Five Reasons Why Uwe Boll’s Postal is Better than Meet the Spartans

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 28, 2008

When a bad movie comes along, people in my particular business turn into giddy little children, hungry for the snack that is to come. We are ready to take in these epic failures of cinema, chew them up and spit them out with the movie review equivalent of drunk Uncle Charlie’s charred chicken breasts that ruined last year’s Labor Day cookout. It is a film critic national pastime, and like baseball, it too has its stars. One of its most prominent stars is actually a pair of dimwits known as Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the now unnecessarily rich duo who has brought us Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and the upcoming, aptly named film Disaster Movie. They are the kings of the unfunny, obvious pop culture reference, choking Americans for every red cent along the way.

Conversely, we have Uwe Boll, another star in this twisted game of tattered cinema. Boll’s fame is derived from the fact that he takes himself seriously as a filmmaker, trying to adapt every videogame under the sun until he gets one that will make people want to see one of his movies. He’s done everything from Bloodrayne to Alone in the Dark to most recently a Burt Reynolds/Ray Liotta starred version of Dungeon Siege. And whether or not people see his movies, they still have hate for the man — he is destined to fail based on his overblown public sense of self-worth.

I tell you those stories to tell you this one: I have completed an experiment. If we remember back a few months to when I first viewed Meet the Spartans on DVD, we might recall that I made the following statement: “I have never in my life wished more for a natural disaster to come and wipe my house from the face of the Earth than during the first ten minutes of Meet the Spartans.” Needless to say, I was not a fan. As well, there has been quite an interesting response to Boll’s latest film Postal, which hit DVD shelves this week. In fact, we posted the first 11-minutes of the film yesterday and it was met with very mixed reactions. With that in mind, I decided to run out and grab Postal and put it to the test. Would it be better or worse than the movie that had me wanting to die a painful death? As you will see below in the list promised by my title, I am happy to report that Boll’s film was leaps and bounds better than Meet the Spartans.

And now I’m going to tell you why…

5. A Dave Foley frontal nude scene is more tolerable than a Britney Spears impersonation…
Some of you will find this hard to believe, but it’s true. In a year that has already seen plenty of on-screen dick, I will publicly say that I would rather see Dave Foley with his pants off than see another terrible, ill-placed Britney Spears impersonation. And that’s all I have to say about that.

4. J.K. Simmons beats the fat guy from Borat, hands down…
This either proves that Uwe Boll has more money than Friedberg/Seltzer, has more clout or is holding onto some pictures of some studio exec. and a teenage boy — my thought is that it is the latter. There is no reasonable explanation as to why he continues to get good actors to act in his bad movies, but in this case it’s a winner. J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man, Thank You for Smoking) makes an appearance, has a funny line or two, and collects his check. That beats any combination of Ken Davitian from Borat and Method Man any day.

3. Some of the jokes actually work…
There is probably enough offensive material in Postal to put both Tropic Thunder, Alan Ball’s Towelhead and The Birth of a Nation to shame, but some of it works. No, not the part where Verne Troyer gets raped by 100 monkeys or the aforementioned Dave Foley frontal nude scene — some of the other stuff. Including, but not limited to a little satire about terrorists and the “72 virgins clause” as well as a half-decent George W. Bush impersonation. Oh, and Zack Ward is just funny, in a really awkward, unassuming kind of way.

2. Uwe Boll is aware that he sucks…
Friedberg and Seltzer clearly are aware that they make bad movies, but its obvious that they are not clued into the fact that they are even bad at making bad movies. Uwe Boll on the other hand, appears to have come to terms with the fact that he, himself, is a failure. So the fact that Postal to include a scene where the man who created the video game attacks Boll for turning his game into a shitty movie is a testament to the fact that Uwe is smiling back at us. “Hate my movies,” he would think in his thick German accent. “It’s okay.” All this while Friedberg and Seltzer are probably off getting stoned together, macking on college chicks on Venice beach, telling each other “Dude, seriously, people laughed like crazy at the Paris Hilton joke.” No, we didn’t, you guys are idiots.

1. At least Postal stays on topic…
Friedberg and Seltzer have proven that they will spoof absolutely everything that has happened in the realm of pop culture and beyond with their films, if you can call them that. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael Phelps and his 8 gold medals show up in Disaster Movie this Friday. The thing that bugs me the most about their films is probably the thing that I most appreciated about Postal: at least it made an attempt at a coherent story. Sure, the story was bad and even more poorly executed, but at no point did Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or Simon from “American Idol” show up — and that is something that I think we can all agree is a good thing.

And there you have it, my case as to why you should skip seeing Disaster Movie this weekend and go out and rent Postal on DVD. If you are going to torture yourself, you might as well laugh a little along the way. If making bad movies were a boxing match between all the big players, Uwe Boll would have just won himself a round. Unfortunately in this game, everyone’s a loser.

Also, as an added bonus, the fine ladies in the picture below are all over Postal in various states of undress. All you get with Friedberg and Seltzer is a fully-clothed Carmen Electra or Kim Kardashian’s chunky ass. I’ll leave you to make your own choice on that one.

Read more articles by Neil Miller