Notorious videogame movie auteur Uwe Boll is returning to the director’s chair with a spiritual successor to House of the Dead

It looks like infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll is staging a comeback: The Hollywood Reporter says he’s begun production on a new film called 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead, a spiritual successor to his 2003 flick House of the Dead, based on the Sega game series of the same name.

The report says Michael Roesch, a long-time Boll collaborator who worked with him on films including Blubberella, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (which somehow features Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Kristtanna Loken, Matthew Lillard, and Burt Reynolds, to which I say, what the hell), Bloodrayne (with a comparably stack cast—Ben Kingsley! Michael Madsen! Michelle Rodriguez! Billy Zane! Udo Kier! Meat Loaf!) and House of the Dead. Jonathan Cherry and Ona Grauer, who starred in the 2003 film, will return for this one.

Boll’s been out of the gamer eye for some years now, but he’s continued to produce and direct poorly-received flicks based on other topics, like migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the Bandidos gang, and “the first QAnon mass murder.” His return to the world of videogame cinema was apparently inspired in part by director Paul W.S. Anderson, who’s working on an officially licensed reboot of House of the Dead.

“When I heard that Paul Anderson is rebooting House of the Dead, I immediately knew that it will be a soulless CGI orgy,” Boll said. “And I want to do a completely different zombie movie: Bloody, gory and handmade.”

How “completely different” Boll’s new film will be remains to be seen: The plot isn’t known at this point but the title is kind of a giveaway. “We’re upgrading from a house full of zombies to a castle full of zombies,” Roesch said.

Well, look: Nobody’s going to see these things for the enthralling cinematic experience they offer. Uwe Boll was making videogame adaptations long before Hollywood took the medium seriously, after all—primarily as a means of exploiting loopholes in German tax law.

You know what you’re in for when you go to see one of his films—shlock and garbola—and at this point in his long, legendary career (and I mean that entirely unironically, this is a man who challenged five of his harshest critics to boxing matches and beat the shit out of all of them) I’d be disappointed if he delivered anything else. Imagine if Uwe Boll demonstrated growth as a commercially viable director by putting out, say, a serviceable Mortal Kombat film? I think the world would be a lesser, sadder place for it.

Boll’s House of the Dead has a Rotten Tomato score of 3%, by the way, and no, that’s not a typo, there’s no missing number, it’s just 3. Here’s a trailer:

A release date for 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead wasn’t announced, but principal photography is set to start on September 5.

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