Coming up right on the heels of two major Jewish holidays, including the all-important Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the trailer for Uwe Boll’s next film, “Auschwitz,” has dropped. And it is a doozy; brief, but incredibly explicit and starring Mr. Boll himself as an unsympathetic Nazi officer. We know he’s unsympathetic because he stands idly by with a forlorn expression outside of a room full of Jews being gassed with Zyklon B. Given the director’s reputation, the nicest way to put it would be to say he’s ill-suited to tackle a subject of such gravity. Then again, he’s not really fit to be making films at all, but that’s a whole other issue as well.
Boll has attempted to tackle 9/11 satire with “Postal” and the Darfur genocide with “Darfur,” but to our knowledge, his more recent films, including suburban serial murder drama “Rampage,” have not seen stateside release. The Internet will no doubt be up-in-arms about this film and Boll must know this after the publicity he’s pulled in with other controversial projects he’s taken on. Frankly speaking, he is a legitimate director of questionable quality and this film will likely bear the low-quality trademarks of prior Boll films — the difference is it will gather significantly more attention due to the nature of the subject. And that’s a shame. But it’s not like ignoring him is making the director go away either.