What if Uwe Boll made a movie that wasn’t trash? That’s not to say that Stoic, starring Edward Furlong as a prison inmate who is involved in the savage death of his cellmate, will actually be good, but does the new trailer for the movie actually suggest that Bol is…trying? gasp! Watch the clip after the jump.

Stoic is one of three planned non-videogame projects for the combative director. His next two films could be Darfur (with Furlong and Kristanna Loken) and The Storm, with Lauren Holly and Luke Perry. But if this represents the tone Boll is planning to take with those two movies, I might be more actively frightened of the guy’s future than his past.

Which brings me back to the notion of Boll making a movie that isn’t trash. Because Stoic looks trashy as hell, if only in a more ‘artistic’ fashion than his game movies. The story follows three prisoners who played poker, with the loser being forced to eat his own vomit in a sort of hazing ritual that devolves into rape and murder/suicide. Supposedly the origin is in a true story which, you know, makes it all more legit.

The trailer suggests that the movie could be full of confessional interviews, and I’ll admit that there’s something weird and almost (almost!) compelling about seeing Boll do his confrontational, excessively violent version of Errol Morris’ recent Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure. Mix in some of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and influences like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Hubert Selby Jr. novel The Room (an examination of a prisoner’s rage and revenge fantasies that is unrelated to Tommy Wiseau’s awful masterpiece film of the same name) and Stoic could almost be something interesting. But I don’t get the sense that Boll is trying to do anything more than shock and provoke, except that this time his target is an arthouse audience. I’d love to be wrong; there’s a contrarian part of me that would love to see Boll actually make a movie worth watching. He keeps trying, and I have a weird respect for that, despite the fact that the results never seem to vary or improve. Do I actually expect anything to change this time? Not really, and based on this clip not with this film.

Note: doing a little more searching after I saw this clip on Twitch I found that the same trailer has been around in lesser quality for a while. But we haven’t run it before, so I’m going with it now.