Blubberella (2011)
Foywonder
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Starring Lindsay Hollister, Michael Pare, Clint Howard, Brendan Fletcher, William Belli
Directed by Uwe Boll
Uwe Boll’s Blubberella is a holocaust of comedy. I witnessed six million jokes die right before my eyes.
Just the other week I bought a Canadian import Blu-ray of House of the Dead. That movie never fails to entertain me with its Ed Wood-ian badness. Ditto In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale; any movie where Burt Reynolds plays a medieval king cannot be all bad. I also proudly own a copy of Boll’s shockingly good Rampage, his best movie to date. Now I can say I have added to my collection the worst movie Uwe Boll has ever made and, God help us if I’m wrong, ever will make.
Those of you that found Postal enjoyably vulgar, this is not Postal. This is not even Vampires Suck. This is not just Uwe Boll’s worst; this may very well be one of the worst attempts at comedy any filmmaker has ever put to film. I would not be at all shocked if Blubberella goes on to become a modern day Faces of Death, a movie people get together to watch on a dare to see how much of it they can endure.
The one and only laugh I got from Blubberella stemmed from a closing credits outtake in which the actors were shown breaking character and declaring aloud, “It’s not funny!” Know what really made that moment so funny to me? What was being declared “not funny” was the continuance of a running joke done multiple times throughout the movie I had just suffered through, and no, it was not funny.
Shot simultaneously with BloodRayne: The Third Reich, Boll recycles the same basic plot, the same order of scenes, the same sets, and the exact same cast (sans a very lucky Natassia Malthe) with the idea being to make a politically incorrect parody about an obese dhampir battling Nazis in 1940’s Germany.
Astoundingly, Boll totally flubs the central joke.
Instead of the zany misadventures of a sassy overweight vampiress saving the world from Nazis plotting to create an army of the undead, Blubberella’s screen time mostly consists of her cooking and eating and bemoaning her lack of a love life. She’s whiny and annoying, and most of the fat jokes at her expense will only sound witty to a first grader. I began feeling sorry for the actress, at least until I saw her name listed in the end credits as a co-writer. I remember the comedienne Roseanne, herself a large woman, once saying how much she loved a good fat joke. I don’t believe Roseanne would have any love for this film.
Blubberella uses cooking utensils as weapons and kills Nazis for their sandwiches; are those really the wittiest gags anyone could come up with to comically incorporate her girth into what very little action there is? I’d decry the film for being full of missed opportunities, but that implies any aiming was ever involved. This is a movie that constantly throws random jokes out there while never bothering to make sure there’s even a wall for any of it to stick to.
Fat jokes, gay jokes, sex jokes, Holocaust jokes, Nazi slapstick, white actors in blackface doing ghetto shtick, “Dancing with the Stars” and Precious jokes in 1940’s Germany, adding “motherfucker” at the end of dialogue as a substitute for actual punchlines, Uwe Boll as Adolph Hitler – It’s not funny!.
Blubberella really isn’t even about a fat superheroine saving the world from fascism. What we really have here is 80 minutes of cringe-inducing sketch comedy, much of which I strongly suspect had to have been improvised because you can practically see the flop sweat dripping off the floundering performers as they desperately strain to milk laughs they have to know deep down don’t exist.
The only difference between Clint Howard’s Nazi mad scientist in BloodRayne: The Third Reich and Blubberella is that his shtick was genuinely amusing in the movie where his performance wasn’t intended to be funny.
Some scenes are so devoid of both humor and lucidity, so incomprehensible they border on surreal, it’s enough to make me wonder if one day it will be revealed that Werner Herzog secretly directed Blubberella as his own giant in-joke targeted at people that call Uwe Boll the worst director of all time.
There’s a good ten minute stretch kicked off by Boll informing us via voiceover that this part of the film is really boring so we should just ignore what’s happening and try to enjoy the musical score instead. What follows are two rather lengthy scenes from BloodRayne: The Third Reich never intended to be comical. You can tell from the sound of Boll’s voice that he’s trying to laugh off having nothing as he pads his unbearable movie out to a respectable running time. Despite barely qualifying as feature length, this was hardly the first or last boring part or the only time I had to resort to the fast forward button for the sake of my own sanity.
Blubberella is cinematic Cthulu – so maddeningly unfunny, incoherent, and soul-crushing there’s a good chance laying eyes on it will make you lose your mind forever.
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