instead I felt a great swell of sadness. For all his public bluster, he has a set of neuroses that would strike fear into the heart of Woody Fucking Allen.

You poor, poor man.

But you’re not poor enough for me to give you a good review.

I’ve seen MadTV sketches that were funnier than your piece of shit movie.

-FEATURES ‘N’ SHIT-

In addition to the pre-requisite trailer and behind-the-scenes featurette, we have…

- Footage of Boll fighting his critics. You know, if you just broke down and made a good movie, you wouldn’t HAVE to fight them. They’ll just shut up on their own.

- A small video of Verne Troyer, calling out Harrison Ford, saying that Postal would be better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s sad is that he was almost right… Fuckin’ nuked fridge…

- The second disc is a copy of Postal 2: Share the Pain for the PC. In spite of the fact that it’s an FPS, it’s Grand Theft Auto on food stamps.

1/2* out of 4