FrightFest '07: Postal

Postal will be a controversial film. It's trying to be. But it's also, perhaps surprisingly, really quite good.

Uwe Boll is best known for making film adaptations of computer games, and also for being one of the most hated filmmakers alive. It's not a reputation that's justified, and I could name a slew of directors much, much, much worse than he is off the top of my head. Postal might just change that.

Based roughly on the computer game of the same name, Postal follows the adventures of a man pushed to his limits. Everything about the Dude's life sucks, and his attempts to change his fortune only make things worse. When he turns to his cult leader uncle for financial help, the Dude unwittingly enters into a battle with the Taliban, with the owners of a Nazi theme park, and with a pack of tree-hugging religious fundamentalists. There are a lot of controversial elements in that last sentence alone, and people who haven't seen the film will probably manage to build up quite a righteous anger. But Postal isn't only an equal opportunities offender; it's also almost affectionate in its mockery. The message at the centre of the film seems to be that we're all human; we're all living on this planet; if we keep fighting one another over silly issues like religion and skin colour, we'll never face the real issues.

The humour is largely on the silly side, and there are a few gags that don't quite work, but on the whole, the jokes hit the mark. The problem with some of them might be that while it's easy, from a position of privilege, to point out how silly some issues seem, to people who actually have to face religious or racial persecution on a daily basis it's really not all that funny. Postal isn't going to change the world. But, shockingly, it might actually make you think.

Putting aside controversy for now, Postal really works as a movie. It looks great, for one thing. It's not a particularly high budget movie, but it looks really, really good. The uncut version that played at FrightFest sags ever so slightly in the middle, but a few minutes are going to be excised for pacing reasons before the film goes on general release, so that's not worth worrying about. The violence is cartoonish and relentless; the finale, literally explosive.

And although there aren't really any A-list names amongst the cast, the actors are all great. Zack Ward is a genuinely good comedic actor; he's endearing enough that you identify with and root for him, even though he's really rather inept, and does, of course, go 'postal' during the movie. The situations he finds himself in are somehow familiar, if amped up to absurd proportions. The job interview scene, for example, is really well observed, and hysterically funny throughout ("what is the difference between a duck?" made me laugh even on second viewing, and, I imagine, will still amuse me on third, fourth, and fifth viewings). That scene also features Rick Hoffman, last seen stealing the show in Hostel; most of the characters in this film, even the most minor ones, are played by recognisable and talented comedians. Dave Foley deserves a mention, too, and Uwe Boll's own cameo is one of the best self-parodies I've ever seen.

In a way, it's almost a pity that the subject matter is so controversial, because it'll mean that a lot of people won't see this movie. Then again, dealing with controversial subjects didn't do South Park any harm, did it?

IMDB link

Interview with Zack Ward

After my little excursion out to the set of Postal back in September, I've been writing some articles and doing some follow-up interviews with the cast. Or, to be more accurate, with the Postal Dude himself, Zack Ward.

An extract from our recent interview follows:-

ZW: Think about it, there are these robots that turn into cars. The heroes, they end up getting to drive these cars, like it’s a pickup truck, or it’s a Corvette, or whatever the hell it is. But think about that, it’s just kind of creepy. They’re driving these cars… I don’t know about you, but when I’m driving my car, I’m on the phone, I might be talking to myself, or running lines on a script, or I might be picking my nose, or maybe I’ll fart, or maybe I’m with a pretty girl and we’re making out a little bit. I don’t want my car to watch me!

[Laughing]

ZW: I mean, if I fart in a Transformer, what part of the Transformer am I farting on?

I don’t know, but I think the movie should address this…

ZW: I mean, talking cars, like, uh, KITT from Knightrider, he’s all ‘Hello Michael…’ but what part of the car is his chair? Is it a shoulder ride? Are you sitting on his nose? I don’t know. It’s a little gross.

I think maybe you’ve thought about this too much.

ZW: I did. And! What if, what if, you leave a used condom in a Transformer?

[Incredulous laughing]

ZW: [Gets more impassioned] Will there be a baby? Because YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SEX THEY ARE! I don’t know if Megatron is a masculine name or a feminine name, they don’t tell you! And I don’t like that. I don’t want my kitchen appliances to have an opinion on what I’m cooking. I don’t want my car talking back, like ‘You’re driving too fast, you drive like a girl!’ You know… I don’t want that.

That’s a little worrying.

ZW: Yeah. I think people should think about THAT. It’s scary.

My articles featuring Zack will be appearing in new issues of Penny Blood magazine and Model and Collector's Mart magazine over the coming months. Oh, and if you're on MySpace, go add Zack to your friends list. Tell him I sent you, if you want. But play nice, okay?

Postal Day 3

The concluding part of my Postal blog:

"Postal" Day 3: Saturday, 23rd September 2006

Since nothing was planned for Saturday till the pick-up at 5:30pm to go to the fight, Andrew and I decide to do some sight-seeing around Vancouver. Feeling guilty for being less-than-supportive the previous evening, we leave a note with the hotel concierge for Jeff, giving him Andrew's mobile number and telling him to call us if he wants to hang out later. (Due to a chronic misspelling of his last name, it later turned out that he never got the message, which didn't help with the guilt.)

On the way down to the waterfront, we spy a load of police cars and news vans, and are curiously wandering when we notice that the cars say “NYPD” on the side, leading us to deduce that this is actually part of a film set. Our suspicions are confirmed when we spy a sign reading “Fantastic Four 2” (which has to be a working title, right?) but we're blasé about movie sets now so we carry on on our quest. One SeaBus and then a normal bus later, and we're halfway up a mountain; a cable car takes us to the very top of Grouse Mountain, where we watch a world-famous lumber-jack show starring a guy called, against all probability, “Stirling Hart”, before communing with nature in the woods and looking at a sleepy wolf. The views out over Vancouver are stunning, but we head back early because, let's face it, the fight is the whole reason we're there.

The thing is, before I got on the plane to Canada, I was expecting to watch Uwe Boll beat up his critics. Unquestionably, I didn't think anyone else stood much of a chance. (Except maybe, er, Chance.) Having spent a couple of days hanging out with them, I still mostly expected they'd get their asses kicked, only now it felt sort of mean. I liked these guys, I didn't want to see them get hurt; I'd never seen a boxing match before in my life, but had an inkling it wasn't gonna be pretty.

The time immediately before the fight seemed a little disorganised, or maybe just manic. Having been shown to our ringside seats probably an hour before anything was scheduled to start, we got restless and wandered off to the casino to speak to everyone backstage. I managed to collar Uwe Boll for a quick interview, and I have to say (this ain't gonna be a popular opinion) I like him. He comes across as fun, friendly and charismatic, trading jibes with the challengers as they got their pictures taken by the official photographer immediately behind us. He also stuck around to finish answering our questions even after he'd been told, twice, that GoldenPalace.com needed him up on stage to be interviewed, so kudos to him for that!

After everyone had been ushered away, we took our seats again; only a couple of feet away was a table where Kristanna Loken, Zack Ward, Andrew Jackson and Ralf Moeller were sitting, cheering on Boll. Well, except that there were ten (yeah, TEN) displays of martial arts from some kids' gym first, most of which involved small children waving around knives in very close proximity to one another, and making all of us in the front row excessively nervous.

The fights themselves, you can watch on YouTube. To cut a very long story short, everyone got their asses kicked. Lowtax kept up his comedy schtick till the bitter end, despite some vicious blows to the head; Jeff stood up remarkably well, considering, even making it to a second round; Chris Alexander's fake blood stunt was beyond brilliant; and Chance, well, I can only figure Boll thought Chance might pose him some genuine risk, and decided to put him down as quickly as possible, because that match was harsh.

The weirdest part, for me, was that the Boll fight wasn't the headline act: immediately afterwards, some kickboxers (who, incidentally, look like a Mr Gay Universe line-up) get in the ring, and I promptly flee back to the casino. Chris has donned the costume he entered the ring wearing (but had to remove for the actual fight) – batwings and a silver Mexican wrestling mask – and I can see Lowtax getting interviewed; Chance is around, but I can't spot Jeff anywhere. I eventually ask Trevor, who points to a waist-height screen and goes “He's behind that, I think.”

“Holy shit.” I'm pretty sure I actually just said that straight to his face, which is another black mark on my conscience, but – the boy did not look well. He's sitting on the floor, with a paramedic beside him helping him breathe through an oxygen mask, and a rubbish bin in front of him in case he threw up again. (I'm kind of glad I missed the throwing up, to be honest.) The punches Boll was throwing had looked pretty harsh at the time, but Jeff had just kept on getting up and carrying on, and I'd assumed he was okay (after all, everyone else seemed alright). See, I'm not a totally inhumane monster; if my mother's reading this, I'm sure she'll be relieved to know that no end of horror movies can fully desensitise me to real life violence.

Okay, enough with the fluffy bunnies – there's an after-party at the nightclub adjacent to the fight location, but it sounded incredibly shit, so we pile into the van back to the hotel. And then promptly pile back out again, having seen Jeff off to his room, to find a bar in which to toast Chris Alexander.

(Eventually, we end up in a bar where the waitress shifts people out of the way so all ten of us can sit in a booth; we had to abandon an earlier, half-empty bar due to Chris's overly loud “This is shit!” declaration the moment we walked in. Good stuff.)

"Postal": Postscript

And, that's pretty much it. Chance and Chris went out for breakfast with Uwe Boll the next day, while Lowtax posted a comment on SomethingAwful about how much he hates the guy and Jeff, well, when I called him at 10:30am, he was planning on getting a massage in his hotel room. The whole thing was probably the weirdest experience I've ever had in my life, so, in a ridiculously diva-esque style, let me just conclude by saying that everyone involved is a good egg in my book, and entirely undeserving of getting their asses kicked. Cheers, guys; I owe you all a drink sometime. And hey – at least no-one got AIDS.

Postal Day 2

Part 2/3 of my Postal blog:

"Postal" Day 2: Friday, 22nd September 2006

Bright and early on Friday morning, a van arrives to take us out to the set of "Postal." Part of the deal for the internet critics who took up Boll's challenge was that they got to be extras in the movie (… yeah, a movie by a director they claim to hate; it makes perfect sense, honest). Not everyone's bothering to go; Andrew, Lowtax, Megan, Chance and I do start to question our judgement when we realise we've been driving for what feels like forever and are now way outside of Vancouver, somewhere that can only be described as looking exactly like "Silent Hill." And I hated that movie.

When we get to “circus”, as base camp is known (because it has a lot of tents, y'see?) we're sent off to wardrobe to be made up as “trailer trash.” Being 6ft tall, I can see the wardrobe girl panicking slightly when I enter the costume trailer – which, incidentally, looks like the inside of a second-rate charity shop from the 1980s. She digs out some hideous denim cut-offs, an even more hideous purple denim vest with a tie at the waist, and, improbably, some even more hideous yellow flip-flops that decidedly look like they've seen better days. I feel hot as fuck when I emerge to general hilarity.

… And then I realise it's freezing cold, and promptly shove my socks, trainers and jumper on over the top. It's so cold that there are plumes in the air when we exhale, but we're assured that on a film set, the lighting will make it warmer. Hmmm.

Andrew gets some grimy shorts and a black vest to wear; Lowtax's wife dons a mini-skirt and a midriff-baring boob-tube; and Lowtax himself is just given a blue shirt patterned with flames – apparently, his lower half is trashy enough. I feel distinctly like I've got the short end of the stick here, but I'm always willing to make an idiot of myself for the sake of a laugh, so it's all good.

The set, it transpires, is another van ride away, in a custom-built trailer park. We spend quite a while trying to figure out what's real and what's not, but having never been in a real life trailer park before I'm completely clueless. The hair and make-up team, meanwhile, take one look at Megan and I and declare “You're too pretty, you're not going on set like that.” We then spend maybe an hour getting our faces caked in crap and having our hair destroyed – the amount of hairspray and backcombing involved in building the haystack on my head was insane. Andrew, meanwhile, is kitted out with a rat-tail style mullet that doesn't match the colour of his real hair by any stretch of the imagination, and has dirt rubbed all over his shirt; Lowtax gets pro-active and rolls around in the dirt of his own volition, and then helpfully suggests to the girl doing my makeup that I “should have a black eye.” Stupidly, I agree, and she goes to work – layering me with green facepaint and oozing fake blood; the works. I feel like the hottest woman on earth. Someone tells me to wear my socks with the flip-flops, and I intensely regret that they're black, and not neon-pink instead.

The weather has, helpfully, warmed up by now. In fact, it's positively summery, and quickly becomes evident that, by the end of the day, my pasty white English skin will be sunburnt. I like to think of it as suffering for my art, and as a result, have a semi-permanent reminders of the trashy “pull down your bra straps” look on each of my upper arms, my real skin colour looking kind of sick and greenish in comparison to the redness surrounding those marks. Mmm, sexy.

While we're waiting, production guy Trevor approaches Lowtax with the liability release forms he'll be required to sign before he can take part in the boxing match the following day. Perhaps wisely, he reads the form rather than just signing his life away, as they were no doubt hoping he would: the form basically says that if Uwe Boll breaks any bones, inflicts any brain damage, gives him AIDS or actually just straight out kills him, Lowtax won't have any legal recourse. (I'm fairly sure this wouldn't actually stand up in a court of law…) Lowtax makes amendments to the form before signing it – scrawling “NO!!” across the paragraphs he disagrees with, with smiley faces inside the “O” of all but the paragraph about AIDS, which gets a frowny face instead.

Eventually, it's our turn to go on camera. In the foreground, Zack Ward, playing the Postal Dude, will approach his trailer which is rocking wildly and shout “OH COME ON!” To help his expression of outrage, a male crewmember cues him, each time, with “Come on Daddy, give it to your bad girl!” which remains hilarious even after the 20th time. There's also something going on involving a dog, and an unhappy dog at that – the dog requires the film to cut numerous intensely irritating times. My role is to walk around in the background, never speaking or making a sound, and paw through garbage. Seriously. Also, because my glasses “look too expensive”, I'm not allowed to wear them. Which means, effectively, I can't see shit. Every single take, I fall over something different on the ground that I can't see. After about three takes, we're told that the camera's going to move for some close ups, and we should try to replicate precisely what we did before.

Except I have no idea whatsoever of where I was or what I was doing when the Postal Dude walked past me.

Another 34834093094 takes later, and we're done. One of the ADs decides to get a shot of Andrew and I walking into the scene; we're actually in the foreground for a moment. Thing is, there's a cable lying across the road to power, er, something or other, and it'll be right in shot. To hide this, they throw a line of garbage across it, which, in my opinion, only serves to make it more conspicuous, but hey, I'm not a set dresser. Just as the garbage is sufficiently strewn across the road, an old lady on a motorised wheelchair contraption drives down the road, and we all have to move to get out of her way, which is intensely hilarious to, well, me. We shoot in two takes, because we're brilliant, and then it's time for lunch, so we head back to circus.

I heard people later complain that the food on this day wasn't especially great, but I have to say, it was more than enough to impress me. King crab legs, with a buffet of salads and pasta and veggies, and ice-cream, fresh fruit and cake afterwards; what's not to like? I'm slightly concerned that my lipstick mostly seems to have come off, but when we get back to set, we don't seem to be needed, anyway.

Or so I hoped.

By now, the black eye makeup is driving me insane. It itches, probably psychosomatically, because I don't want to mess it up but it's uncomfortable as hell. I ask Trevor if we're done filming for the day, so I can go wash my face, and the next thing I know, Uwe Boll is in front of me. “What ees itchy?” he asks, and I, ridiculously, tell him it's all fine and I don't mind keeping the makeup on if he needs us in shot again. He tells me it's okay, the next scene will be a wide shot and the makeup won't be visible. Like a trooper, though, I don't wash it off anyway (I don't want to be a continuity error!) and the real horror of my day begins: we need to provide a redneck background comedy scene. By comedy, they mean, er, physical comedy – groin scratching, nose picking and rape are the order of the day. (Yeah.) Someone has the brilliant idea that Andrew and I should be making out on top of a broken down washing machine; and though we've been friends for over four years, this was still more than slightly humiliating. I had to sit on the washing machine, which had jagged pieces of metal sticking out all over it that looked just about ready to bite into my skin at any given second, wrap my legs around Andrew's waist, and, er, simulate sex.

Yeah, not only am I appearing in an Uwe Boll movie as a victim of domestic violence, I have a sex scene, too. Not my finest hour, I have to say.

Facing one another, Andrew and I are trying not to giggle, willing someone to say “cut!” and generally feeling stupid. At one point I lean my head against his shoulder and rub fake blood all over him; at another, his cap falls off, exposing the mismatched mullet. My legs, too, ache from being held so stiffly – you try wrapping your legs around someone while trying to have as little physical contact with them as possible, and see how comfortable you are!

Like I said, not my finest hour. At last, though, we were done filming for the day, and could run off back to circus to change into our own clothes and scrub the muck off our faces. While we were there, we got our paws on a copy of the Postal script and had a sneaky flip through. Hmmmm. The party line seems to be “It's like South Park, it'll offend everyone” and I probably should withhold judgement till I see the movie, but, er, I'm not hopeful, really.

By the time we get back to the hotel, we're tired and hungry, so Andrew and I plan to go out for a meal after a quick change of clothes. I have a message in my room to call Calum from Empire about going out for drinks with the challengers that evening, so after possibly the worst restaurant service I've experienced in my life (dear Canada: please give your waitresses notepads. I never saw them equipped with writing-things-down equipment, and they repeatedly got orders wrong as a result. What the hell is that about?) I head out again with Andrew, Calum, and Jeff Sneider (one of the guys there to fight Uwe; he writes for Ain't It Cool.com, for anyone who can't be bothered to check back to the beginning again). The bar was actually pretty nice, and we soon got down to the film journalist-y thing of ranting about movies (unanimously: Wolf Creek sucks!) and talking about our best and worst interview subjects. Jeff blows everyone else out of the water with his A-listers, before the conversation somehow moves on to Britpop, whether Coldplay are responsible for the downfall of Western civilisation, and whether Jeff should get drunk the following night as a way of dealing with the inevitable beatdown he's about to suffer at the hands of an angry German man. Cheery, really.

Postal Day 1

When director Uwe Boll invited four of his harshest internet critics up to Vancouver to go three rounds in a boxing ring with him, I had to get involved. What follows is my blog from the time I spent on and around the set of Uwe Boll's Postal...

"Postal" Day 1: Thursday, 21st September 2006

It's about 6:55pm Vancouver time, which means 2:55am London time to my poor tired head, and I'm standing in the lobby of a posh hotel, looking around for Uwe Boll's publicist, Bill Wanstom. I've been told to look for a man who "looks like a grumpy Santa," but right now this lobby looks like it's holding a grumpy Santa convention. Tubby, bearded men looking like they definitely don't want any screaming kids sitting in their laps are everywhere; seriously, I can see at least six of 'em.

Luckily for me, I soon hear a booming voice talking into a mobile phone. "Hi, this is Bill. I told them to be here at 7pm, and I can't see anyone..."

I hasten to introduce myself; it takes maybe another 10-15 minutes to round up everyone else and whisk us off to a run-down gym out in the middle of nowhere. ("Everyone else" being Chris Alexander and his entourage from Rue Morgue magazine; Nelson "Chance" Minter; Jeff Sneider from Ain't It Cool.com; self-professed “workhorse actor” Andrew Jackson, Michael Paré, some guy involved with the production named Trevor, my university roommate Andrew Mickel, and, eventually, Something Awful's Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka and his wife, who aren't even staying at the same hotel as us due to some unholy mix-up.) The gym, when we get there, has a smallish boxing ring on one side; some punch bags littered about the place; a couple of bald-headed scary looking dudes with too many tattoos, and about a million movie cameras. Okay, well, maybe around five or six. There's a shedload of other journos there, too, including one representing UK mag Empire and a guy who may or may not be writing about it for Fangoria. We chat for a while before the man himself, Uwe Boll, shows up – with his dogs and another boatload of film-types in tow.

The first thing I hear him ask is “Are there any press here?” which strikes me as kind of funny. Basically, we're all here because Boll issued a challenge to the internet: he was sick enough of the bad reviews of his movies and general Boll-bashing that he would fly his five harshest critics to Vancouver, and then get in a boxing ring to go three rounds with him. The reason I'm here is because I responded to that challenge complaining that it wasn't fair that his critics got a free holiday to Vancouver -- I'd reviewed House of the Dead positively and had personally stood up for Boll on the IMDB message boards, and I wasn't going to get the chance to go up there. He invited me to come along, though obviously, being a girl and all, I wasn't about to get into a boxing ring with a semi-pro boxer with more than eight years of fighting experience. (Luckily, there are people far dafter than me who were willing to take him up on his challenge – enter Lowtax, Jeff, Chris and Chance.) The first fight took place around the beginning of September in Spain, with a Spanish writer; the fight was uploaded to YouTube and it became apparent that Uwe Boll was a force to be reckoned with.

Anyway, like the good little fangirl I am, I scamper over to introduce myself. Boll has a quick chat with each of his challengers, sorting out who needed to be kitted out with equipment and so forth, and I basically run around taking pictures of everyone and everything. Like, for example, Chance beating the hell out of a punch bag in an impressive manner, before giving Jeff some pointers (which seemed, worryingly, to be all the training he'd done). After some more general schmoozing, Uwe Boll and another director named Brooke Burgess get into the ring to have a sparring match.

I've been totally unable to find any physical stats on Uwe Boll, but he's got to be around 5'7” – 5'8”, and though he looks to be in good shape, he's not huge or anything. Burgess is, according to the press release, 6'2” and 185lb, and they actually seem to be fairly well matched. Until the crucial moment – Burgess called time, claiming that Boll had backed him into a corner and carried on punching him. The ref's unconcerned, but Burgess has had enough, and leaves the ring. Unfortunately, I am an idiot and was too busy trying to get a photo to actually see what happened, so I won't make any kind of judgement on whether Boll was actually fighting dirty or not.

With the slightly sour taste of that dispute in our mouths, we drove back to the hotel, and although I know people did go out drinking that night, I'm ashamed to report that considering I was still on London time, I just went to my room and crashed.