Most movie directors achieve fame as the result of an impressive body of work. Sure, sometimes their skills fade away like Peter Bogdanovich, but at least they were able to create something wonderful once that made their name. Then there are extremely rare cases like Ed Wood. Filmmakers who are so inept at the art form that they develop a following of film fans and critics who regard their names as the definitive examples of terrible filmmaking. The current director to achieve this special status is writer/director Uwe Boll, a German filmmaker who specializes in video game adaptations. His career is so devoid of artistic merit that petitions have begun circulating pleading for Boll to retire and somehow, he’s actually willing to consider it.

Boll has been directing movies since the 1990s, but didn’t produce anything memorable until 2003's House Of The Dead, an almost unwatchable zombie movie based on an arcade game. The movie was a critical and artistic disaster, but it didn’t stop Boll from returning to screens the following year with Alone In The Dark a lowlight in the hardly spotless careers of Christian Slater and Tara Reid that was voted the worst film ever made by www.rottentomatoes.com. The same year he cranked out a third video game movie BloodRayne, a ludicrous thriller about a video game that kills its players. While these movies were all released by Hollywood studios, they were all financial failures. Yet somehow Boll kept getting movies funded. A ridiculous medieval epic In The Name Of The King, the silly thriller Seed, and the indescribable terrorist comedy Postal were all released in 2007, and each movie was more loathed than the last. All of which begs the question: how does such a consistently awful filmmaker keep making movies?

The answer is a disappointing one. Boll has found a loophole in German tax laws that allow him to appear successful to German financers. As a result of a national tax law, any investors in German owned films are able to write off 50-100% of their budgets. This means that any meager box office that a German film makes will automatically equal profit for investors. It’s a great system to encourage the production of uncommercial art films, but one that Uwe Boll is sadly able to capitalize on. His terrible movies may not bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, but they do make far more than any other independently financed German movies, making him seem like an ATM machine to potential investors. Boll may be a hack filmmaker, but you’ve got to give him credit, he’s found a way to make all the shitty movies that his heart desires.