Review #26: Are Uwe Boll-ing?

Oh yeah, we totally believe you.

Title: [sic] Productions
Creators: Remy (writer), Jax (artiste)
Genre: Humor, movies and naughty puns
Updates: Weekly-ish
Link: http://www.sicproductions.com/

"Dammit receptionist boy," I growled, "I told you that information ain't for your ears."

"Oh c'mon Doctor Haus! What happened to that crazy bartender guy? You never finished that report, but you swiped some hydrocodone from the pharmacy!"

"I already said you'll find out when I'm ready to tell you! So who's my next patient?"

The receptionist boy sighed in defeat. "Some dude named...Uwe Boll?"

"Eh, I do ball occasionally," I said, suddenly remembering my humiliating defeat the last time I challenged a guy to a 1-on-1 game of basketball.

"Doctor Haus, his name is Uwe Boll."

"Oh jeez, another drama queen?"

"No, but he does claim that some guy beat him up and left him in a dumpster after stealing his recent movie script. He wrote something about a movie idea he had with Destro from GI JOE and some other guy with massive dreadlocks fighting Cutsman from the Mega Man games?"

"Wait, and you're telling me these guys stole that idea from him?"

"Oh yeah, and he says they threw in a catgirl, a cross-dressing wuss who becomes a dada detective, and a militant lesbian that..."

"Stop right there," I held my hand up to his face to emphasize the point, "You're sure he was fully conscious and sane when he was saying this shit?"

"Well, aside from the bruising, yeah."

"Here," quickly whipping out my trusty notepad, I wrote down a perscription, tore off the top page, and handed it to the receptionist boy, "Give this to him."

After reading the paper, he did a double-take before saying, "You're prescribing Mary Jane for this guy?"

"Why not?" I said, "Maybe if we're lucky, Uwe Boll will have a spirit quest and come out with an original idea that doesn't suck." With those words, I ran out the door, hopped in my car, and headed for the nearest movie theater. The local movie reviewer had to be warned before he became a patient of mine yet again.

After reading this far, you might be under the impression that I'm about to bury [sic] Productions six feet under. Well, you'd only be half-right.

The story seems based around a few self-inserted characters (Jax, Remy and their buddies are the main characters, but at least they don't take themselves too seriously) getting together to shoot a superhero film on a whim, based on pretty much everything I said above. Something about a hero with large dreadlocks and another hero with a bald head ("even Destro is gonna say, 'That's a bald bitch!'") fighting Cutsman from the Mega Man games for some unknown reason. To fund the shooting of this movie, they make a deal with a mobster named Ronnie Cordova, who doesn't seem to ask for much in return. But he does have a robot butler.

What's to like about this comic? The artistry does seem to evolve pretty well from some black-and-white sketches to fully-colored and shaded panels. Also, the humor in the comic seems to swing wildly between trite parodies to the occasional original situational comedy.

However, there is one big thing that I can't seem to find a good excuse for: Several characters suck.

Maybe I'm over-generalizing a bit, but the cast has grown so large that its hard to keep track of why we should care about many of them. Has the catgirl done anything other than act as a catalyst for the blonde-haired Beldin to grow a pair and do a film noir parody? How about the token black guy/dance choreographer/CIA agent, or the CIA woman with the huge freakin' gun who hires two other crazy women who are supposed to be evil? Apparently, the extent of their evil was replacing Jax's (the character's) wedding ring, magically turning him into a Hot Topic shopper and gluing on a soul patch. And that's not getting into the fact that several of the women that appear in this comic are either militant amazons, evil lesbians, or both.

And yet, despite all this, I will give them props for somewhat staying on a storyline that isn't used too often. When the jokes actually center around the movie-making quest instead of the dead horses of gaming parody or sexual stereotypes, the comic actually has a glimmer of hope...at least until some evil femi-nazi cutout smacks one of the dudes in the face.

Despite this, I can't bring myself to hate this comic. The "smart humor" fans out there may hate it, the "stupid-funny" fans will probably enjoy it, and the folks who like an actual story in their humorous webcomicry might like it if they can look past the stereotypes.

"No..." I muttered to myself, looking at the movie reviewer convulsing in the aisle of a movie theater screening room. I was too late.

"Doc, aren't you going to help him?" Someone shouted out.

"I can heal him," I shouted back as I ran down the stairs towards the reviewer, "But I don't think this guy will ever be the same again."

"What can we do?"

"I'll prop him up in a chair, just tell the management to start playing Adaptation over that screen and hope his jaded elitism will come back naturally." As the startled moviegoer ran out of the screening room, I thought out loud, "There's only one person capable of unleashing such horror upon this world: my archnemesis."

To be continued?