'Raging Boll' boxing bouts set

Uwe Boll wants to pummel his biggest detractors, and online gambling site GoldenPalace.com is giving him the chance to do just that. The outlandish online casino has signed on as a sponsor for "Raging Boll," the culmination of the BloodRayne director's open challenge to his critics to engage him in physical combat.

Boll originally challenged his critics to step into the ring with him for a series of five 10-round matches over the final two days of Vancouver filming for his big-screen adaptation of Postal (he later amended the match length to three rounds). Prospective pugilists were required to send in "at least two extremely negative articles" written about Boll's movies in 2005 to be considered by the director.

Boll also directly challenged a pair of his peers to put on the gloves. "Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino are among the most eligible candidates," read Boll's original release, referring to the writer and writer/director of Pulp Fiction. Avary also wrote the screenplay for the big-screen version of Silent Hill and will write and direct the film based on the Driver games.

Apparently Avary and Tarantino didn't take Boll up on the challenge, as they are absent from the director's just-announced slate of five opponents. Currently four matches are scheduled for September 23, with the other match taking place in Spain at an unspecified earlier date. Boll's opponent for the first match will be Carlos Palencia Jimenez-Arguello, webmaster of Cinecutre.

After that, Boll will run a one-day gauntlet of matches against Something Awful webmaster Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, Ain't It Cool News writer Jeff Sneider, horror magazine Rue Morgue writer Chris Alexander, and a fifth opponent who GameSpot has reason to believe is a minor. When asked about the age of the fifth contestant and the legality of bringing an American juvenile to Canada for the purposes of a boxing match, a representative of Boll's merely said the matter was being looked into, and that he would get back to us.

GoldenPalace.com is known for unusual advertising campaigns. The company has previously grabbed headlines by purchasing William Shatner's kidney stone, a grilled cheese sandwich with an image of the Virgin Mary, and Britney Spears' pregnancy test. It also paid a woman $10,000 to tattoo the site's URL on her forehead, and forked over $15,500 for the naming rights to a Connecticut woman's baby.