He's one of the most hated men in movies. Critics pan his flicks. Audiences aren't having it. Gamers loathe him. Heck, a chewing gum maker even wanted him to retire. But is it possible that we've all been wrong?

This year, Prince of Persia was supposed to be the big Hollywood film that got gaming right. It didn't deliver, and 2010 was another year bereft of the elusive great gaming flick. As gaming movies continue to let us down, maybe it's time to consider that the worst offender in all this might not be the worst offender after all. It is time to re-assess the king of hated video game movies, Uwe Boll.

The German-born Boll made his splash in the early part of the last decade with House of the Dead, a cinematic take on the Sega arcade games. Low budget and corny, it was the film that would cement his reputation in the West as a maker of low-budget game-inspired schlock.

"I have almost no time to play video games," Boll tells Kotaku from the set of his current production In the Name of the King 2. According to Boll, The House of the Dead film version came via Mark Altman, the film scribe and producer behind DOA: Dead or Alive.

Boll thought he'd made the most accurate House of the Dead film send-up possible, and Sega supported the picture with then Sega of America exec Peter Moore given a zombie cameo. The movie's reviews were brutal, but the movie turned a profit. "Because it made money I went deeper into the gaming world and tried to acquire games I like — for example Alone In The Dark or BloodRayne," Boll says.

Alone in the Dark didn't fair much better with Alone in the Dark's scriptwriter dishing on the changes Boll made to the film and the game's developer deciding not to make this film a tie-in for the then-upcoming Alone in the Dark 5. The movie was not a success with critics or at the box office. BloodRayne, which had a budget of $25 million only made $3 million at theaters. Critics hated it. This is where the career of any normal filmmaker would draw to a close. Uwe Boll is not any normal filmmaker, because Boll produced sequels of both: BloodRayne 2 in 2007 and Alone in the Dark II in 2008.

This is Boll's genius — he is able to get his films made. Even when critics tear into his pictures, there he is with yet another film. He's used German tax loopholes to get his films financed as well as good old fashioned pre-sales, private investors and subsidies. Boll might not be the greatest film director, but he is a great movie producer. Since 2002, he's made over fifteen films. "I've never made more than three movies in a year, and I only did that twice," he says. "Normally I do two movies a year. Three is too much." Here's a guy who filmed three movies back to back, all using Nazi uniforms, props and settings and all completely different. His work ethic and corner-cutting harkens back to the bygone days when directors pumped out films year after year, rather then leaving them to languish in development hell. When asked whether he'll continue making films into old age, the 45-year-old director replies, "I don't think i will make movies after I'm 70."

Uwe Boll doesn't only get films made, he gets them made with name actors: Ben Kingsley, Christian Slater, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, John Rhys-Davies, Michael Madsen, Tara Reid, Kristanna Loken, Til Schweiger, Leelee Sobieski, Burt Reynolds, Ray Liotta, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Billy Zane, Edward Furlong have all appeared in Boll's films. There some big stars in there who have worked with big directors in big movies.

And even after suing Billy Zane over a BloodRayne dispute, the director was somehow able to talk him into starring in this year's Attack on Darfur. Even Michael Madsen, who got ill and injured during BloodRayne, said he'd work with Uwe again "if he called me tomorrow".

But what's his secret? Compromising photos? Blackmail? Ha! No. "I send the script and make an offer," Boll explains. "Actors and Hollywood Managers and Agents know that I'm a real filmmaker and [don't] agree with the internet bashing. They watch my movies and don't hate them."

It's more than that. Uwe Boll turned himself into a brand-name filmmaker. Ask any internet inhabitant, and they'll know his name, just like they'll know Steven Spielberg or Michael Bay. Granted, they know Boll's name for different reasons, but they do know it. Name recognition breeds media exposure (like this!), which creates interest in what he is doing.

Boll didn't build a name through himself by a series of bad films. There are tons of directors that create b-movies. No, Boll — who has a PhD in literature — is smart. The man is a master of early 21st-century publicity stunts: beating up internet critics or calling Michael Bay a "fucking retard".

"Boll uses the internet as a true communications medium," says Vince Desi, CEO of game developer Running With Scissors (They made the Postal game). "He interacts directly with the fans and the press. He is very public about his personal opinions about actors and topics he makes movies on." He knows how to push buttons, how to elicit a response. For example, Postal, based on the Running With Scissors franchise, was one of the first films to attempt to parody the 9/11 tragedy, causing a firestorm of controversy. The movie featured a 9/11-style attack gag that caused two hundred theater goers in New Jersey to walk out on a free Postal screening. Distributors balked, and the pictured went from a planned 1,500 screens to a mere 21. "All my movies are about life and death, and they are all radical," Boll says. "I'm not the political correct guy."

Boll considers himself a serious filmmaker, as he should. He's made several serious films like Attack on Darfur and Rampage — with those films getting solid reviews. Next February, Boll's take on the Holocaust, a film titled Auschwitz, will debut in Berlin. The director describes it as a "day in the life" at Auschwitz, stripped of traditional Hollywood heroics. "There is a documentary element in the film with interviews with German school kids," Boll says, "and it is shocking to see that they don't know a lot about this chapter of German history."

Meanwhile, Boll continues work in Canada, directing action star Dolph Lundgren on the set of In the Name of the King 2, the sequel to the film he made based on the Dungeon Siege games, readying a new social welfare drama and appearing in video game Postal III. Uwe Boll is a hard-working filmmaker and brilliant producer. His grandest production so far is himself, Uwe Boll.

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It's World War II, but with fangs, a large woman and controversial director Uwe Boll.

Following up on 2007's BloodRayne II: Deliverance, BloodRayne: The Third Reich, which was originally titled BloodRayne: Warhammer, pits Rayne (Natassia Malthe) against Nazis out to make Hitler immortal.

The trailer below might be NSFW.

The first BloodRayne film was released in 2005 and starred Kristanna Loken as Rayne, as well as Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen of Reservoir Dogs fame.

This isn't the only World War II film Boll is working on. He recently finished Auschwitz. According to Boll, "I made the movie because there is not one movie made what shows the Holocaust really was — a killing factory."

Besides BloodRayne and Auschwitz, Boll has yet another flick with Nazis, making a trilogy of sorts. It's called "Bluberella", a word play on blubber and Barbarella.

Uwe Boll, the German filmmaker best known for his film versions of video games, is helming two movies about World War II. Both films were shot back-to-back. One is based on a video game and features zombie Nazis. The other?

The other is based on history and features things far worse.

The first flick, BloodRayne: The Third Reich, sounds like typical Boll fare — a low budget cinematic adaptation of a video game. Boll has said from the beginning that he is planning to do the BloodRayne movies, based on the video games, as a trilogy and that the third one will end in the Second World War.

Previously, Boll has helmed movie versions of Alone in the Dark, Far Cry and Postal.

His second film is titled Auschwitz and is set against the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The recently released trailer shows Uwe Boll dressed as a Nazi as he leans against a gas chamber. Inside, men and women, young and old, perish.

The trailer is explicit and disturbing. It shows horrors like teeth being pulled from a dead body and a little boy being incinerated. In short, it festers in the nightmare that was the Holocaust. [Note: the trailer is not work safe.]

"I made the movie because there is not one movie made what shows the Holocaust really was — a killing factory," Boll says. "All the movies made showed us the special people...the heroes. But nobody has focused on the subject matter." Boll says he plans to include a documentary in the film as well.

The subject matter is most unpleasant. There have been numerous documentaries dealing with the Holocaust, but it seems Boll is referring to movies like Schindler's List. When Schindler's List was released in the early 1990s, there were critics, including Holocaust survivors, who derided Spielberg's portrayal of Oskar Schinder and its SS officer Amon Goth. According to Stanley Kubrick, the Holocaust is about 6 million Jews who died, and Schindler's List is about a couple of thousand who survived. Jean Luc-Godard said the movie was "Max Factor".

Criticism aside, Schindler's List was a critical and commercial success. Make no doubt, this is a landmark film. But we're not simply talking about film here, it's the Holocaust. And Uwe Boll — who doesn't quite have the technical wizardry, the sure hand or the heart of a Steven Spielberg — is making a movie about the Holocaust. There have been better directors who have approached the subject material, and, yes, there have even been far worse.

In an age in which some people continue to deny the Holocaust, he says, "I do not think that it is so bad to show that Auschwitz happened." Considering that the Jewish New Year has begun, the timing for reaching such an arresting trailer could have been better.

Uwe Boll is, if anything, a brilliant provocateur. He's made a name for himself. He gets his films made. Boll knows which buttons to push, and he pushes them well. In recent years, his films, however, have gotten increasingly political. He's taken on topics like 9-11 in Postal. That was dark comedy, though. Recent films like Darfur have shown that he has moved beyond parody. But have his films?

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David Hayter is a rarity. He has made a name for himself in voice games as a voice actor and in movies as a Hollywood screenwriter.

With a foot in both worlds, no doubt he has a unique point of view on video game movies.

Over at the MTV Movies Blog, Hayter gives his opinion on a laundry list of game movies. Here are the highlights:

BloodRayne
"It was really... something else, that film. I was working on a Black Widow adaptation at the time and I looked at all these female-driven action movies of their day and came across BloodRayne with Sir Ben Kingsley. That was unbelievable in the very truest sense of the word."

Mortal Kombat
"That's an example of-when they have done it in a decent way, adapted a video game into a movie, what they've really done is just sort of taken the elements of the video game and transferred them to film in a way that felt true."

Resident Evil
"My wife is a huge fan of the Resident Evil movies and I did enjoy the first one. It had a cool attitude and I think that it did capture what Resident Evil is, tonally. I've played a lot of the Resident Evil games and I really like [their tone]. There's something cool and weird about that world that goes beyond zombies and beyond just the T-virus. They captured sort of a neat thing there."

Tomb Raider
"I think the Tomb Raider movies had a problem... in that I don't think [the filmmakers] really understood what it was that made Lara Croft so appealing, and made that world and those games so appealing. [It seemed like] they thought it was just about the guns or the gadgets. To me, the idea of this character, this wealthy girl, being thrown into larger than life situations and having to deal with those things... that makes it interesting. Whereas in the movie, Angelina Jolie... was perfect casting, but they sort of made her this Teflon superwoman who wasn't affected by the danger because she knew she wasn't going to die, and that sort of took away some of the drama of it all."

DAVID HAYTER GUEST BLOG: Looking At The Best And Worst Of Video Game Adaptations [MTV Movies Blog]