Ray Liotta, shunning period-wear (and dignity) to slum it in Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Seige Tale

There was a time when all a B-movie addict needed for a fix was a quick look through a local video store with an eye for faded cassette jackets, improbable terrors and low budgets undermining high sci-fi concepts. With DVD supremacy pushing the last of the VHS cassettes out of stores through sales and bargain bins, the cull was inevitable, and the tapes that remain often lack panache.

Then, in 2003, previously unknown German director Uwe Boll burst onto the scene with his bold adaptation of the arcade shooter House of the Dead. Abandoning the already meagre gruel of the game’s original plot for an even thinner dribble of horror movie clichés and straight-faced lines like “this book looks old, maybe it can help us,” House of the Dead was brilliantly bad. Random, pixilated game footage bookended random, awful writing and low-budget Matrix-style 360-degree pans that came almost four years late. The film’s universal reception would be handled sagely years later when Boll, a former amateur boxer, pummelled his underweight Internet critics into paste.

After actually making money on the film (and backed by a German tax law allowing investors to recoup 50 per cent of their investments), Boll has since been given enough projects to eke out a niche for himself in video game adaptations, even calling in B and former A-list actors to provide some additional cachet. If you have any doubt as to whether Ben Kingsley puts forth a better performance as a troubled former Iranian colonel in House of Sand and Fog or as Bloodrayne’s vampire overlord, there’s really only one way to check.

Unfortunately, it might not be worth the effort. Because if Boll’s growing resume has shown anything, it’s a perversely inverse fall from grace, a precipitous incline that has him rising from high camp to soggy mediocrity. In the Name of the King is the latest and greatest in his franchise of failure, but compared to a film that sees Tara Reid portraying a scientist by slapping on a pair of bookish glasses (Alone in the Dark), the stakes for greatness are pretty meagre.

King is a piece of crap, of course, but its crappery isn’t why the film is a disappointment. Rather, it’s just not crappy enough, even if it does make valiant attempts. In addition to Matthew Lillard’s turn as (another) insufferable ham, the film features a soupy mix of dialogue that sounds like it was cribbed from Shakespeare Coles Notes and half-remembered Die Hard scripts. The film’s only two female protagonists (Leelee “Is She Still Doing Movies?” Sobieski and Bloodrayne star Kristanna Loken) are both underwritten and completely unnecessary, while the smattering of name actors are merely collecting easy paycheques. The results are blandly poor.

With all the generic flair of fan-fiction written by gamers who read more Internet forums than novels, the serviceably named Farmer (Jason Statham) is pitted against legions of Orc-like man-beasts called The Krug in a painful attempt to cash in on The Lord the Rings four years too late. It even features a strangely gaunt John Rhys Davies, who has dropped his dwarven prosthetic makeup in lieu of vaguely defined magical powers. Sure, the film’s special effects don’t look cheap, but every other person and thing in it does.

Maybe a half-assed attempt at an epic is the most appropriate Boll vehicle of all, coming as it does after such a promising, almost heroic beginning. Anyone can make a bad movie — they’re released every week in direct-to-DVD dumps — but it takes a rare individual to make something howlingly bad. Just as it’s saddening to see a hero fall from greatness, it’s been a shame to watch Boll ascend to par.