Let's get this part out of the way: Uwe Boll is not the worst director in Hollywood. He's not, as TheMovieBoy.com once alleged, “a director so incompetent that the very job title of director seems too praiseworthy” or, as another message board suggested, “a worthless, life-sucking little maggot.” No matter what StopUweBoll.org would have you believe, a puppy is not run over by a car every time Boll makes a movie. And though there is also a Web site named UweBollIsAntichrist.com, Uwe Boll is probably not.

It is true, as his critics like to repeat, that three of the video-game adaptations Boll has released theatrically in the United States—House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, and Alone in the Dark—are all regularly ranked on the Internet Movie Database's “Bottom 100” list of the worst movies ever made. But as Boll himself points out, “It's absurd. Out of something like 5 million movies, only 200,000 can be on those lists. That leaves 4.8 million movies that aren't even counted.” Nonetheless, The Dallas Morning News did give credit to Alone in the Dark for proving “it's possible to dumb down a video game,” and Bloodrayne prompted the San Francisco Chronicle to opine that “Uwe Boll is such a bad director that it must be intentional.”

From Ed Wood to Roger Corman to Troma films, there is a long tradition of celebrating both B-movies and filmmakers who insist on working Outside the System. Uwe Boll has not exactly been a beneficiary of this romantic view. Instead, he is booed wherever he goes. The IMDb, for most of us a sober, objective compendium of data, is for Boll a howling chamber of hate. In fact, it's probably fair to say that Uwe Boll (pronounced oo-vuh bowl) is the most hated director in Hollywood—or more precisely, outside Hollywood, since he insists on producing all his movies himself, a kind of Robert Altman of schlock. It's a common (if ridiculous) rumor that his films are financed with Nazi gold.

But Boll says all this is about to change. He's about to release his sixth video-game adaptation, a film that, unlike his previous work, he says expresses his personal vision. Postal is a comedy that involves, in no particular order, biological weapons, crooked cult leaders, hot blonds, sex with obese women, Verne Troyer being gang-raped by monkeys, a love affair between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden (played by Seinfeld's Soup Nazi), and Boll himself, in lederhosen, as the führer of a Third Reich—themed amusement park.

“In Postal, people will finally see what I want them to see,” says Uwe Boll.

On the morning I come to see him in Vancouver, where he lives half the year and produces most of his films, Boll sits slouched on a sofa in a dark, crowded editing suite, sipping a Starbucks cappuccino with a straw. He's shown up an hour late at a special-effects meeting for the action movie Far Cry. Packed in the small room are an editor, an effects producer, and a host of others, holding clipboards and laptops. The 42-year-old director has little patience for meetings, and he stares fixedly forward as the questions fly: “Do we want to pop a missile head onto the grenade POV?” “Should we go for a kind of Predator effect here?” “I can't remember, is this the funny version or the gory version?”

Those who imagine Boll as a feral beast prowling the streets for brilliant, sincere scripts on which to defecate would be disappointed to meet him in person. Physically, he lives up to the role of movie villain, with his squat fighter's frame, crew cut, crooked grin, and slight limp (a legacy of competitive handball in his youth). It helps, too, that he speaks in a near parody of a German accent, Colonel Klink hamming it up for The Producers. But the Raging Boll of Internet myth is mostly absent. He lives a relatively quiet life in Vancouver with his fiancée, Leeanne, and the couple's two dogs. His default mode is less a blitzkrieg than a kind of distracted hurry, one foot always pointed toward the next item on an agenda he appears to keep only in his head.