Sanctimony



Uwe Boll has quickly gained a reputation as being an awful director, mostly on the strength of his silly zombie/action flick House of the Dead (2003). Before he’s inducted into the Bad Movie Hall of Fame I think we should make sure there’s a consistent crappiness to his oeuvre. Hence, Sanctimony (2000), one of Boll’s earlier films, probably his first in English.


Try to guess: Whose career is going down the toilet fastest?

Sanctimony is basically Se7en (1995) without the style or intellectual weight. As a matter of fact Sanctimony indicates that the over-lit, glossy look that was so inappropriate in House of the Dead is an inappropriate choice Boll applies to all his films. Colors are all candy-bright and prodigious blue light streams in through all windows at night.

New York is being terrorized by a serial killer dubbed the Monkey-Maker. Right off the bat you may notice that “Monkey-Maker” is a really stupid name for a killer. It gets worse. The killer is known as the Monkey Maker because he removed the eyes from the first six people he killed, the ears from the second six, and now in his most recent murders he removed the victims’ tongues. Fair enough. But how would the killer’s nickname, which is usually generated by the press as soon as they get wind of the unique aspects of a case, possibly reflect a pattern that wouldn't become clear until the 13th victim? Isn't it much more likely he'd be "The Eye Gouger" or something?

The two cops assigned to the case are Jim (Michael Pare) and Dorothy (Jennifer Rubin), the two most creepily chipper murder investigators in the world. We first see Jim running after Dorothy as she jogs, and when he catches up she asks "What ya got?" "Three DOAs," he pants, but then he checks his own pulse and says, "Make that two!" Ha! Get it? He's not dead, like the people slaughtered the night before! Later Jim and Dorothy discuss the case and Dorothy explains that the killer will either get caught or stop when his pattern is complete. That's the "unwritten agreement" between the police and killers, she explains.


"I was thinking we'll call the kid either Wilson or Spaulding."

The killer is actually Tom (Casper Van Dien), a stock broker so successful he sits alone in a dark office and yells stuff at people through two LCD screens. After a bizarre subplot where Tom and Jim go to the same dance club to find a group that's filming a snuff film in the basement, Tom pretends to find the Monkey Maker's latest victim. He does this to get close to the detectives. Tom then kills Dorothy, nearly kills Jim's pregnant wife, and goes on a very public killing spree until Jim, driving his silver New Beetle, shows up and shoots him dead. The end.



Sanctimony is an awful film. It turns out that all our favorite Bollisms (brightly lit sets, bad German dance music, nonsensical subliminal flashes from other parts of the movie edited into scene transitions) have been present in the director's style for at least four years. He wrote this movie himself, and the fact that nobody speaks like real people speak makes it obvious that Boll is new to the English language. You want a point? Sociopath stock brokers are evil. Oooh, there's a controversial subject. And yet, this isn't the worst movie Uwe Boll has made. That's scary.

Posted: Mon - January 10, 2005 at      

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