QAA Podcast - Citizen Vigilante Movie Night (E381)

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

POV: You’re the world’s richest man, clicking the POST button on the platform you own. You’ve just shared an inconceivably terrible and violently bigoted film to your 240 million followers, catapulting what would’ve been a forgotten flop to the top of the streaming charts. The film is “Citizen Vigilante”, featuring Armie Hammer’s “comeback” role where he executes migrants. It’s directed by the prolifically terrible Uwe Boll, who once mercilessly pummeled his harshest critics in a boxing ring. For our latest movie night, Brad forced co-hosts Live, Annie, and Jake to hate-watch this travesty, enduring the pain so you don’t have to. Although, Jake genuinely enjoyed covering Boll’s endless video game adaptations, none of which he’s actually seen. Brad: https://x.com/LoveAndSaucers https://www.instagram.com/bradwtf/ https://lnk.bio/extrasensory Liv: Livagar.com https://www.twitch.tv/livagar https://bsky.app/profile/livagar.bsky.social Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 381. Citizen Vigilante Movie Night. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Annie Kelly, Liv Aker, and Brad Abraham's. Oh, yeah. This is a crazy ensemble. Have we ever had this ensemble on the show? This particular config?

I don't think so. It's really a case of needing to assemble a team. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Yeah, we've got the two non-American ladies, and we've got the two American Jews. I'm Canadian. I was going to say. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Just because you live here, it doesn't mean you have to be here spiritually. So that makes sense. Yeah. At Inevitable West tweeted, breaking. Citizen Vigilante is now hit number one on Amazon in the United States. The film in the establishment doesn't want people to see has gone viral. American flag emoji. And Elon Musk has quote tweeted it, and he writes, this is what the people want to see.

Which again, Elon has now showed his whole ass, because if he had watched this movie, he would be embarrassed to endorse it. I think no matter what your politics is, this is a bad movie on any and all fronts. Yeah, and the reason that this film, Citizen Vigilani, hit number one on Amazon and number two on Apple TV, is precisely because Elon Musk has been boosting it for a full week, going as far as to share the film in its entirety to his 240 million followers streaming on the platform that he controls. So if it weren't for him and a bunch of other high-profile right-wingers having a fit of ecstasy over it, your embattled hosts likely would not be presenting this episode to you. He's streaming this movie live on Twitter? He did, yeah, for 48 hours. I'd be pretty mad. Oh my God. Well, he got permission to you. I see. Okay, okay. So here we are,

and yish, like, this was a rough one. And I think as much as we all love watching and covering movies that are so bad, they're good for the pod. We'd really rather not be giving our precious seconds on this prison planet to citizen vigilante. But if this means we spare tens of thousands of you from doing the same, it'll have been worth it. Yes, please. Yeah. Please. We must do this service and save you.

My wife had headphones on. She was playing Stardue Valley on Switch. which she had no audio sense, like no audio visual senses except for the game. And like she glanced up like three minutes into the movie. Took her headphones off and was like, this looks bad. She was like, this is what you have to watch for work. And I'm like, yeah, she goes, this looks real bad. And she was like, oh, is that Army Hammer?

And I was like, yeah, she goes, he's in this. Somebody cast him in a movie? And I was like, well, well, movie is generous. It's a generous term here. It's really the biggest piece of shit. Yeah, I believe, well, I think, Brad, you went above and beyond because you were telling me just before we started recording, you were actually watching this in public of all places. Yeah, yes. So I was like trying to make the best deuce of my time and it didn't really, I didn't need to give it justice by like watching it on like a nice TV or a sound system.

So I watched it on the airplane on my laptop and like very soon into watching I was slowly inching my computer screen away from anyone being able to see it until I could only see like a corner of the screen. shaking my head when I watch this is visual art. I don't know. That I hate it. Yeah. Oh. That is like the worst part of this job, I feel. I remember once when I was doing my PhD, I was in the university library.

And I was listening to a speech, Richard Spencer speech on headphones, obviously. Okay, okay. But like, it was the nightmare scenario. Literally, the headphones just stopped working and it started blaring out of my laptop. And like the whole laptop froze. And like I've never like, oh my God, I've never panicked so much in my life. Like I was pressing everything. I was like trying to slam it shut.

It still was going. Just break it at that point. Oh, amazing. Just hit the table off and start. That's crazy. I've never just like wanted to scream like more like this is what I'm studying. I promise this is like a research thing. I don't agree with any of this.

It's crazy that there was like a Nazi like library ghost that was there that was like, I must interfere with the computer so the whole library can hear these beautiful words. That's so funny. I actually pulled my blinds down. There's like a horrible, like long sex scene. It's I guess in all Uve Bowl movies, but like this one particularly, there's like a very long sex scene with like a sex worker. And it was so gratuitous and weird and bad that I like got up and closed my blinds because I was embarrassed if like some. somebody walked by with their dog or their kid or whatever, that they would look through our window and just see like neon, like neon fake tithes, like glistening, like, you know, like, because everything is bathed in like this weird sort of like Grand Theft Auto lighting scheme.

Yeah, and you're right, it is like three times too long as well. Yeah. Every, every scene, yeah. Every scene. So many edits. A hundred edits to show me, like, picking up a piece of paper or like loading his guns takes like an hour. hour and a half. I don't think I've ever agreed with that meme where it's like, you know, the makers are pouring

unnecessary sex scenes into the, like, the analogy is like the coffee cup and it's overflowing. This was an unnecessary sex scene. Yeah. I thought he was going to go in and like liberate the, I thought he was going to go do something kind of like taken style. But then I noticed that the camera started being pervy and weird. It was going to his POV, like checking out everybody's like ass and boobs. And I was like, what the fuck?

And then he just goes and like, has sex with this woman. Oh, God, I'm sorry. We're getting ahead of this ourselves. Yes, we'll cover that part. We'll get it all. Yeah. Yes. So before we get ahead of ourselves, in case you don't know, the film is about a vigilante

taking quote unquote justice into his own hands by hunting down criminals, which are really just brown migrants. And it's not just bad, but it's hateful. It's mean-spirited. It's terribly written and amateurly directed. But the director behind it is a chaotic troll of. the highest order. And this is why we're going to break the format of the traditional movie night app by talking more about the man than the film itself.

Raging All. Dr. Uva, that's how it's pronounced, not Ui. Dr. Uva Ball was born on June 22nd, 1965, in a small town in Germany's industrial northwest. He was no film Nepo Baby. His father was a chemical technician and national handball champion, and by Ball's account, his earliest and harshest critic, constantly yelling profanities and calling him a waste of time and a fucking loser. So imagine like this is, this is what you get from your dad from day one, how this is going to affect your development. Oh my God, every scene is just him killing his father. Okay, pretty much. Go on, yes. His mother Ernie, though,

was by all accounts, a delight and catered his first movie. He said at six years old, he walked alone to the local cinema and watched Dr. Javago, which is, there's something about like a six-year-old walking alone to the theater to watch like an almost four-hour long movie, which is, Very strange to me, if true. And then he also watched the original Godzilla, which makes a little more sense. Those films, plus seeing Marlon Brando and Mutiny on the Bounty, settled it.

He would become a director. The film schools rejected him, an early start to his eternal outsider status. I know another individual kind of like him who was rejected from a certain arts school. Yes. Another Germanic individual, you're right. Instead, he studied business administration and literature.

And in 1994, was awarded a doctorate in literature, and where his doctor moniker comes from. His dissertation was a 130-page paper on television series called The Genre of the Series and it's genres. Surely something's lost in translation there. Yes, yeah, sure. But how did a man with no connections, no film school degree, and no certified bangers get to make over 40 feature films?

Up until 2005, German tax law let private investors in film funds right up to 100% off their investment immediately. paying tax only on whatever the film earned. So for a wealthy German in a high bracket, a ball movie was a tax play. Even a total flop of which most were cost almost nothing to them. So starting in 1999, Ball set up 10 of these funds, raising about 150 million euros or roughly $160 million through them.

Genius. Yeah. And who passed to take us through Ball's filmography in this period, which were mostly video gain adaptations. Take it away, Jake. Thank you, Brad. You know, it's funny that I'm in charge of the OeVVille. video game adaptation section, because I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any of these movies.

Now, look, some of the early Resident Evil films, the Doom movie, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, these were the video game adaptation films I had sought out in the early 2000s. I just didn't give a shit about Alone in the Dark, which at the time I knew was only a graphically impressive, albeit, but too scary, too hard computer game that I'd played maybe a demo of. maybe a demo on a Macworld disc. I was like 10 years old when it came out for Mac. So too complicated. Did any of you ever played the OG alone in the dark Brad?

No, no, no. No, none? Not on a computer? Your Pops wasn't playing it? No, I don't remember. It was one of the original like Polygon sort of like titles. It was when graphic, it was like I was used to seeing sprites and like pixel graphics and then it was like Polygon characters.

It was very impressive. But I wasn't playing it. I was playing Star Wars Dark Forces, Marathon Durandle, full throttle, other Lucas Arts titles, maybe a little digger, maybe a little monkey island, but I digress. Despite having seen none of these movies, I don't think. It's possible one might have slipped through the cracks at a hotel or something. Because you never know what's on TV. Sure.

I can say with confidence, though, that I have played most of the games that they are based on, which makes me uniquely qualified to lead you, dear listener, through a quick list of Uve's most famous gaming adaptations. House of the Dead 2003. Now, at first, I couldn't believe that somebody actually tried to make a movie out of the 1997 Sega Lightgun arcade game where you blow chunks out of zombies as well as these little wormy goolies I'm sure people who played remember,

until they inevitably kill you, which was always. I never got further than the first level, I don't think, never had enough quarters. I remember House of the Dead having pretty good graphics at the time. The game apparently had an impact on Ovei as well because he actually cuts two footage of the game during the movie's famous cemetery shootout, which is incredible. Because he like ran out of footage or something? No, I think it's like a stylistic choice.

Okay, okay, okay. So the plot of the film is as follows. A group of college-age kids travel to an island to attend a massive rave. But when they get there, everyone is dead and the island has been overrun by Zeke's. Bull introduces each character holding a various weapon with a 360-degree camera turntable. Think like OG bullet time. Apparently, this is one of the last films to use the turntable because it was way too dangerous having a giant camera just swinging around 360 degrees.

But they use this like gratuitously throughout the shootouts. And it's actually, it looks great. I'm going to be, I'm going to be honest. This movie is probably the most gamey feeling, I would say, if that makes sense. It was universally hated by movie critics, currently sitting at a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes. Which seems to be like the average score of this films. Yeah, yeah, one to six percent from my guy, which is like really impressive. Yeah, that is actually quite hard.

It really is. Would live and Annie, do you want to take turns reading these two reviews from two? 2003 when the film dropped. Ken Fox from TV Guide gives it a 1.5 out of five and says, Lazy by even the low standard set by earlier video game adaptations like Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat. And Dave Kerr for the New York Times gives it a one out of five and says, cutting around frantically in a vain attempt to stir up some energy,

the director, Uvee Bowl, drops in occasional images from the video game itself, as if he was subliminally trying to remind ticket buyers why they showed up in the first place. Yeah, he really does seem like a person who, like, if he is given an artistic decision, we'll always make the wrong one. You just inevitably. Like, you can make a good film by doing the exact opposite of him, like, to the letter. So this is actually insane by today's standards, given what sort of passes as, like,

a sort of, like, indie kind of horror film budget nowadays. But House of the Dead was made for $12 million, which is, I think, a lot for a horror indie Nowadays, especially after Obsession, which is like a massive, massive hit. It's like, okay, can you make your horror film for 750K? Because, like, that's what these guys did. Yeah, and 12 million back then is like 20 million now. It's insane. And before that, before Obsession, it was like paranormal activity.

They made for 11,000 the original. So it's like, hey, can you make your movie for this cheap? But this guy's got like 12 million to make. It's insane. He worked that tax loophole. Like, oh my God. I wish literally anyone else had found out. the loophole other than him.

I was going to say, like, imagine if somebody truly, like, amazing filmmaker had found this. Yeah, and didn't he, like, ruin it for... Yes. Yeah, yeah. Future generations, right? Yeah, I'm going to get into that. But I think it speaks to, like, what he seems like he's good at is, like, financing, pre-production, development, like, producing and just terrible at writing and directing.

I think if he was just a producer on an indie film, like, maybe he could have, like, had a, you know, a functionally, like, uh, respected career. Mm-hmm. So this, this movie, though, actually ended up being one of his best successes. It made about a million dollars. It did, like, over 13 million of the box office. And Bull credits it with basically saying, like, well, this, I'm going to make more video game adaptations because this made a million dollars, like, this made a million dollars.

So, like, everybody's zeroed out. Like, we all had a good time. Like, I'm just going to keep doing this. And he did. Alone in the Dark 2005 How the hell And I mean

How the hell Did he get Christian Slater To play in a video Adaptation movie From to me Kind of a surprising Video game title You know

You guys said you never played The original Alone in the Dark But it was like a proto Resident Evil A fixed camera Polygon art 3D survival horror In fact

Guinness Book of World Records Credits the Devs for inventing that genre. Crazy. From my memory, your character moved like really slow. It was really hard to aim. The original games were set in the 1920s and used a type of French boxing for the majority of the combat. Very difficult. So like, you know, to me, like a Marathon Durandle movie, say, made a lot more sense. Even like a, you know, a Sam and Max movie or something made more sense. Why pick a lone in the dark? It actually didn't matter because Uve's movie took very little from.

the games themselves and instead served as an early indication of his level of pillidness. Christian Slater plays Edward Carnby, a paranormal investigator connected to a secret government organization called Bureau 713. They're in charge of tracking down paranormal anomalies, uncovering ancient civilizations, and locating children who've gone missing. To show you how far he sort of like wandered from the source material, the game's original plot is about escaping a haunted mansion. The film did away with the game's slow, unnerving atmosphere in favor of lots of machine gunfire and shiny, happy, slithery, CGI-I monsters.

It has been considered generally to be one of the worst movies ever made, partially due to it making only roughly half of its budget back at the box office. The writer Blair Erickson claimed that the original script was a slow-burning paranormal thriller that paid homage to the Lovecraftian vibes of the game, but that Ball began sending email suggestion after email suggestion, slowly turning the movie into an action flick. Thankfully, Dr. Boll was able to hire his loyal team of hacks to crank out something much better than our crappy story and add in all sorts of terrifying horror movie essentials like opening gateways to alternate dimensions, bimbo blonde archaeologists, sex scenes, mad scientists, slimy dog monsters,

Special Army forces designed to battle slimy CGI dog monsters, Tara Reid, Matrix, slow-motion gun battles and car chasers. Oh yeah, and a 10-minute opening backstory scroll read aloud to the illiterate audience. Ten minutes. The only people able to successfully miss all the negative reviews. I mean, hell, ball knows that's where the real scares lie. Now there's a writer. Yes. Real like just venom just dripping off the screen there.

People widely mock Tara Reid's performance in this movie as the museum curator, saying that she sounded too dumb to work at a museum. She's really mean. Also, there's a really gratuitous sex scene between Reed and Slater that Bull later ended up removing from the director's cut. He removed it from the director's cut. He like ended up removed, like the director's cut, he ended up like taking out this like really weird sex. scene. So maybe even he was like, I've gone too far.

Alone in the Dark is currently sitting at 1% on Roddy's. Incredible. Blood Rain, 2005. When I saw the cast list for Blood Rain 2005, they made two sequels. My jaw nearly hit the floor. Ben Kingsley? Sir

Ben Kingsley? Michael Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez, Udo Kier, Billy Zane, meatloaf? What the heck? Meatloaf. Blood Rain is a 2002, third-person action game from the era of combining jack-off material and guns and gore. You know what I mean? It's like the Lara Croft.

It was like. Before they made video games woke. It was when the devs were like, I can turn these triangles into tits. And they did it on all their characters. You play as a half-human, half-vampire hunting Nazis as well as other non-human creatures. The game had bad polygonal titties that the devs, of course, animated to bounce and lots of gratuitous ass shots during cutscenes. It's like Tomb Raider meets Legacy of Kane, kind of. That makes sense to anybody.

Now, Bowles' movie serves as a prequel to the story of the game, which takes place in the late 30s before World War II. I think, now this is a title ripe for adaptation. You've got a hot half-vampire blade master taking on Nazis, Circa Indiana Jones era. It's perfect for like a grindhouse. style flick. Instead, this movie is about rain, escaping from a traveling circus, and joining up with a group of vampire hunters so they can help her search for magical body parts that will help her defeat her father, the vampire lore. The screenwriter, Gwynnevere Turner, also known for American Psycho, says that after she turned in her first draft, Uve basically was like, excellent,

took the script, made a bunch of changes, and then handed it over to his actors, encouraged them to make their own changes. She said like 20% of her script is in the movie and that a lot of it was written on location during the filming. Amazing. So the movie was widely panned and earned only $3.7 million at the box office towards its $25 million budget, making it one of Ball's largest financial failures. He was criticized for hiring sex workers as extras for a scene where Meatloaf plays a decadent vampire surrounded by Entopless harem. Ball claimed that this was cheaper than hiring actresses willing to perform. topless. The theatrical release was also a major boondoggle, with theaters being shipped prints of the

film when it had not been ordered. The mix-up caused a number of theaters to end up not showing the movie, and Bull later sued Billy Zane, who had a hand in the distribution. Wild. Michael Mattson later called the film an abomination, but admitted he really liked Bull and wouldn't mind working with him again in the future. Yeah, this actually, this is something that's pretty consistent is like cast and crew are like it was actually like a fun time nothing went wrong on set everyone got paid like again he was like good producer he he made like sort of a good environment for the filming but then the end result obviously terrible you know to me i wish i hadn't heard that because that goes a really long way i know you know this guy just wants to show up and put a squib on you like

that's what he wants to do he's like let's he's like let's like let's fuck around with these squibs and like see how much like realistic looking blood we can get he's like he's like I've got an idea for one of the police officers during like the killbox scene. I want to blow his whole face off. Like, let's do that. Like, I can imagine, as somebody who's worked on a handful of film sets, like I can imagine a set like this would probably be pretty fun. Bull would go on to direct two more straight to DVD Blood Rain movies. Postal 2007.

I cannot remember if the original Postal game had a story. It's an isometric shooter that was very controversial when I was a teenager, with people saying it would make you, quote, go Columbine if you played it. Have any of you played the original postal or any of the sequels? No, I know about the first two, but never played them. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not a gamer and I haven't heard of any of these games, but I have heard of this one, I think, because of how controversial it was. Now, I never owned this, I don't think. I don't think I had the balls to try to funnel that kind of violence into my family computer, my, my, My mom, if you're listening, be thankful because I know you would have had an aneurysm at this game. But I'm thinking maybe that the first level hit like a Macworld demo disc or something. I just included a picture here for the hosts. Okay.

Especially our younger hosts, you know, who didn't have to have demo discs delivered in magazines. This was what we fucking waited for. This was it. Look at this one. Best of the year. Over 50 power pack demos trials. and movies of the Mac's best software of 1999. This was like, I had months of content, maybe.

I was 98 baby. I was one years old. So I have no clue. This is a whole different world for me. Postal, the game. I played it. It made me feel bad inside. You wore a trench coat and shot at innocent people

in suburban towns and neighborhoods through Molotov cocktails at marching bands. This was a lot more violent than the original GTAs. Some of your still alive victims would crawl away from you leaving a trail of blood. It was incredibly intense. The original game came out in 1997 and was developed by the company Running with Scissors. The game is named after the phrase going postal, which I heard pretty frequently growing up

after an incident in 1987, where a postal worker went on a shooting spree and killed 14 colleagues. So that was like how people said that you were crazy back then. They were like, oh, he's going to go postal. So is the game, are you actually just going on a shooting spree? Are you like a mass shooter, basically? You are a mass shooter, basically. And they had, like, execution animations, I remember. Like, if somebody was still alive on the ground, you could, like, go up to them and there was a specific animation to, like, blow the rest of their head off.

It was like, I remember as a kid being like, ooh, like, ooh, this is, ooh, I don't know, I don't know. I think you just got, like, point. You're supposed to be killing, like, the police and the military that are coming after you. Now, Postal, the movie, though, directed by Uve-Bull, is probably the closest, I would say, spiritually to the source material. It stars Zach Ward as The Postal Dude, an unemployed guy from Arizona who stumbles on a terrorist plot to unleash a biological weapon. Zach Ward, the actor, is the bully from Christmas story with the Davy Crockett hat, the red hair. The movie opens with the 9-11 hijackers flying towards New York and arguing over how many virgins will be. waiting for them in heaven.

After realizing they aren't actually sure if any virgins will be waiting for them, they decide to divert the plane to the Bahamas. Just then, the passengers break into the cockpit, grabbing the hijackers, and forcing the plane to crash into the two towers. What does this have to do with anything? Some say that this is Bull's masterpiece when it comes to video game movies. Most of the movie's action takes place at a German-themed movie. amusement park called Little Germany

that Bull himself plays a character in and says that the park was funded by Nazi gold. Oh yeah, I have a clip of that. Hell yeah, here we go. We got a clip, folks. But I want to use that situation here where I'm live in TV, and I want to explain a little

about the financing of my movies and also from Little Germany where the money comes from. Because you know, there are all that rumors out that my movies are financed with Nazi gold, and what should I say? It's true.

But somebody must do something with the money. Go! I get a little horny here on stage sometimes. If you see the crowd and all that children. This is incredible. Yeah, honestly, that was actually quite funny. You know, this movie is kind of the, I would say, probably the best, like, movie in terms of, like, having a plot and having some laughs.

Yeah. He's at his best when he's not taking himself seriously, I guess. Yes. Absolutely. But anyways, this scene devolves into madness and lots of children. are depicted being killed. Leading to many theaters flat out refusing to show the picture.

Bull claimed he was just trying to challenge American moviegoers who are easily able to stomach hundreds of, quote, adult characters being slaughtered on screen. The movie is definitely pilled. As, spoiler, there's a bit at the end about Osama bin Laden and George Bush being best friends and potentially lovers.

Dave Foley plays the postal dudes, Pilled Uncle. There was potential here, I feel like. And some of the Reddit guys guys claim that this is Bull's most faith adaptation. Unfortunately, it only made about $150,000 with a $15 million budget, which led one reviewer to write. Christy Lemire for the Associated Press says, how does Uvee Bowl keep getting work?

Seriously, this is not a rhetorical question. Someone somewhere surely must know the answer. So it doesn't even address the movie. She hadn't heard of the tax credit scheme. That's why. And Annie, you were telling us that you saw a ball movie. that you remember. Yes.

Yeah. In the name of the king. That's right. Oh, yes. I think in the name of the king, a dungeon siege tale. I think it's cool. And he made like four of those or something, something crazy. It's a kind of funny movie.

I mean, it stars Jason Statham, and I think it's got Ray Leota as well. So it's like another one of those ones where it's like a weirdly like, it's not just nobodies who are appearing in this. It's like weirdly stuck. It also had Bert Reynolds and Ron Perlman and Matthew Lillard. Jonathan Reese Davies, yeah. But yeah, there was a couple things that I remember like sticking out to me. The one was, which we've covered before, yeah, again, like intensely gratuitous sex scenes that I remember I was watching it with a group of guys at the time.

And I remember actually feeling secondhand embarrassment for their gender basically because it was like so gratuitous and so kind of, I don't know what the word is other than like just like straightforwardly like condescending to just like men. as a whole, to straight men as a whole. It's like, this is what you like, isn't it? Like, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to sit and watch this if we didn't show you this woman's boobs. I don't know. I sort of like, yeah, I kind of, I felt bad for them. It's like only the biggest, fakedest boobs for you felt. We know what you really want, something almost unnatural. Yeah. But there was also another part of it, which I guess was, so the, the character is engaged in battle as a kind of. fantasy setting. And I think he's engaged in battle against a kind of species, which are clearly

meant to be based on orcs. I think they're called like Krugs or something like that. And, you know, that that's like fairly common for fantasy at the time. But I guess like as the film goes on, it kind of becomes clear that like the Krugs kind of like have a basic like society, that they kind of like have like language. I don't know. It's kind of one of those weird things we were just a bit like, you're kind of watching the main character just engage in like a genocide of what seems to be like a fairly sophisticated species. Sure. Which I guess, yeah, given the political leanings of the movie, we're about to discuss. Right, I was going to say, not all that dissimilar from this film.

Yeah. This one had a budget of $60 million, Jake. Oh, wow. Double the last one. Period. Peace. That's tough. Yeah, and also currently 4% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah. I would say that that is generous. That is a generous 4%. So this generational speed run was about to come to an end for Dr. Bull.

Germany tightened the film fund rules back in 2005, partly because of Ova. And his money machine died. Investors in his films had lost heavily. And later on, a Nuremberg court even ordered Ball to personally refund an investor. Oh my gosh. I love the fact that it's Nuremberg because it really heavily implies that these films are war crimes. Yeah. Amazing.

From then on, Ball says he financed his films with his own money, but they did not get better. In 2006, stewing over terrible reviews for his film Blood Rain, Ball challenged his harshest critics to real boxing matches, open to anyone who had written at least two extremely negative reviews. The online casino, golden palace.com, sponsored the event and dubbed it, Raging Bow! Five critics accepted. including the late Richard Lotax Kiyanka of something awful. It was not expecting that name. No.

It felt like an entirely unique sentence. If that hadn't happened, no one would have said that sentence in all of his chain. And writers from Ain't it Cool News, Ruh Morg, and Moore. They were told it was just a PR stunt. They'd get training, which they didn't. And Ball wouldn't actually hit them hard anyways. They were never told that Ball was a trained amateur boxer with over a decade of experience. He fought all five, beat all five.

and dropped Lotax inside two minutes. So here's a clip from a short doc about the event, starting with Ball and then introducing his opponents. If you come up here and you fight me, then I will kick the shit out of you. All that hecklers, all the critics, all the geeks are want to be filmmakers. And as soon they do something on their own, it sucked. He's one of the most prolific filmmakers out there.

Yes, he's shit. But he's prolific. His movies are bad. They're terrible. They're awful. They're hypnotically bad. You done any boxing before? Never. Never before. Never been in a ring. I did not come to kick ass. I came here for the free trip to Vancouver. What do you think about Dr. Bull's work?

Um, most of his movies suck. So, yeah. And then this next clip is Bull and action just destroying everybody one after the other. Incredible. I can't wait to watch this. The Deutsche Land Destroyer, the Teutonic Killer. Dr. Ova Boy! So, yeah, one of you described that, what we just saw? What we saw was a human being getting to live out all of our fantasy. We've all had this fantasy of getting into the ring with our critics or, you know,

somebody that said something mean or treated us poorly, and just they didn't know. They didn't know that you came to fucking fight and you beat the shit out of them. were scared. They were puking afterwards. That's what happened. We saw somebody just like achieve probably one of the most satisfying moments that a human being can have. If you've got a chip on your shoulder, if you're like a peaceful non-chip on your shoulder kind of person, that good for you. But, you know, for somebody like me, I got a couple people that I'd love, I would love to imagine doing this too. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, I guess these guys just clearly think that it's all a bit of a joke. One has got like a t-shirt that says, hi, mom on it and

Uvei Ball is just like really just really trying to kill them in that ring. Yeah, he really is. Around this time, a stop Uva Ball petition was circulating online. It peaked with about 354,000 signatures. A rival Long Live Uva Ball petition only got 7,631. Ball said he'd retire if the petition hit a million, but then reneged by recording a video declaring himself, The only genius in the whole fucking business.

He went on. Look, I'm not a fucking arsler like Michael Bay or the other people running around in that business Or Eli Roth making some shitty movies over and over again. If you really look at my movies, you'll see my real genius. Michael Bay responded saying that Bull was a fucking idiot. Some dumb chum trying to get some fame when he has none. He's obviously a sad being. When you ask, do I care?

Not in the slightest. It's so good. It was a rocky road from then on, as he grinded for years trying to get more films made. When crowdfunding for his film, Rampage 3 failed, he raged. So goodbye and goodbye Hollywood. Make another whatever, Marvel's, Avengers bullshit dirt. I have enough money to play golf till I'm dead. I mean, it's so funny because, like, yeah, Marvels and Avengers are really crappy movies,

but, like, compared to the stuff he's coming out with, at least from the two I've seen, yeah, a dungeon siege and in the name of the king. and Citizen Vigilante. Like his movies are probably the only ones that could make those movies look good, is basically what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good point. But yeah, to his line that he has enough money to play golf till he's dead,

he did have a lot of dough. And his net worth, I think now is estimated at around like 10 million, like 4 to 15 or so. And it makes sense because, you know, he had films with big stars like Ben Kingsley, Jason Statham, Christian Slater, J.K. Simmons, blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, those films are going to get residuals over the years. Sure. He just got six bucks from me to rent citizen vigilante. Oh, you paid for it. Yeah, I watched it on the OLED, the big screen.

Okay. I thought it was going to be a lot better than it was. Eventually, he mercifully announced his retirement, but he had a backup plan, fine dining. In 2015, Bull opened Bahaus, a high-end modern German restaurant in Vancouver's historic gas town. Oh, really? That's so funny. Can I go to this? That's like a maybe a 20-minute one. walk away from my house. Is it still, is it still there? Yeah, before it even opened, in typical bowl style,

he'd insulted the city's rival restaurants in vicious YouTube reviews. And he soon grew to hate the neighborhood, writing to Vancouver politicians that he and his wife, got robbed, vandalized, peed on, yelled at, and spit on from homeless and drug addicts for five years. Vancouver is an expensive shithole that needs to get cleaned up. The homeless need to leave, period. So it should be noted that this restaurant was just like a block or two away from the intersection of East Hastings in Maine, which is one of the poorest and most destitute like points in all of Canada and derogatorily called wasting and pain. And it's like I've been around there.

It is so sad. Like it's just it is such a sad. Like Liv, I'm sure you, you have a lot of experience just like in that area. Can you describe a little bit? Yeah. It's a very high concentration of homeless people who are basically kind of abandoned. together because it's like if we all kind of stay in this one area it's harder for police to harass us and you know anything that's kind of around there is going to have you know any any proximity to it there

are going to be some like homeless people who are like particularly not doing well this is like I think possibly gotten at least worse from when it was in 2015 because of like COVID and the rise of housing prices still fundamentally I believe like the 90s and the early odds it was a concentrated like much worse yeah it still it still remains like a pretty terrible And produces a lot of, like, chuds. Like, basically, like, the orthodox liberal position on the situation is, like, we got to get them out of here. Like, it's, you ask, like, a Vancouver liberal what they think about, like, East Hesig Street and they turn into Adolf Hitler. Wow.

Okay. Okay. So, Boll, just, like, kind of saying that the homeless needs to, basically calling for, like, yeah, cleansing of the homeless. Yeah. It's actually not betraying any particularly reactionary leanings. That's just the mainstream liberal. Basically, yeah. Yeah.

And not to go too far into this, but like, you know, a lot of cities, you see the pot, you see poverty in pockets like in several places in a city, right? Like downtown, outskirts, et cetera. But in Vancouver, it seems like it's all concentrated at one intersection. So a whole city's poverty in this one intersection and then contrasted with the rest of Vancouver, which is like this sort of like sparkling fake utopia. It's really stark. Like if you just like happen to walk to this intersection from like, you know, the historic pretty gas town, you're just like, wow. Okay, this is how you do it in Vancouver. Have those like horrible decline porn YouTubers discovered it yet?

Oh, they love it. Tyler Olivier have been there and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I bet they do. Yeah. Like, Americans know about these tastings, like who watch those. Oh, yeah. It's a very, yeah. The failed state of Canada.

Mm-hmm. But COVID, fortunately, brought the closure of his restaurant in March 2020, and Bull moved his family back to Germany. So I don't know, Liv, if you had eaten in the Gastown area about like five or six years. I'm sure I had. I can't remember this name specifically. It would be so funny if I were to have gone to Bauhaus. Yeah. So as we inch closer to talking about the film at hand, we should talk politics. For most of his career, Bull presented as a leftist. He made movies about the Darfur genocide, mass shootings, revenge on Wall Street bankers. He also, very unfortunately, made a Holocaust

drama called Auschwitz, where he appeared in it himself as an SS guard. The German magazine's stern wrote. The words Auschwitz and Uve-Bol in one breath rightly leads one to fear the worst. I couldn't bring myself to watch this one, hearing that I had about 15 full minutes of torture porn in it. Oh my God. Bull said this of the Auschwitz haters. Half of my crew for 22 movies have been Jewish. My best friend where I live in Vancouver, Jonathan Shaw is Jewish. It's completely absurd. They put me in a corner saying it's an insult to the Jewish community. It's totally bullshit. It's the opposite. On his politics, some years back, Bull said,

I battled for the right causes. It's not like I made fascist movies. I'm very left-wing, and I hope that Bernie Sanders gets elected. And 10 years after the Bernie endorsement, he is now the toast of the online right, in his own words. Traditionally, I'm not a right-wing person at all. But when something goes completely wrong, I point it out. You're doing like a Mel Brooks impression for Larry David or something?

I don't know. I don't want to do like a German accent. Sure. Yeah, I hear you. Julian would have been the only one to do that. Exactly. Webinized autism. Bull wrote, produced and directed citizen Vigilante, which stars none other than Army Hammer.

Confusingly, Bull frames it as a companion piece to his film Run from last year, which is a somewhat empathetic story about the plight of refugees arriving on the Italian islands. He said his real world inspiration for Vigilante were gang raped cases from 2016 and 2020 in Hamburg, Germany. The facts in the 2016 case are that four youths raped an intoxicated 14-year-old girl and left her partially clothed and unconscious in freezing temperatures. She almost died. Four of the five got suspended sentences. In the 2020 case, an intoxicated 15-year-old was raped over roughly two and a half hours during a festival. Nine were convicted, but only two went to prison. In regards to them inspiring the film, he said,

If you look at what happened in Hamburg where the rapists walked free without any penalty, It's as if we're living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe where people have completely lost track. There's a huge difference between so-called hate speech and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don't matter anymore. I studied crime statistics. And at one point, I felt I needed to make a film showing that if we don't get a grip on this, everything will go to shit.

But one of the many issues with his framing is that he blames migrants for a leniency that comes from German juvenile law, which prioritizes rehabilitation for offenders up to age 21, regardless of their background. Half of the 2020 perpetrators were German nationals, not migrants, and they got the same suspended sentences as everyone else. Yeah, and I think I'm not kind of defending the decisions that were made in these specific cases, which I don't really know anything about. But there is a tendency, I think, often to frame these kind of lenient sentences for juvenile offenders as a case of kind of woke sort of policies and soft-hearted kind of policies. And it's actually just going from decades and decades of criminalogical research, basically, which shows, I think, that for, and particularly, this is the case for sexual crimes committed by minors, that the recidivism rate that is the rate

that means that somebody will be likely to repeat their crime goes way, way up if they have a sentence in prison, basically, if they spend time in prison. So there obviously is a kind of problem in criminal courts in general with sexual crimes not being taken seriously. But I think a lot of the time, particularly what's happening with juvenile offenders, is that the research has just kind of only ever really pointed one way for decades in this sense, which is often what leads to these kind of quite confusing and quite like, yeah, shocking sentences basically when they kind of hit the headlines. Yeah, yeah. So you may have caught my brief mention of Army Hammer, the once almost A-lister whose career completely imploded in 2021 due to allegations of assault

and bizarre text messages about cannibalism and rape fantasies. Hammer's career destruction was so complete that in 2022 he started selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands. In an interview on the YouTube channel, Kino Corner, he likened this experience to acting. So you were in the Cayman Islands and you were selling time shares for a time. Did that feel like acting to you? Did that kind of was that, did that? Yeah, there were aspects of it that definitely felt analogous. You have to read what's going on with your scene partner in acting and react and respond to that.

The same way with timeshare. You know, obviously the end result of a good scene is a bit more ethereal. The end result of a good time share is closing a time share. is closing a deal. But you also, when you're selling timeshare, the fun part about it was, is like, you have to read what the other person needs and then become that thing and give it to them. Like, does a guy need his ego stroked to get a time share or does he need his ego challenged? And you say something like, listen, I know these are really expensive and it's probably a little bit out of your price range. But I just want to show you this one of the thing. And then they'll be like,

well, no, I can afford that. You know, and then that's all the money. a sudden you got that guy or, you know, it was fun. I really, I actually just recently saw my old timeshare boss. He flew through LA on a layover and I got to see him for a little bit. And it was great. Like I really enjoyed selling timeshare. I just, I love that he, the interviewer, can like barely deliver that question with a straight face. This is so, so just a case of a guy who's had exactly two jobs in his life. Yeah. It's like, it's like the guy who's only ever seen boss baby being like getting a lot of boss baby vibes from this do you know yeah and he's like oh yeah it's great i know exactly how to manipulate people yeah yeah people people always say their job is about reading people i used to

find that sure did you guys ever watch the traitors every season oh yeah it's so good it cracks me up how like i don't think i've ever seen a single person on that show they always just like i'm a police officer so my job is reading people i'm a psychic so my job is reading people i'm an accountant so my job is reading people Yeah, this just reminds me of that. They're like, as one of the winners of Survivor in 2011, I'm pretty good at reading people. And then they're all wrong. It's so, traitors, if you want to watch like, if you want to watch like 20 people like all like think they're right and be wrong like on TV, it's a great show. And Alan Cumming, of course.

In 2024, with no agent, manager or publicist, Ball emailed Army directly and went through his attorney. It was Hammer's first acting offer in five years. So, Army, how did you get involved in this project? Uva sent an email. He just sent an email and said, you know, are you busy? I was like, nope. And he's like, you want to do a movie? And he sent the script and I read it and I thought, this is amazing.

I would love to do it. So it was really just kind of that simple. He thought it was amazing. Amazing. The movie opens with a woman getting stabbed in the neck by like the most racist depiction of a brown person. Like every brown person looks like a terrorist in the movie. It is like, oh my God. This script was amazing, though.

In an interview with the Hollywood reporter, Hammer said, I'm pretty sure I cried. It was just this moment where I was like, I'm going to get to do the thing that I love more than anything, other than my children. I would have done a fucking cat food commercial. I just wanted to work again. I do like, it's like, okay,

Ova Ball movie or cat food commercial kind of equivalent. I mean, it's kind of crazy that Army Hammer was in, like, some really highly regarded movies. Oh, yeah, call me by your name, so many. Yeah. The social network. I mean, like, sure. I genuinely do think there is actually more dignity to just doing your time shares.

Yes, yes. Bull was equally candid about why he wanted Army for the role. I cast him because he's a great actor and also because he was cancelled and wanted to work. He wasn't charged with anything. There was no lawsuit. He was just a guy who was famous and fucking around. He's a handsome, charismatic guy who could be James Bond. In fact, he'd be perfect for the part.

Hammer said this about the role and his character, Sanders. All of us have had vigilante fantasies. Every single one of us has been wronged. Every single one of us feels like there's not been justice. And all of us, whether in a small way or a big way, have had fantasies of taking matters into our own hands. Probably not a good idea to do that in real life. But getting to do it for a couple weeks, running around Croatia and killing people

in the name of personal justice was a lot of fun. It was just a lot of fun. I want to pitch in here and kind of point out that several women have accused Armyhammer of sexual misconduct. And I believe there was one allegation of straight-up rape. I think it was like the LA County police kind of like, you know, began an investigation into this and then eventually he put out a statement saying that they would not file charges. They did not clear him of any wrongdoing. They just actually put out a statement which like could not be more

kind of clear and sort of, you know, in the sense that like, look, we, we just don't have enough evidence to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. We are not calling the women liars. You know, it was really, really kind of, yeah, sort of like nuanced and kind of, you know, saying we know that it takes like a lot to accuse somebody of rape and all of this sort of stuff. But all of this is to say, I don't know, if I were him, I would be extremely, extremely cautious talking about every single one of us feels there hasn't been justice when we've been wronged. Every single one of us has vigilante. I would be extremely cautious about endorsing that idea at all, basically. Sure. And about people saying, saying like, well, I've had fantasies about taking matters into our own hands. Probably not a good

idea to do in real life. We've all seen your fantasies, yeah. He's like, I'd love to kill the two women who ruin my career. Yeah. So in that same interview on Kino Corner, he was asked about his inspiration for how he played the role, and he gave a very surprising answer. There was a few things that I really wanted to get in there. And one of the main things was sort of like just creating a character that lives in a very black and white world, almost to like being on the spectrum kind of sense, where it's like... A lot of people are saying that your character is kind of autistic. I was going for that. Like, that's definitely something I was trying to get in there.

And I'm really happy people are picking it up because we didn't say anything about it. We didn't acknowledge it. But that was, like, in my head as I was reading it, I was like, this guy's autistic. Like, like, for the way he just sees the world of like, I wanted to get that in there. So I'm glad it came across. It's like autistic guy, special interest is Nazism. It's funny, I didn't get that. I really didn't get that from him.

It seems so insulting. Yeah. To me, to me the movie was like about like, you know, these like awful stories that you hear on the news about like some piece of shit who like goes into like a mosque or a synagogue or whatever and like, you know, shoots up a bunch of people or goes into like Walmart like goes on a spree like a school shooter. That's what I thought like his character was. I was like, oh, it's like a school shooter movie but like the school shooter is the hero. Yeah. So Hammer's fee was approximately $250,000, which is a steel. depending on how you look at it.

That's an insanely good rate. That's an insanely good rate for him for the level of this movie. Sure. When Variety broke the casting news in January 2025, the film was actually titled The Dark Night

with a cave. Jeez. Oh, my God. Warner Brothers, who own the rights to the Batman films, sent a cease and desist, and Bull eventually gave in, renaming it Citizen Vigilante.

Wow. It really is just what if Batman was racist. Exactly. And no costume. Yeah. What if Batman, he never had a costume? Well, his costume in the film is sort of like how every, every right winger on Twitter dresses. Yeah.

Black turtleneck. Yeah. Black trench. Mm-hmm. The film was self-financed at roughly $2 million and shot run and gun in Zagreb, Croatia, doubling for a deliberately generic, quote-unquote, Europe title card, while the on-screen signage stayed Croatian. And this is ironic for a film about the dangers of mass migration because Croatia is like the whitest country on earth.

It's 99% Caucasian. They don't like any immigrants. It's so funny. Wow. The whole thing took about 15 shooting days over three weeks with no permits. That's about like half on the very lowest end of shoot days, even for an indie production. Croatia denied the production its usual tax rebate, according to Ball over political objections to the content. Amazing.

Yeah, it felt to me like there were some scenes that were like, improvised, like, that they were kind of writing the dialogue as they went. Like, this makes a lot of sense to me. I'll bet it was fun. I'll bet they had a good time. But it does have that kind of, like, student film. We don't have any permits. Fucking get in, get out.

Like, have fun with it, you guys, like, improvise. The Dark Night. The film has a completely and confoundingly non-linear, 89 minutes, set in an unnamed European city that's coded for Germany. Throughout, the main character Sanders monologues to camera, delivered via a camcorder. Also throughout the entire film are shots of him

loading various weapons and working out. The film does not look great. About a quarter of the shots are from consumer drones. It has a very crunchy color grade, like, very, like, black blacks and, like, things are kind of blown out. Many shots are reused throughout. It feels like another quarter of the shots we've seen before.

And the audio quality is just terrible. Like, I found it kind of hard to understand what people were saying over the din of, like, music or sound design. Yeah, any, any cinematic quality thoughts from the group before we go on. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I thought that it was just like, there was so many edits. At one point, I was like, how many times are we going to cut to this guy like opening a drawer? It was something mundane like that. I was like, one, two, three, four, eight shots. Eight shots. He used to do that. Like, he just would keep cutting back to like them, like, opening the chain on the bottom.

Like, it was always, everything took for fucking ever. The film opens with an epigraph attributed to anonymous. All behavior traces to instinct. And when justice is denied, instinct turns to vengeance. And then we hear like a gun being like, you know, or bullet being chambered in a gun. Then a very blonde mother and her young son are shopping at a small grocery store, sweetly negotiating over when the boy can eat some chocolate.

As soon as they step outside, the music turns. This also took a hundred angles. to shoot, by the way. There's like 50 cuts, like of them, like, talking about the child. It's supposed to be, like, raising tension or whatever, but it just looks, like, very amateury. Can I now eat chocolate? No.

Okay. Okay. Oh. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.

Mom. So will you guys sort of visually describe that? Just the worst blood effects possible. She seems to be stabbed by an anonymous figure who's in maybe like a kind of run-down coat who's holding a knife behind his back, just like stabs her right in the neck. It's, yeah, the worst blood effects I've ever seen in my life. Yes. It's definitely CG blood spray there.

And of course it's a person of color who is randomly stabbing her in the neck. The knife might as well have like Islam written on it. Yeah. We cut to a news broadcast reporting a country gripped by fear. The nation is gripped by fear as a wave of shock sweeps the country. Her mother was murdered in broad daylight in front of her child by another suspected undocumented migrant. Parents were afraid to let their children play outside. And many women avoid venturing out after dog, and together.

We took to the streets to hear what people think about the shadowy figure. Here's what they had to say. He's a real hero. You know, we work, we pay taxes, and for what? To help all of Africa. You see, they come here and we pay for them. And in return, we get robbed. And as a woman, you cannot go out after 9pm anymore.

No, it's too risky. I love that guy. He goes out there, he goes against all those criminals. They laugh about the police, but not about him. I want to marry him. I mean, he's a real knight, and he helps the help us. So, yeah, in the second half of that clip, it's a bunch of sort of on the street interviews

and social media reactions that track his rising support. I was describing it to my husband while I was watching it. And I think, yeah, the way I tried to, like, frame it to him is I was just like, it's like what the news reports on those purge movies are like. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, just like this, like pure kind of, like, vengeful, like, right-wing propaganda channel.

Yeah, it's crazy. because also in that news clip that it's showing, at the bottom there's a moniker that's like four dead in case like involving 14 year old like rape or whatever. And those are the guys that he kills at the end of the movie. Like the timelines in this movie make no fucking sense. I think Uvei is trying to do like some kind of Nolan-esque sort of like convergence of timelines, but it's not have the skill for that.

Yeah, it's indecipherable. Yeah. And then Sanders has even seen watching the social. media videos that are gushing about him in this next clip. That guy out there, wow. Have you heard of this vigilante crime fighter guy over in Europe? He's like the real deal. This man is taking out the trash.

I think we need somebody over here in the States like that. What do you guys think? Comment down below. Let me know. Look, this guy is greatness, okay? We need more guys like this in Canada. Okay, we need him. I love him. I love this guy. We need someone like him in Germany. That guy is great.

We need a guy like this, isn't it? Like, he doesn't even know how to do the lie. Like, he can't even make the social media stuff, like, look. Yeah. Yeah. It's so unconvincing, right? It feels like social media done by, like, someone who's, like, never been on it before. Yeah.

Yeah, there's, like, no life to it. It's like a post where a guy's talking, like, oh, no. Yeah. It also feels like, I think of like, I guess he's just taken from the dark night. But like, like, he doesn't understand how like big a country is where it's like, oh, he's stopping all of the migrant crime. This one guy is walking around shooting people stopping all of the migrant crime. All of the migrant crime in Europe as well.

Yeah, in Europe. Because they haven't even bothered to specify what country it is. So it's just on an entire continent. And can we talk briefly about the fact that this guy is leaving his fingerprint? everywhere. You watch the movie. He is like closing, like he murders this family

at the end of the movie. We'll get to it. And then I watched him like reach back. Like he's like, oh, I forgot to leave my fingerprints at the crime scene. And he reaches back with his bare hand

and like closes the door behind him. Like this guy, he's touching car door handles. He's like led five senators out into the same field. Like there is no way that he's not getting caught instantly. It's just,

they don't even try. We then meet our protagonist for the first time via a camcorder. It's been a lot said about me, so I thought you should hear directly from me. Everything that I do, I do for you. I can't sit here and watch you exist in a state of sleep paralysis anymore. The truth is this. You are all being used. You are all nothing but play things.

Every soldier who's gone off to war thinking that they're doing, death was for an idea or that their sacrifice was important for society has been played Clinton, Biden, Trump. You never see them on the front lines of any battle. Why? Because they never risk their own lives. They have you. It's like weirdly, like, eccentric fascism.

And I feel like you can see this with how Army Moore talks about it where it's like, oh, you know, look, we don't endorse everything about this, but it feels good. And as a political moderate, I imagine like it would have been easy if I had read the script to see where this was going. But I kind of do like wonder if, because I guess a lot of the like proper Radio Rwanda style stuff comes in the form of the like news bulletins, right, that kind of keep on cutting in. And they'll say like stuff like, you know, migrants are making women afraid to walk on the streets or migrants are officially now taking more from GDP than they are putting in and things like that.

Stuff like that, which is just like, oh, this is just like pure, pure racist propaganda in a way that kind of makes me wonder of like, Army Hammer when he's doing his script, and maybe I'm giving him too much credit here, kind of thinks this is more of a cool, edgy Batman thing and isn't like necessarily spotting the kind of, yeah. It's possible because, yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about some like alternate reads of the movie later where it's like seen more as like satire. But yeah, that's good sort of ripe for discussion. Now that I know that he's playing an autistic guy, the movie's a lot better. I think it works a lot better for me now that I sort of know what he's going for. Now that I kind of see, I see what he's doing now. It's also just so funny, he's talking the only politicians he references are Biden and Trump when he's like specifically meant to be like in Europe, like combating like the European problem.

Could not be more obvious, I guess, that this is just like geared towards Americans. He also referenced Clinton. Yeah. It's like, guy. Yeah, like, just like even less relevant to, like, presumably his European audience. The action proper begins, with Sanders massacring a crime syndicate of three people, gunfire in a blacked out room, intercut with his voiceover, and we can't see anything that's happening. Interpol regional chief Henry, played by the SAFranchise veteran Costas Mendelor,

gives a televised statement, floating that the vigilante may be an anti-democratic terror cell, supported by Russia and or Chinese government institutions. Meanwhile, Sanders rides the bus. This is Ova's favorite scene in the film. In it, a few teenage hooligans get on the bus and refuse to pay. So here's the first clip of that. Hey, hey, hey, hey, guys, your tickets. What you?

Guys, you did not pay your tickets. It's $150 per person. Fuck up and drive. It's $150 per person. Didn't I tell you to sit down on drive? Fucking bus. 150 per person, please. Gentlemen, everyone on this bus has somewhere they have to be,

and for some of us, it's urgent. So please resolve your issues and go drive the bus. Could you imagine how inefficient buses would be, if this is how things work? So Sanders does pay for the kids, and then sits next to them and starts to lecture them and puts a gun up to the waste of one of the children. Who we are, and what we do has ramified.

in our lives and in the lives of everyone around us. Hmm? You don't understand? All right, pay attention. Let me explain this to you. If you get onto a bus and you don't pay your ticket, if you go to the movie theater, if you grab a banana at a grocery store, and you don't pay, eventually the cost of everything will go up.

If 10% doesn't pay, the cost will go up 10% to cover the loss. And that's not fair. You're going to look back at this moment. Look back at this moment and realize that it is the luckiest you have ever been. Believe me. The kid is so chill about just this strange adult coming up to him and pointing a gun on him. Yeah, this kid has ice running through his veins. Yeah.

He's like, society must function. It must pay the bus driver. I think it's very telling that this is like the German director's favorite scene of the movie. I guess it's worth saying that this group of wayward, teens, they are multiracial as well. Yeah, but they're supposed to be, so later in the film we see them, they're speaking Arabic. Oh, what? I think he just couldn't get as many, like, minorities as he wanted, just because there

aren't that many in Croatia. For the chopping block. Yeah, so instead he's like, it's kind of multiracial, but they are somehow supposed to be, like, maybe Middle Eastern Muslim. Right. Okay. Yeah. If you see them from behind, they each have Islam.

sort of written on there, written stitched into the back of their jackets. Yeah, yeah. So next up, Sanders visits Elsa, a rape victim who was badly beaten in her attack and pitches her his alternative to the courts. Who are you?

I'm just here to help. What do you want to happen? What do you mean? Men who did this to you. What do you want to happen to them? I want them to go.

to cheer for the rest of their lives. Not good enough. Not the right answer, lady. Not the right answer. So he continues pitching his own brand of justice and asking if she wants him to enact it. And of course, you'll have to participate in that trial, telling the story of what those men did to you over and over in a room full of people who are going to call you a liar. And try to poke holes in every detail of your story. And then during that long and expensive trial, we have to hope and pray that the men who did this to you don't do the same exact thing to somebody else.

Do you want justice? Yes. I guess implication, she's like, I never thought of that before. I guess I do want you to be a judge, jury, and executioner. This is just further abuse. like breaking into this poor woman's like poor woman's fucking hospital room she already is like

you know like in the worst in the worst state of her life and he's like what do you want to happen she's like yeah I'd like them to go to jail for the rest of their life and then he like pressures her for like threatens her basically like no like actually like that's not even going to work like wouldn't you

basically forces her to ask him to kill them for her and this is he he goes and does this he has this thing where he like asks permission almost or it's like, he basically is like, I have to get the kill order from the victim first. But he, like, goes and, like, forces it out of them. It's the most bizarre plot point.

Only a man, only a man could write this and think that this is like, that this is like what a woman. Yeah, he wants to consent. After she's been raped once. Exactly, yeah. It's funny that he's written as, like, a persuasive, powerful political figure who's, like, has really strong rhetorical skills.

Like, it shows how it's like, you want a dumb person writing a script, writes a smart guy, and they're very stupid. Yeah, exactly. Ball in himself is not convincing politically. He can't, so he can't write the character he wants. He does really capture somebody on the spectrum really well, though. I got to say, like, you know, all my...

But he's also just, like, being very wooden in his performance, right? No, I'm being totally facetious, Brad. I was going to go on to say, like, all of my, like, yeah, like, all of my friends who are on the spectrum, like, are incredibly, like, aggressive. And, like, they love going up to people, like, strangers in public. actually in threatening them. Like very, this is very like stereotypical of people with, you know, who live with that. It's so interesting that he's doing this all in the name of democracy when it's like, you're not following the rules.

Like, you'd think if it's like autistic guy who's really rigid about the rules, you know. It's interesting. It's a very like American fascist sort of thing where they say that they're pro-democracy, even though they're not. Because like the institution has lasted so long. It's interesting to see a German do that, given like, how newly implemented democracy like a parliamentary system is in their society. They're getting like America brained.

To that point, through his monologues, we learn who Sanders really is. And he is an American with no residency in the country, in the country illegally, supposedly taking care of family assets that happen to be there and reveals my favorite detail of the whole film, which is that he's a landlord. Yes, that was incredible. We are a very hands-on. landlord and management company. And whenever a tenant moves out, quite often,

we will go through the unit to inspect for damage, to make sure that if we can, we can give them as much of their security deposit back as possible. So weird and boring. Yeah. By the way, like the scene that they're showing of him, like looking at the buildings is taking pictures. It isn't even for the tenants.

It's for his own place you find out later that he's like, By the way, he's like, my piece of shit apartment is like crumbling. Like, the place I'm saying is shit. Like, these are pictures. Like, he's not even, oh my God. At a surprise inspection of his real estate company, he lectures them about evictions. I hope you don't mind me using your office while you're gone. And I need some privacy for delicate calls with tenants who are behind on their rent.

How many behind on the rent? We're always under 10%. So, on average, 90% of the rent comes in each month. Are there fluctuations or is it the same 10% each month? If so, I want them evicted. Well, the procedure is after three months of unpaid rent, we send a final notice to pay within four weeks. And if that payment doesn't come through, we get a court order, and that will allow us to evict them within seven months total. So if somebody doesn't want to pay, they get to live for free for seven months?

If you want to see it that way, then you're right. Is there another way to look at it? We have 3,500 units in this city, Owen. That brings us in 50,400,000,000 euro annually. 10% of that is 5,040,000 euros that people are stealing from me. It's unacceptable. Evict them immediately. It's just such a bizarre, like, fantasy.

It's so bizarre. I get the kind of romantic folk outlaw kind of thing that they're going for at the beginning. But then you're kind of thinking, well, I don't know. Then you're thinking of people like Robin Hood, right? And, like, there isn't a scene where Robin Hood is, like, talking about evicting all of the, like, all the tenants who are back on their rent. Like, specifically, he's, like, fighting those guys. We're only making 50 million. euros we could be making 60.

Right. I think it like speaks to just like this kind of very specific like right wing anxiety of being, you know, people are taking advantage of you. They're kind of taking advantage of you in their vulnerability. And I think that like really comes through here that this is like not just a folk vigilante kind of like story, but this is like specifically geared to a very right wing neurosis. Yeah, it's tailor made for that. Platonic ideal of like fascist guy.

Yeah, I feel like. Yeah, that's it, which kind of, I think, like, differentiates it from other kind of, like, vigilante, like, stories, which, you know, will certainly flirt with that, that political tendency. We'll certainly kind of, like, you know, have a, like, little kind of romance, kind of dark night of the soul with it, but kind of won't come right up to it in that same way. So, looking back on this with the mention of, like, ironic or satirical interpretations, I can see, like, the landlord bit being a bit of, like, an attempted plausible to liability of like, look, he's not, look, he's very like, weirdly autistic in a certain way about

justice and, like, rules. But, like, he's not all good necessarily. Yeah. It's like a very poorly written version of Roershack kind of. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that is also a bit in that same scene where he's kind of lecturing his, um, his, like, shiftless manager where the manager is just like, yeah, saying like, oh,

but the government wants us to, to give all of these flat, these apartments to refugees. if we evict people. And he's like, no, we're not going to do that either. Yeah, yeah, it's a funny one. I see why Elon Musk likes it because he's honoring that level of like evilness and greed that it's like, no, it's like a 50 million, no, it's like instead of being like,

okay, well, 10% burn off like that. Okay, and it's this much to take them to court and get them out, all right, whatever. But it's like, no, they're stealing 10 million from me, every single, five million for me, every single month they didn't earn, they're living for free. odds all they're black or they're brown. Like, like, it's just, oh, God, this is the, this is the problem.

Like, what, what would happen actually if 10%, if it was built into our system that 10% did actually go to people who were having troubles and it did fluctuate? And there was a slush fund, you know, that people could rely on, you know, like, oh my God. These people wouldn't even notice that it's gone. I do wonder, like, well, wants us to feel the way that a lot of people feel about Trump were, like, they don't like him, but they think he's doing a good job. Presidentially where it's like we don't like it, but like it's the rules. We need people who follow the rules in society. Of his holdings, included is a brothel, which brings us to the film's one erotic scene

where Army stops mid-sex because he sees mold on the ceiling. Which makes a lot more sense now. Yes. It's like played out like a horror movie. with like Twin Peak style like music What it is? It's mold When you let clients shower in the bathroom after you're done

You open the window? No Why? If you let them shower and it gets hot The steam builds up And you get mold in the room But why you care? Because I own the building

You own the building Wow Really? What do you think your pimps own the building? I don't know So I should not took your money Of course you did It's your job.

He started anyway. Now we finish. Yikes. There's a lot going on in that scene. It gets funnier when you realize the scale of how many buildings he owns. Because I thought initially, I thought it was like maybe he owns like one or two buildings. But then we see with the scene of like, you know, 10% of 10% of it's not paying that like he

owns so many buildings. This guy is like a fucking real estate type. Yeah. This is like if, like, Richard Branson was going around in a black turtleneck and trench coat and just, like, murdering people, like, and leaving his fingerprints everywhere. It also makes it so much worse that at the beginning of the brothel scene where he introduces himself to the sex worker, he offers her 50 euros. Right. I mean, what a fucking, like, cheap skate.

Jesus Christ, you own all of this stuff and you, like, you can't even just get, yeah, you can't even pay her properly. 50 euros. Yeah. And then she's like, yeah. Like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have taken your money? I mean, yeah. The 50 euro? You get what?

Like a Wendy's combo. Yeah, it's like a really, really pathetic amount of money. I also want to point out it's like really nothing to do with anything. But the sex scene is like the moment where I always have this when I'm watching a really bad movie. And you kind of realize to yourself, you're like, oh, I bet I bet making films is really hard. But there's like a scene, he says get on the bed. And then they like talk a bit more. And then she gets on the bed.

And then he says get on the bed again, even though she very clearly is on the bed. There were like a few scenes like that where he like repeats himself in weird ways But that one I was just a bit like oh yeah I guess I'd never really thought about it before Because I've never filmed anything before But I guess it is actually a little bit complicated to like know where everyone's going to be And how it's all going to be like cut together Yeah the role on set is like a script supervisor or continuity And I really don't think this film had it

No They were running and gone in. Yeah So we have another like a mid-movie monologue at this point where he of course mentions Nietzsche and And then we see him at a nightclub where he watches two men plan to drug women, but switches their drinks so they dose themselves instead. So Henry, the Interpol chief, happens to be at this bar just for some reason and collects a glass that Sanders handled to pull his DNA. So this is one of the many surfaces he touches.

Yes. Where he can get his, I guess it's weird, like get his DNA. I thought it would be more fingerprints. Anyways, it leads Interpol to an address. And then a fully militarized Interpol SWAT unit, which I'm sure does not exist, storms the property. Come out. Surrender.

I understand that you're here to do your job. I have no interest in killing all of you, but if you try to stop me from doing my job, I will be forced to kill you all. This is your last warning to leave. The dialogue is so bad. It's just like, I know you're doing your job, but I'm doing my job. I don't want to kill you, but I will have to kill you if you do your job. It's like video game dialogue.

He's in this big metal box through like a long hallway where he's these two AK-47s mounted in like slits. And then these 10 soldiers come out and stand right in front of the box and just like just in the perfect vantage point. And they're like, you got to come out now. Idiots. They could easily gassed him out of that thing. It was so, yeah. Or just not stand in front of. a mounted AK.

Like, it was, I think this is like probably the dumbest scene for me in the film. Yeah. Apparently, the whole house is just a facade built around this armored box that Sanders is in. And he warns the tactical team over a speaker to leave. But Henry orders them to fire. And here is that scene, which is, it's only 20 minutes into the movie, but it is like, it's sort of one of the two center pieces of the film. Fire!

Fire at the metal box that we can't get into. just fire through the metal. So this goes on for, I feel like, 10 minutes or something where... It takes so long. You just see in slow motion, officer after officer getting all their limbs blown off. It's like video game AI.

Splattered. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then the Interpol chief, for some reason, just keep sending more and more officers into the room. As soon as like 10 officers are dead, he sends another 10 in, and it just is this endless stream of carnage. It's a wave mission, Brad.

We're waiting for like, We're basically waiting for the check, like, game save to pop up to let us know that we're like at the next checkpoint. But this is supposed to be, this is supposed to be like a crack Interpol operative who is, who is masterminding this mission here. So a booby trap bomb then puts a chief Henry in the hospital, sadly. Next scene, Sanders visits the father of a 14-year-old sexual assault victim to confirm the family found no justice in court.

It's sort of exactly like the previous scene, but with a different person. It's very confusing. This is the case. forms the spine of the film's climax, which is about to come, which Ball says mirrors those two Hamburg cases we talked about. But first, the teen thugs from the bus reappear, and this time they're harassing and beating a teenager in the park, all while speaking what I think is supposed to be Arabic.

And at the end of the clip, Sanders comes to the rescue. What? What? Tasing him. He's just grabbing the kids and tasing them. Get your phone. Call your parents. Tell them you want to press charges on each one of these pieces of shit. I'll give you their names. I think this is supposed to be a Jewish boy.

I thought it was like they were trying to speak French or something. Like they really miss. Yeah, I'm not sure. But anyways, it's very strange because Sanders, just by chances walking through this park, when these same kids from the bus in this like European metropolis, are harassing this kid. There's like 20 people who live in this country.

Yeah. And nobody else is at this park, by the way. Just the kids he saw on the bus and the Jewish boy that they're tormenting. So that the boy runs away and Sanders just brutally fucking beats them and threatens their lives. Here's the clip.

Wow. Hello, boys. You remember me? If I ever see you put your hands on anyone else ever again, I will visit you. And you will not be walking away from it. You understand? You.

You remember when I told you on the bus that it was your lucky day? Maybe now you understand why. Oh! Oh! Oh! He's crushing their wrists and fingers. He stamps on their hands and their wrists until they're like broken off, basically. And these are teenagers. This movie sucks. Like, there's no reason for this movie. We already had taken. We already had taken. We already had falling down with Michael Douglas. There's no point

for this. This is literally a guy who is a violent guy and he somehow scraped together two million dollars and he's got like a very violent army hammer who's got a giant Hebrew tattoo of an olive, I believe, on his like tummy. I do wonder if that's like, does it. Brother, I bet that I bet that I bet you that that is a real tattoo. Okay. Interesting. All right. Why would the character have a Hebrew Ruletta on this, Tommy. I guess. It's like a big, almost like medieval scripted alif. Yeah.

We're in the home stretch here, everyone. And we're getting to the darkest act of the entire film. Never apologize for long content, Brad. Yeah. If Travis isn't here, it's, you know, I have to say. So Sanders abducts a judge who freed the gang rapists, apparently. And after another tiresome monologue, which includes this line, You let a gang of rapist go.

Might as well have raped her yourself. He then stages the judge's death. Which the staging is so, like, the idea that any corner would look at this and think it's a suicide is like, oh, there's a heroin injection into their neck and they like, without drinking, have poured some vodka on their body. This is really guilty. And then slit their wrists. I was like half paying attention to the movie at this point. I had my phone kind of in my hand.

I was scrolling a little bit. But I looked up because I like heard the splashes of like. I was like, why is he just like dumping vodka on this guy? I was like, is he going to light him on fire? I was like, this movie sucks. And then it's like maybe one of the most gratuitous like wrist slitting scenes I think I've ever seen in any movie for absolutely no fucking reason. Like worse than Drive when Albert Brooks. Oh, spoilers.

I guess if you haven't seen Drive yet, that's sort of on you. But like that's a bad wrist slitting scene. I've seen a couple in my day. And this was easily one of the worst. You see him open up both of this guy's wrists. Yeah, it's, yeah, terrible. So Sanders then goes to the home of Yusuf, who's one of the freed rapists,

where he and his whole family are having lunch. Maybe we have just a little chat. Back. Oh, good, Yusuf's here. Relax. Go. Hello, Yusuf. Yosef.

Run. Where are they going to go? What you want, what the fuck? What is here? Why? How are you doing? Go tend to your son. Buy something around his leg.

I didn't hit an artery. He should be fine. I didn't hit an artery as if he's like, I think he is being written as like autistic superpower. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, he sort of barges in the house past the dad. To see it's like a scene of just this sort of like nice scene of a family having lunch, like a kind of like a normal afternoon affair and then shoots the teen.

in the leg almost immediately. And then he holds them at gunpoint on the couch. In this next clip, Yusuf and his father plead their case. Bull stole this from fucking taken, by the way. It's the exact same scene where Niesin goes to his French police officer. But he's like, you forgot to tell the weight of a loaded gun versus the weight of an unloaded gun. Like he shoots the wife in the knee. It's the same exact scene, except he doesn't execute everybody at the end of it.

Are here because of my son, because of the court. Mm-hmm. The court free him, and is the court from your country. Of course, because your son and his friends had to rape that 14-year-old girl. So traumatized from their childhood that they couldn't keep their dicks in their pants. It's very good work by your attorney, by the way, painting them as the victim. What was it? Traumatic integration. We're really getting mental help now and support.

We will be better in the future. I promise that. It's the right answer. Which also like, yeah, that's what your attorney... Like, that's how the court works, typically. That is the law. Yes, if you're following the rules, that's, I guess, the law. He then accuses the seemingly innocent sister and points a gun at her. The only problem is that on your social media,

since the event, I have not seen any regret or empathy. In fact, I think you said that she deserved to be raped. What I mean is that they dress wrong and just make boys horny with their mini skirts. They show their legs and breasts. You wrote that she deserved it. Which it's so weird, like, that she's, the sister is there outdoors at the rape?

Yes, just watching. This is really the point where it's like, is he going to do the thing that Jake's just previously mentioned that he does? Like, is he really? Yeah. Are we really doing that? Because the kid seems pretty, like, the kid seems pretty apologetic.

He's, like, crying. He's like, look, I'm getting, like, mental. Like, obviously, you know, I'm not, look, I'm not trying to say any, I'm not trying to say nothing, complainers. But, like, the kids, look, he's like, you know, he went through the court system. He got punished. Like, hopefully, maybe he can, like, be reformed, you know, yada, yada, yada. Like the statistic that Brad gave about people who go to prison. I think it was.

No, that was Annie. Annie, you know, people who go to prison are, like, way more likely to, like, you know, become like repeat offenders. So I was like, I was like, you know, maybe, like, maybe he won't do that thing. And yeah, I kind of, I guess I want to point out that like, if any of this was to do with with protecting women or women's rights, then you would understand that the sister and the mother are presumably a victim of that culture as well. Sure. Like, if anything, they would be, it's, it's first victims. No, they're just guilty. Yeah, but they're not, because it's a racial animus, essentially. Exactly. Which is using kind of women's rights as a, as a very, like, very, very

cover. They are kind of all all cast under the same kind of like guilty ethnicity, essentially. Yeah. He then lectures about the values of the West that could be lifted from every other post on X that I read. Like as soon as I open up X, totally. It's just this over and over. This is why Elon loves this movie. Yeah. Are these the values you're teaching your children? I teach him the values from Quran and these values from our family. Well, if these are your values, that women in America and Europe deserve to be raped because of a dress code. Why did you come here? Do you know what I think?

Why? I don't think it was the good ones that got out of your country. I think it was the bad ones. And I think you brought with you your archaic value system and your commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law. Which it's so awesome to kind of go forward a little bit about what's about to happen. Like, Ova Bull is about to discover honor killings from first principle and say that they're good. Like, while lecturing about Western values, he's discovering that honor killings are cool.

And rule of law, which he's like literally in previous scenes kind of said is useless because it's really hard and the victims may have a tough time doing it. So it's not worth, not worth doing. He then forces Yusuf to phone his accomplices one by one and summon them to the apartment. It's a bizarre sequence where he not only massacres the whole family, including the mom and sister, but a seemingly endless parade of accomplices that come over two by two by two by two just shoots in the back over and over. What the fuck happen? What's wrong?

Go in. It's okay. It's okay. Everything's okay. It's fucking insane. And this is shot, it's so ridiculous. It's all like slow-mo with a bunch of confusing repeated shots. Nobody that he's shooting is a threat in any way.

Every execution is cowardly and in full one. Yeah, it's like in the back of their heads. None of these people are a threat to him. It is such a confusingly staged scene. Like, can anyone figure out why he doesn't just get them all together all at once? Like, why the accomplices do come in two by two like that? Because it surely would make more kind of, would surely be more dramatic if he shoots them all than and there.

I guess. But this is like truly one of the ugliest and like most miserable scenes I've ever seen in a film. I've seen like, I've seen disturbing movies that have like brutal violence that are about war that are done really well obviously and like give you different perspectives, etc. But this is just, it's just hate on screen, wanton violence and hate. And Ball said that he asked hundreds of actors to be the family before finally finding

one group of people that was wild so so obviously like yeah people like read the script you're like fuck no it's a Mia Khalifa situation of like they had to find like a Maronite Christian woman to do like the hijab porn scene right so after the family annihilation Sanders visits the hospitalized chief Henry with the message for him and the government hello chief Henry very happy you survived because I have a message for you to take to the government. What is this message? It's the same message I told you when you tried to storm my bunker, that the people will not accept a takeover. This is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left. And if this takeover is successful, it'll destroy the democracy

you say you love, all the freedom, everything you enjoy and stand for. There's a only one option. You end this, or we the people will end it ourselves. Everything you enjoy and stand for is like, that's what I do in my like first draft and then I like, and I'm just like, oh, what was I even trying to say that? The implication here is that he's like so rhetorically skilled that he's like pilled the commissioner, I guess. Like he's got him to like come to Jesus moment. By the way, the commissioner already liked him. The movie opens up with the commissioner watching videos of guys being like, look, I think this guy, he's, can I say dare that he's, uh, handsome even?

You know, and like, the commissioners in the car like cracking a smile, being like, ah, I hate that I have to bring this guy. Even his monologues are like, look, man, like these are the rules and society doesn't function without the rules. I have to bring you in. It really doesn't make sense how he's such a stick with for the rules about rent. Like, why you would construct a character like that? He's like, no, but this rule that's like making a bunch of terrible, you know, evicting a bunch of people making them home.

It's like, no, the rules are the rules. He's also like a horrible cop killer. Is that like supposed to be like his Antifa half? Yeah, they're like, he's half antifah, half. He's remorse for it. He's like, you can leave. Exactly. He didn't want to kill the cops, but they got his way.

So the second last scene is another sympathetic news report about the vigilante's killings, including the killing of the entire family. and a bunch of negative stats about migrants. What possesses the greater threat to society? The criminals committing these heinous acts or the vigilante who was eliminating them. According to Europe's criminal statistics, over 105,000 violent crimes were attributed to migrants last year, including 980 murders and over 18,000 reported cases of sexual assault

involving immigrants from Africa. Un-fucking believable. And only giving, only giving like the stat that's like, these are the amount of crimes committed by migrants. But that's the only statistic we're going to give you. Or like, as far as I'm aware, like zero African migrants in Croatia. Exactly. I know that there's another canceled actor, Kevin Spacey did a movie about the first Croatian president, Tudgment. Yeah, yeah, where he plays it straight, Frank Underwood, by the way.

There's nothing like, I don't know. There's something going on with Croatian film. Amazing. So, yeah. And in that clip, the teenage victim of Yusuf and his cohorts learns that her attackers are dead and smiles to the camera. Like, the attackers and the family, which is like... And the family. Like, could you like...

The idea that that would have automatically been someone's very happy that you've just like... Yeah. ...that you're just like on her killing doing their name. potentially dubious. Sanders signs off with one last scrambled broadcast telling viewers it's time to act. I'm here to help you take that control. back. I'm here to show you that you are no longer the victims. I'm here to show you. There is time to go out and show these fuckers that they aren't getting away with it.

Remember, I do this for you. Until you learn to do it for yourself. This film is dedicated to the brave Mujah Hadin fighters. Yeah, so the films end dedication card reads To the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe betrayed by the legal system Yeah, so that's the last words on screen Which you get abstractly, it's like, I mean, yes, That's your physical systems

Not in the way that he means it Abstractly, yes Yeah Fuck you are So let's talk about the reception For a film that has no right to be getting any buzz at all, it's been expectively polarizing. Upon release, Germany's film ratings board, the FSK, twice refused to give the film any rating at all, a decision that blocks theatrical, retail, TV, and any mainstream streaming distribution in Germany.

A third review granted an 18-plus in July, but this hasn't stopped the right from declaring that it's quote-unquote banned in Germany. It's not even fucking banned in Germany. That's so funny. No, it's, yeah, it's everywhere in Germany. after the film was pirated and stream for free, Bull publicly asked the people who watched it illegally to send him seven to ten euros over PayPal on the grounds that he had financed him.

He's found a way to make profitable films. Yes, now he has. Yeah, I did see somebody, a screenshot of somebody saying, like, yeah, you know, since Musk posted the whole citizen vigilante to X, I've watched it like 24 times. It's such an amazing film. And Ball, like, actually replies to them himself, and it's just like, please consider donating.

Oh, my God. It seems like a mixed blessing, I guess, just having your movie, like, benevolently pirated like that. Quiver distribution released the film digitally on June 19th, and the few critics who bothered to watch it demolished it. So it sits at about 6% on Rotten Tomatoes right now, which is actually pretty high. I think it's kind of high for a ball movie.

Yeah, true. And that's about 18 critic reviews, the lowest critical score of any Army Hammer movie in his career. Variety's Todd Gilchrist wrote, The film is so astonishingly bad, it almost feels like the writer-director-producer is deliberately sabotaging his star Army Hammer, whose intended combat can only be harmed by this project.

The bulwark's sunny bunch, a self-professed lover of vigilante movies, said, hopefully then you'll believe me when I say that the problem with citizen vigilante is not that it's rancid, fascist dog shit. Worse than that, it's incompetently made dog shit. Is that really the worst? Yeah, that's the Norm MacDonald's, like, the worst part was the rapes.

Chuck. Yeah. Nathan Rabin, who once co-wrote a book Defending Ball, called it. The Most Racist film since D.W. Griffith's controversial 1915 melodrama, the birth of a nation. I honestly would come out of this thinking it was more racist than that film. Like, that was one of my original thoughts. Yeah, yeah, actually, yeah. And Josh Lewis's one-star letterboxed review.

Heartwarming. Ball, German idiot has 30-year. movie-making career despite never learning to compose or edit frame. Be more demanding of your evil filmmakers have standards. The voice of the people, though, is another story. Against that 6% critic score with 18 reviews sits a 92% audience score from almost 3,000 ratings. And here are a couple highlights.

Notice a pattern in these, by the way. A bit rough on the cinematic side. Army Hammer was perfect. Messaging was powerful and related to many ellipsies. not just Europe. Not a great movie, but an excellent guide to our future. I'd recommend this movie to everyone. Everyone.

The premise of the movie was spot on. The cinema photography would have been better. I love that. It was like, even the people that this like movie is catering to explicitly cannot call it an outright good movie. No, and I don't think they're necessarily cinefiles either, and they're just universally like, not a great movie. The film would have died as a direct-to-ve-eof-euvre. D-flop without one man. Elon.

Musk's team directly contacted Ova through his podcast, who relayed this message. They told me, like, we got a message from Elon Musk. I thought that it must be a parody account. I mean, you're not really thinking that he would contact you, but then it turned out. It was true. Bull gave him permission to release the film on X for 48 hours for free, posted from Musk's account. It was tagged.

The movie Hollywood doesn't want you to see. Musk's post drew somewhere between 10.5 to 15 million views and balls another 5 million. So we got about probably 20 million watches from these posts. Someone please read this tweet and the quote tweet of it. Libs of TikTok says, Citizen Vangelandia has now surpassed the Michael movie and is number two on Apple TV. Germany banned it and now the richest person in the world shared it and its chattering records. And who quote tweeted it?

Elon Musk. And he says, citizen vigilante too, will be even better. Of course, because it'll be financed by Elon Musk, who's like, of course, I could, yes, I'd like to make a movie quite, yes, of course, how many million do you need? I'm surprised there hasn't been more, like, I feel like there started to be kind of chud films specifically for a pilled audience a couple years ago. But I feel like it's taken off less than I would have expected. Yes, because the artistry is not there. Yeah. Bull leaned into all of this tweeting.

Keep watching Citizen Vigilante, and we can start shooting Part 2 soon. And then the poster is a citizen vigilante 2, and there's an American flag behind him. And the subtitle is the end of Somali scam. So the implication here is that he's going to come to Minneapolis to shoot Somalis. Kill some Somalian families. So the usual boosters lined up. Sir Doge of the Coin, failed politician Valentina Gomez, Jack Posobiac, lives of Tif Tok, Patrick Bet David, Tommy Robinson.

and on and on and on. I came across this post from a Musk-obsessed man with many flags in his bio. Elon, we need to create a based film festival in response to the Oscars where we showcase films like Citizen Vigilante, non-woke independent filmmakers, and GROC-Imagine artists.

I would be happy to organize it. Make cinema great again. They already know that they don't have enough artists without the use of AI. Like, they have to include the AI guys. Yeah, I had to click through this guy's account and found this other post, which has nothing to do with Citizen Vigilandi, but the level of obsession with Elon is amazing here. So he's retweeted his own tweet and says, Elon, I started a series where you, a polar bear, and I go on adventures all across the world using Grok 4.5 and blending it with real photos that I take and then a heart. Oh, man.

What about the polar? Why the polar bear? What's going on with that? Yeah, it's a photo of him and like a very sort of like young, masculine-looking Elon with a polar bear behind them during the bunny ears. Very cute. Who are Elon and the polar bear replacing in these pictures or was nobody there to begin with? Yeah, I wonder. His family. Tristan Tate begged Ova for a role in the sequel and here's this quote. I'll do it for free. I'll pay you. for my own flights, but I'd like to be in citizen vigilante too. It was 10 out of 10. And Roger Avery, who is the Oscar-winning co-writer of Pulp Fiction, asked, Is Paul the boldest and bravestuteur working in cinema today? Bull thanked him in a video with,

Thanks, Roger Avery, you are not a pussy as all the other people who are shy to speak out. Which is awesome. It's like animosity towards people, all the people who should presumably like him, but are too afraid to say anything about it. Yeah, very funny. If any of these people were to actually reflect on the film, though, I think they'd come to a different conclusion. I mean, Sanders is obviously written as a psychopath. He himself is a violent illegal immigrant

and a landlord profiting from brothels and slums that mostly kills cops and some white people who are in his way. And so through this lens, it almost reads as satire and Slate's Rebecca Onion put it well. Some anti-migrant film fans who actually watched this vigilante may find themselves a little underwhelmed by how few asylum seekers die in the film.

And the rest of the movie, Sanders actually mostly kills cops, a detail that turns off some right-wing viewers. And how does Mr. Hammer feel about his comeback to her role? The website, Puck, quoting a single anonymous source, so take this with many grains of salt, reported that army was not happy, here's the

quote. The first time he saw it, he was in tears. He called me and said, fuck, this is hateful. disgusting. When he saw the final product, he was, that was not the movie I thought we made. And he freaked the fuck out. It's like, come on, Army. Like, he read the script. He said all the lines, did all the actions. Like, I don't see where any confusion comes from, like, that to seeing the final film, because it's not like some magic was made in the edit that, uh, that made it a completely different film. Radical Islam is said like, or like Islamic extremism has said like multiple times in the

yeah. And then he, he's done a bunch of, interviews like gushing about the experience. Yeah, I think he thought this would be like, yeah, Blood Rain or the Christian Slater one. You're kind of in a bad movie, but like it's a bit of a memeable director and you're kind of back in the biz again. I don't think he like realized that it was going to, I don't think he realized basically the content of what was in the film was going to become public knowledge essentially to anybody other than a few kind of like people who find movie bowl funny. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He didn't think Elon Musk would be tweeting it out and it would become like one of the most talked about films of the last, you know, month or the summer even.

And yeah, it's just so unfortunate that this is the state of things right now. That's a great model, by the way, is that Uveh Bolle puts his PayPal, like, account public, and he gets like Elon basically like to tweet out, you know, as free advertising between that, cutting out like all middle people and then premiering the movie on, on Twitter or whatever is actually, there's no reason that that model it won't continue to work for them if they actually give a shit and are smart about it. I'm curious to see if

Citizen Vigilante 2 will materialize. But given Bowles' work ethic, I feel like it probably will. It'll probably be better and it'll probably gain more traction because like video games and Bull's movies, the sequels are always

better than the original. But yeah, apparently he actually like, this has now been enough of a financial and media success that it's confirmed already. Number two. In that same Puck article, this anonymous source asked Army if he would do the sequel, even after saying he cried after watching it because it was so hateful. And he said, well, if it was a life-changing amount of money, I would do it.

I like the idea that he accidentally starts a right-wing drift. Like he didn't mean to, but he's like, well, the money's here. Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, isn't 250K like a life-changing amount of money? Like, I don't know. Is he spoiled? I think not if you're, you were used to having millions in having like a palace in

L.A., you know. Yeah, I mean, he comes from like this billionaire American dynasty, Army Hammer, right? Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. But breaking news just announced, and Jake's going to be excited about this. Oh, boy. In the wake of all the press frenzy,

Ball announced that a PlayStation 5 video game of Citizen Vigilante will be released. It's going to be released in just a few days, July 17th, on the PlayStation store. Wow. I love this, by the way. I think this is how all video games should be released. Is tell me, like, three days before it comes out. I'm like, oh, my God, I will buy it.

Whatever it is, I'll buy it. Don't make me wait years and years and years and years and years, only to be disappointed that the game is kind of like a weird, like, relationship simulator. Yeah, but, yeah, Bull movie getting its own shitty game adaptation is, that's a first, and it's a kind of poetry, I feel like. But, yeah, here's the trailer for the game, which is... I can't believe it's already up on the PlayStation store.

It's like made by one guy. And like at first it was unclear if it was like an official tie in or like he just like made it. I do think like you're going to hear this V-O, which is just lifted from the film and I'm quite sure this is AI audio. Fantastic. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Everything I do.

I do for you. I can't sit here and watch the system stay of sleep for our system anymore. The truth is you all. Stay of sleep for our system anymore. Our system stay asleep for our system anymore? Hold on. Let's try this again. I can't sit here and watch the system stay of sleep for our system anymore.

The truth is, you're all being used. The police won't protect you. I have to protect you. And if the courts and laws don't give you justice, I will give you justice. Jake, what do you think of the graphics? They don't look that bad. And here he is in the game also killing migrants. She's like popping heads off, guys.

It looks okay. If the state, the courts, the police fails, we need to come in and correct injustice. You need to stop getting abused and used as a tool. Instead, you will take control. So they will be the victims they never dreamed they ever could be. So all of you who care about injustice, correct it. Go out there and show all these.

that they are not getting away with it. It turns into a rallying cry to kill Muslim people at the end. Yeah. And this is in the PlayStation store when you let the trailer fucking play. It like, it gets louder and he's like, we're not going to let these fuckers take over. Like, that is crazy that they got that through. I don't think any other trailer has like, I don't know, as like an explicit F. Maybe I'm wrong.

I don't know. But to me, maybe I'm an old guy. but. So yeah, that's it, guys. By the way, I don't have anything else. In that video game, in that video game, it seems like every head shot like pops the guy's head off. Yeah, I noticed that. Just everyone's head was coming off. Everyone's head is popping off. It's like a giant fountain of blood. Like, to me, that game kind of looks like the old like Soldier of Fortune games, which were just like really gratuitously gory just for gore's sake, like almost comically so.

And I would play this one for those grounds, but it looks bad. The animations look shitty. I mean, it's probably just a bunch of like, you know, flipped on real assets or something like, you know, AI, whatever. So that's it, guys. I'm sorry to have put all of you through this, my fellow co-hosts and the audience. I think this episode is going to be longer than like the movie itself. Maybe this might be longer than like two Ove-Bull movies, like, on top.

of each other. It was certainly better researched as well, I would say. Yes. Probably more time went into this script than the citizen vigilante script itself. Yeah, I just, I hope we've done a service here today. I think we absolutely have. This feels like a new, this feels like a hashtag new classic. Yeah.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second premium episode for every regular episode plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. For everything else, we've got a podcast. Wait, no, we've got a website, which is QAApodcast.com. Annie, where can people find more of your work? You can mostly fan me. I don't really post much on Twitter these days, but I am on blue sky. I also wanted to say this is probably going to be my last episode for QAA for a little while because I'm going on maternity leave.

No. Yeah. Actually, congratulations. But I promise I will be back. It's good. I mean, Travis, it's too late for him. But if any QAA host should be creating life, it's definitely, it should be you, Annie. I think truly one of the best of us.

And you will be missed, but we are, you know, we're so lucky to have you. And we'll see you when you're back. Oh, that means a lot. Yeah, just going to keep making national babies. Yeah, as a national baby yourself, you have an obligation to your country and to the queen. That's my patriotic duty, that's right. Liv, where can people find more of your work? I have a Twitch stream, Twitch.tv slash Louieger, and a newsletter at vigor.com.

Brad, and where can people find more of your stuff? On Instagram, I'm Brad WTF on Twitter. I'm Loven Saucers, and I have a website to just my name, Bradabrahams.net. Go check it out, folks. Go check out everybody's stuff and their sites and their... letters and their blue sky posts. Everybody's making good content, except for me.

Don't find me anywhere, except right here next week. And until then, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. In my film, he goes against criminals, not Moss Flames, criminals. And I know... He murdered an entire family.

And that's the thing. No, he killed... That's not true, Uve. So, no, he killed the entire family, Uve, you're lying. He killed the entire family. What are you talking about? No, no, no, I'm not lying. He shoots the entire family.

Were they all criminals? Was the girl a criminal? Was his sister a criminal? No, but she was okay with the rape, and she saw the rape as a witness. So, and of, you know, so you support killing people for having views you don't like. It's a fictional movie.

It's a fictional movie. And in movies, you're talking in real life now. You'll say he killed only criminals. I pointed out he didn't kill only criminals. And you said, Bush, she had it coming. You said, basically what you say is that it doesn't really matter. It was just a random Syrian family. He goes in and executes them total bullshit.

I didn't say random. You're lying. I specifically said the son was a rapist and he killed the entire family. And that clip is being shown as a moderate response. I've said this multiple times, you've been used online as a moderate as a moderate as one. You should condemn that. Well, you should condemn it. You should condemn it.

If I made something, if I wrote something that was being used, by, far right people to incite violence, I would say. The reality is that the people are fed up with the situation, how it is. The migration doesn't work. You don't speak for the people.