Boy, do I hope this was the worst.
Al, from Mondo Bizarro, has given me a few Uwe Boll films so far, but I ended up liking one and thought another was...well, bad, but it had its moments. So he decided he had to try again, and I got Blubberella.
Congratulations, Al. This one had the results you were hoping for.
Blubberella is:
- Nonsensical
- Unfunny
- Insulting
- Offensive
- Amazingly random
- Poorly acted
- Poorly directed
- Infuriating
I hate this movie.
Okay, so let's start...well, restart...with some compliments, such as they are. There are some moments where I laughed in this movie. Legitimately, I mean, not the kind of hopeless laughter inspired by my soul slowly dying that the rest of the movie inspired. There are some oddly funny jokes sprinkled here and there...some are the kind you'll feel really guilty for laughing at if you have a conscience, but some are of a kind that don't make you question your moral fiber for finding them amusing (there's one kind of odd but funny bit involving a guy trying to do the old "tap you on the wrong shoulder" trick en route to killing a guy, but the target is just totally nonresponsive so he just breaks his neck, for instance). There are also concepts that could be funny if done well (unfortunately, they usually aren't). For instance, Hitler playing Risk or a Risk-like game against Blubberella (dream sequence), with an Operation Valkyrie reference stuck in there, could be funny...were it not ruined by 1) general delivery, 2) length, and 3) an offensive, racist portrayal of a black man (guy in obvious blackface) as Hitler's "new African ally."
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| Seriously? |
Yeah...that's all I've got for good things. Let's talk about the bad.
This film is distressingly random, and I'm saying that as someone who very much enjoyed anime like Pani Poni Dash, FLCL, and...well, I was able to enjoy Excel Saga to an extent, anyway. O_O The point is that randomness can be fun, but...there's a line, and Blubberella crosses it sometime in the first five minutes. I think it's when, shortly after proclaiming that the movie takes place in the 40s in "A Jew-y part of town" (yeah, I'll get to that), it shows that our lead enjoys using her laptop computer to search online dating sites. So, yeah, there's widespread online dating in the 1940s. Honestly, that alone wouldn't be so bad, and I can accept anachronisms and such if they're funny (they aren't here, of course), but the trouble is that that's just one of many, many examples of randomness. The film utterly fails to establish any sense of setting or even consistency in plot at times, and what's worse is that the film is frequently awkward in its randomness. It is also often just plain nonsensical. Here's an example: The commander of the German forces was bitten by Blubberella early in the film and turned into a vampire (well, actually apparently he turns into a dhampire like her). His subordinate and the doctor who has been inspecting him decide to keep him as commander, but when he complains about his lingering injuries they're having second thoughts...for some reason. They decide to flip a coin: heads they'll keep him around, tails they'll ship him off to Hollywood to be on Dancing With the Stars. So they flip a coin, and it comes up tails and they start singing "Hollywood." Then they leave him in command. Or there's the sequence involving Blubberella's extremely stereotypical black mother. Not only does the scene contribute absolutely nothing to the movie, but...why does Blubberella--a white several-hundred-year-old dhampire--have a black mother? (Who, by the way, is played by a white male in blackface.) Or there's the bit where the Jewish resistance fighters assault a train, thinking there's weapons there, and then find Jewish prisoners instead, and talk at length about rescuing them before deciding to leave them after all because they're ugly (no, I'm serious), and then talk to Blubberella about escorting the prisoners, and then decide to leave them again. Or there's the bit where the vampire nazi lieutenant is sneaking up on the group, and then Blubberella starts sniffing the air (leading to obvious Lassie references), and then she opens a door and sees the lieutenant playing pinball in there for some reason, and then she and her allies call him in the room and hold an intervention like you might for a friend addicted to drugs, and somehow that turns then into an interrogation of some kind, and then when they find out the information they want Blubberella gets the nazi to show them where the commandant is by pointing to a place on her body and somehow that works, and then she kills him and he dies with a reference to Citizen Kane ("rosebud")for some reason. It doesn't make any sense even by random comedy standards. This applies even in some of the smaller jokes, like when Blubberella is being held prisoner and the doctor grabs her, prompting her to (poorly) imitate Heath Ledger's Joker with "Why so serious?" Why? And why is there a guy in a fish costume among the resistance? It's not like he does anything. He's just sitting there.
It's...really difficult to describe how this should work. I think the main problem here is that nothing feels stable. Take, for instance, the Naked Gun series. The Naked Gun was frequently odd and random and had Frank and the other characters do some pretty strange things, but there was always a certain level of stability to things as well. You felt like you got to know the characters, and that gave you something to connect to. Connection makes a movie stronger. Blubberella doesn't allow you that connection. None of the characters seem stable. The "straight man" character in one scene will be the one that does something bizarre and nonsensical the next. Characters just sort of do things because someone thought it would be funny, and even the actors aren't buying it.
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| Do I really even have to explain why this is a terrible idea? |
The next problem is, of course, the general offensiveness of much of the film. We have extreme stereotypes presented just about everywhere, people in blackface swearing every other word, onscreen labels describing characters in not exactly socially acceptable ways (One, for instance, describes a character as "however you say 'fag' in German"--oh, and by the way, that same character is evidently an extreme drug addict who is constantly high), and, hell, we even throw insults about GEDs in there because that was necessary. Not to mention, of course, our lead, who is the target of every extremely obvious and insulting fat joke known to man. Even when the film isn't being actively insulting to some group or another, it is absolutely filled with infantile humor such as fart jokes and worse. There's not a whole lot here that can be called "clever," and definitely not much that can be called "funny."
In what is sadly a theme with bad comedies that I've watched, the film also likes to really, really linger on things. This spoils some jokes that could be funny (the aforementioned "Hitler playing Risk" bit--although the blackface does more to ruin that) and aggravates the situation with things that weren't funny anyway (Blubberella going in her extensive fridge and unpacking groceries, for instance). Good and bad jokes both drastically overstay their welcome, and while there aren't extended sequences where nothing at all is happening like in certain other films I've watched, it still gets pretty irritating. I mean...I don't know, is there someone out there who just finds the sight of an overweight woman putting food away just inherently side-splitting? I guess Uwe Boll must.
Then there's the sequences that...I'm just not sure how they're supposed to be funny. This somewhat comes back to the overall randomness of the film, but even apart from that, there are some bits that I just can't see what the joke is. For instance, we get one bit where Blubberella and one of her allies (the target of the aforementioned label) are talking to a bunch of resistance fighters who are preparing weapons, and begin just kind of talking about which of the men Blubberella should have sex with, tossing a flaming...thing...on the table, and discussing time travelling to kill Hitler's mother. There's...not really a joke anywhere in there, nor is it in any way related to the weapons the group is preparing, and it's not related to the plot, so...why is that scene there? I wish I could say that was an infrequent thing, but I found myself questioning why a scene existed frequently in this film, and asking "How is that supposed to be funny?" even more often. (And I really didn't need the scenes...yes, plural...about premature ejaculation and the discussion of such.)
In lesser issues, the soundtrack is really, really annoying at times. It has a habit of using obvious "comedy" or "quirky" music, particularly when Blubberella is going into her giant fridge or doing some other sequence that screams it's funny because she's fat! Worse, the film actually has little musical cues for some jokes! As you might guess, that gives it the feeling of a terrible stand-up comedian laughing at himself, which isn't exactly a comparison to aspire to.
And, of course, there's the fact that there are quite a lot of moments or concepts here that I'm pretty sure are references to Boll's Bloodrayne series, which one wouldn't get unless one watched Boll's Bloodrayne series, which I certainly haven't as I've generally made it a principle to avoid Uwe Boll films unless they're given to me as part of Project Terrible, so of course I don't get any of those. Look, self-referential humor is okay, but...it's better if you're referencing films that people will have actually seen. Though...I guess Uwe Boll just kind of has to take what he can get, there.
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| As an added bonus, chapter cards. Because I love those. |
Blubberella is infuriating on many levels, and it was extremely difficult to sit through. It is unquestionably one of the worst films I have ever seen. The acting is poor (in most scenes even the actors and actresses seem pretty much embarrassed by what they're doing), the action is awful even by the standards of slapstick comedy, the humor doesn't exist, the soundtrack tries to claim it does, and the whole thing is a massive, offensive trainwreck. As I said in my review of Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace, bad comedies are the worst kind of bad movie, because if you're willingly watching a bad film you're doing so to laugh at it, and bad comedies are bad at giving you things to laugh at. While there are a few giggles here from something ridiculous or one or two clever bits, the majority of the film is just plain boring and it took me multiple extended breaks to finally struggle through to the end. The sad thing is that a comedy version of the Bloodrayne concept could work on some level--I mean, the concept of a vampire fighting Nazis has an inherent over-the-top nature that could be turned to action-comedy--but it would have to be done far more capably than this, and with more concentration on an actual plot or characters instead of a focus on fat jokes, racism, intolerance, and yelling at Uwe Boll's critics. This is like a sick version of the kind of film you make when you're 12 years old playing with your dad's camera and totally making it up as you go along. It's horrid. I don't really have anything else to say, there...I think that about sums it up. Definitely worthy of Project Terrible.
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