Blubberella

If there is any modern day film director who has a special talent for bullying the American-public-hating cynics that run and make films in Hollywood, it is Aryan schlockmeister auteur Uwe Boll.  In his 2011 film Blubberella, Boll once again displays his venomous yet jestful hatred for Tinseltown swindlers by parodying their film parodies.  The German director humbly summed up the synopsis of his film as follows, "The first female fat superhero ... She will kick major ass - with her major ass ... All the BLOODRAYNE fans will love that movie!" Blubberella takes its title from the obese and obscenely repellent American ½ vampire-½ human protagonist of the film who lusts after food more than she lusts after blood. Blubberella's rapist psychiatrist (whose name is Dr. Freud) believes that she substitutes food for sex, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to manhandle any swinging dick that has the misfortune of passing through her rather large general radius. Like most obese white chicks, Blubberella was voted in high school as the girl most likely to fornicate with black boyz. In the 70 + year tradition of endless anti-Aryan Hollywood films, Blubberella is a film about a protagonist who is on a mission to exterminate as many Nazis as possible, especially those that won’t share their extra-meaty foot-long subs. Although it may seem far-fetched that an extremely large and equally slow white girl is able to kill entire squads of Nazis, it is no more improbable than Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009); a film with such an absurd premise that it portrays a group of Judaic mensch as SS-crushing-super-commandos. In between killing American and British actors portraying Nazis (another Hollywood favorite Boll pokes fun at), Blubberella unsuccessfully attempts to pick up Jewish perverts on a dating website (no doubt, poking fun at Friedberg and Seltzer’s Date Movie).  Boll's inclusion of modern technology in a film that is set in the Nazi era is indubitably his away of mocking the fact that Hollywood is obsessed with keeping the fear and evil of the long-dead Nazis alive, thus Blubberella could be best described as Boll's noble attempt at creating an anti-Inglourious Basterds (like the Jewish Basterd's in Tarantino's film, Blubberella cites "killing Nazis" as one her favorite hobbies). To describe Blubberella as a ridiculously retarded movie would be an understatement, but that doesn’t mean that Uwe Boll failed to assemble the ultimate cinematic attack against Hollywood and loathsome audience-denigrating hack filmmakers like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. 

Like most retrograde Hollywood satires, Blubberella playfully assaults the usual subjects: Nazis, Hitler, gays, blacks, charming gentlemen, and everything else Americans are supposed to be concerned with. Of course, Uwe Boll’s portrayal and execution of these subjects is quite different when compared to postmodern Hollywood satires, as Blubberella is far from politically incorrect and ultimately a big German,” Fuck you!” to neo-vaudevillian Hollywood. In one especially reflexive and self-conscious scene, a Nazi officer retorts to Blubberella the blimp that Germans do have a sense of humor, thus mocking Hollywood’s portrayal of Germans (especially Nazi officers) as uncomical authoritarian buffoons. Boll is well known in the cinema world for challenging various Hollywood blockbuster directors and film critics to boxing matches, but –  being the girly men that they are – have all declined to partake in the German Ed Wood's challenge. Instead, Boll features a film critic in Blubberella – who also happens to be a rat-like vampire that somewhat resembles Count Orlok from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) – being cruelly experimented on by an enthusiastic Nazi doctor. Boll also refrains from exhibiting the sort of Negrophilia that is typical of a Hollywood director.  Throughout Blubberella, various white actors appear in blackface (an early trade of Jewish Vaudevillian performers and Hollywood actors) and act like harlequin tools with chips on their shoulders. In a nightmarish dream sequence in the film, Brendan Fletcher (who is in blackface) – the star of Boll’s Rampage (2009) – aggressively mumbles about how many times he has been shot (while speaking to Claus von Stauffenberg) as if it is some sort of honor. The wee blackface man also states  (after a white man mentions the Congo; possibly the most crime ridden nation in the world), “why you gotzta always be talkin bout da Congo?”  I can only assume that Boll was lampooning the way Hollywood filmmakers often portray black characters as domineering, thus causing nervous laughter and fear in white American audiences via unconscious sublimation. Boll also had the wonderful gall to satirize the quasi-blaxploitation drama Precious (2009). During this exceedingly grotesque scene, a white man in blackface portrays Blubberella’s heckling and sadistically abusive mother (the inverse of the Hollywood trash comedy White Chicks). After watching Blubberella, it will be apparent to the viewer that Germans do have a sense of humor, for in Boll’s world, Hollywood-invented America rightfully becomes the central butt of the joke.

Although I expected Blubberella to be at least mildly humorous, it far exceeded my relatively slim expectations. It is not often that a filmmaker successfully satires the unsaintly satire saints of Hollywood, thus beating them at their own cynical game. Of course, Boll has been one of the greatest international rivals of Hollywood since the beginning. With his 2003 piece-of-celluloid-excrement House of the Dead, Boll managed to make a pretty penny at virtually no cost to himself via German government funding and virtually nonexistent production values that rival the goofy splatter flicks of Herschell Gordon Lewis. For Blubberella and Auschwitz (2011), Boll merely recycled the sets from his film Bloodrayne: The Third Reich (2010), henceforth, proving his keen business sense. Although Boll’s cameo in Blubberella as an unconventionally blissful and mirthful Adolf Hitler might seem a tad offensive to certain viewers, his appearance in Auschwitz as an SS guard who tends the Jew-incinerating ovens at everyone’s favorite death camp will certainly cause heads to explode. If you’re looking to see a severely retarded comedy where politically correctness has been disposed of in a Nazi-era urinal, Blubberella is bound to provide you with a splendid and farcical post-postmodern time.  I suspect that Auschwitz may turn out to be Boll's masterpiece, but until then, watch Blubberella; a film that lets sentimental American audiences know that fat girls need love too.

-Ty E