Hate the playa

Is German director Uwe Boll the next Ed Wood? In recent years, Boll has churned out epic monuments of cinematic cheese, recruiting well-respected thespians like Ben Kingsley and Ray Liotta and dragging them down to his level, much the way Wood did to Bela Lugosi in the '50s.

Last year, on the heels of a near-perfect string of despised action-horror films, came "Postal." One of Boll's many video-game adaptations, "Postal" managed to cross over into the weirdly personal and the shockingly offensive. Like other Boll films, it's poorly constructed. What's unique about this film is its brazenness, its sociopathic eagerness to appall, which sends the film spiraling down in flames with both middle fingers in the air. It's punk-rock cinema: clumsy, arrogant and utterly captivating.

This week's Uwe Boll Film Festival will be a chance to revisit the work of a director who is both a product and a destroyer of contemporary culture.  He probably won't mind if you laugh a bit, as long as you cheer a bit as well.

Boll will be in person on Dec. 18 at the Downtown Independent for the premiere of two new films, "Far Cry" and "Tunnel Rats," with a Q&A to follow; 9 p.m. Click here for times and tickets»