Uwe Boll (pictured) has been responsible for so many lousy horror movies (Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and House of the Dead to name just a few of his monstrosities), it’s no surprise the German filmmaker is taking desperate measures to try to raise finance.

This, after all, is the guy who inspired nearly 325,000 people to sign a petition last year imploring him to quit, declaring, “His distasteful handling of the subject matter and lack of acknowledgement of his failures simply cannot be abided any longer.”

So now Boll is using the internet to try to entice investors, or “co-producers,” to cough up 33 euros ($65) each to back his terrorist disaster tale Blackout. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he aims to raise $28.5 million through the film's web site by March 31; if folks are foolish enough to stump up at least 43 percent of that amount, he says he may make the movie with a smaller budget. As an inducement, each investor is promised a limited-edition DVD of the film plus a chance to win a trip to the set and other prizes. Whoopee! I’m guessing that’s all they’ll ever see.

It’s great to see some other directors still making movies in their eighties. Poland’s icon Andrzej Wajda, 82, is planning a bio on 1980s pro-democracy Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, with a script by Agnieszka Holland. “The way to tell this story is through Walesa’s wife; through a woman’s point of view, a woman who has so many children and so many duties, with a husband always busy, engaged in the trade union movement or in prison,” he told Variety.

Wajda’s latest film, Sweet Rush, screened in competition at this month’s Berlin International Film Festival. Planned originally as the post WW2 story of a middle-aged woman mourning the past, who takes up with a much younger guy, the film took on another dimension after husband of star Krystyna Janda died, and her self-scripted monologue about processing the grief was added to the narrative.

Meanwhile another octogenarian, Sidney Lumet, is writing and directing Getting Out, the saga of a prison inmate who’s desperate to regain his freedom while caught up in deadly head games with his psychiatrist and the woman he lusts after.

Claude Lelouch, a relative spring chicken at 71, isn’t short of energy or ambition. The French director describes his next project, Ces Amours-Là, as a “unique story of the history of cinema,” stretching from 1900 to the present, focusing on a woman played by Audrey Dana.

Incorporating footage shot by Lelouch shot over the past 30 or 40 years, the film will deal with "the passing of time, about parents and children," he told The Guardian.