Storyboards from Uwe Boll's House of the Dead

Imagine Billy Wilder. Imagine Erich von Stroheim. Imagine Samuel Goldwyn. Imagine Krzysztof Kieslowski. Imagine every yutz who came from Poland or Germany to Hollywood.

Now imagine that these guys made movies about hot bisexual hybrid vampires and kung-fu rappers, working with all the big stars, like the girl Terminator and Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs.

What do you have? Andrzej Bartkowiak and Uwe Boll.

Not since Janusz Kaminski (Lost Souls) has a celebrated cinematographer from Poland transitioned so readily from lensing blockbuster productions (Species and Lethal Weapon 4) to making them.

You might not know his name, but Bartkowiak has worked with DMX, Aaliyah, and that funny fat guy from Kangaroo Jack. His upcoming film adaptation of Doom – starring the Rock – will be this summer's megahit. And just so you know he's keeping it real, the IMDB lists a bunch of Polish people in the cast. One of them's named Vladislav.

But it hasn't always been easy. In 2001, Bartkowiak directed a pilot for a show called HRT, which you know had to be cool because it sounds like "hurt," and Michael Rooker was in it with Ernie Hudson, but I guess it didn't get picked up because that prick Sean Maher was in it too, and he's totally killed three series already. (Remember Firefly?) Maybe the show was supposed to appeal to women past menopause and advertisers didn't like that? I can't think of anything else "HRT" would mean, unless it was "Hot Rooker Time." Yeah, that's it.

And then there's Dr. Uwe Boll, who is the best German import to Hollywood since Arnold Schwarzenegger. Boll has a doctorate in literature, so he understands conflict and characterization and the importance of hot naked chicks in the setting. He's made movies about school violence and moral decay (2003's Heart of America); he's made movies about zombies on an island. He's an auteur in the classic sense.

But Boll's true oeuvre is the video-game adaptation. Like Bartkowiak and the Rock, Boll finds inspiration on the small screen. Himself an avid gamer, Dr. Boll broke into the genre with 2003's House of the Dead and followed it up with this year's Alone in the Dark. As his Hollywood cachet grew, Boll replaced his stable of actors – Clint Howard and Jurgen Prochnow – with big-ticket stars Tara Reid and Christian Slater. (Howard and Prochnow were a step up from previous talent Eric Roberts and Casper Van Dien.)

And now he's ready to break through with Bloodrayne, a star-studded vampire epic set in 18th-century Romania. Parts of the film were shot in an actual Transylvanian castle, the rest of it on a Bucharest soundstage. Next year brings another game movie, Hunter: The Reckoning. We hear that Donald Sutherland – Kiefer's dad – is already committed to the project, and Boll told IGN FilmForce, a Web portal for gamers, that "a guy like Heath Ledger would be not bad for one of the leads."

As with anything great, not everybody gets it. At press time, 942 members of the "video game community, the horror community, and the film going [sic] community in general" had signed an online petition (www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html) exhorting the director to "stop directing, producing, or taking any part in the creation of feature films." Writing for the Boston Phoenix, Mitch Krpata calls Boll "a filmmaker of ... mind-boggling ineptitude – an "artist' who displays all the storytelling finesse and visual mastery of a high-school junior making an action movie for Spanish class" and referred to House of the Dead as "the worst movie I've ever seen."

This statement proves nothing except that the critics are as out-of-touch with regular people as ever. House of the Dead has a battle scene with 11,000 cuts in 13 minutes and over 100 effects. According to remarks Boll made to the fanzine UGO.com, House of the Dead cost more than Freddy vs. Jason or Cabin Fever to make – so much for the argument that his movies are Cormanesque cheapies. And if Boll really is a hack director, why does he keep attracting such big stars to his projects? Consider the example of Bloodrayne. Maybe you'd expect Michael Paré and Udo Kier to be in a game-to-screen horror movie, but Ben Kingsley? Billy Zane? Texas-born tough girl Michelle Rodriguez? Rising star Kristianna Loken, who was once No. 3 on Maxim's "Hot 100"? And the script is by Guinevere Turner, who proved her indie cred with the lesbian movie Go Fish and is a personal friend of Kevin Smith's.

If you're still not convinced, it comes down to this: "We have a really, really hot sex scene with Lokken where she is completely naked," Boll told FilmForcer.