UNCLE SAM
I should've known better than to have been disappointed

  A marvelously goofy premise - the story of a Gulf War vet who returns from the dead to knock off all those who are unpatriotic - has had me keeping an eye out for this movie for quite some time, despite everyone who's seen it telling me it was awful.  But...but...but...it's written by Larry Cohen!  And it's directed by William "Maniac Cop 2" Lustig!  Can it fail?  Yes.  Yes it can.

Uncle Sam starts well enough - a soldier in the Kuwait desert comes across a downed American helicopter, and identifies the steaming carcass on board.  It's Sam Harper, and he was shot down by friendly fire.  After the soldier is reamed out by his SO (William  - not Will - Smith, who gets a spoken-word bit during the closing credits) for daring to be horrified by the notion, the "corpse" comes up with a fairly good response of his own.  Then things get back to American soil, and things start to suck.

It's the fourth of July, natch.  Sam's body has been shipped back to the house of his sister and ex-wife, who stuck together even though the marriage fell apart.  See, Sam wasn't much of a husband, or a brother, or a chopper pilot I guess.  But his nephew Jody (Christopher Ogden) worshipped him (see, he's UNCLE Sam).  Winning the kid over with tales of his own "heroism" and statements like "People who don't respect the American way of life deserve to have their butts kicked", the kid wants to grow up to be just like Sam - much to the horror of his mother and aunt, who knew Sam better.

And for about half the film, that's the story.  The kid wants to be like Sam, and everybody in town (including Isaac Hayes) tries to convince him not to be.  Half a film full of family melodrama is not what anybody's looking for in a movie about a maniac in an Uncle Sam costume.  Finally, at about the halfway mark, Sam decides to do his stuff, donning said costume (with the most malevolent-looking Uncle Sam mask I've ever seen) and doing his work.

So let's see who's on the hit list here.  There's a tax-cheatin' lawyer-type guy.  There's the stilts-wearing peeping tom.  The draft-dodging teacher.  The military guy who always volunteers to inform women that they're now widows, because he "bats .750 with the bereaved".  The congressman whose most pressing matter is "glasses, or no glasses?".  And, of course, the teenaged kid who starts singing "The Star Spangled Banner" Bleeding Gums Murphy-style and finishes it Roseanne-style.

The drama was poor - the horror is worse!  Like, how is one guy shot to death with a BB gun?  Some moments are funny (when one guy is impaled on the American flag - no, that's not symbolic or anything), and some just try to be.  When one character says "Where is that hatchet", it shouldn't take a connoisseur of schlock to predict that the number of remaining lines this character will have is precisely zero.

The plot, even for this kind of thing, is dumb, like the inexplicable introduction of this blind, crippled kid who knows everything, and exploding cannonballs, and exploding houses (what did I say about exploding houses?).

The acting is mostly bad - Hayes has always been a bad actor but sometimes here's a GOOD bad actor.  Not here, though.  Robert Forster, a year or so before his Oscar-nominated role in Jackie Brown, plays that congressman and he's terrible.  It's hard to notice anybody else.

The closing credits dedicate the film to "Lucio", who, from what I gather from the Doc's seemingly inexhaustible supply of quotes from him, would not be impressed.  One-time aspiring shred-guitar guru Guy Mann-Dude worked as the projectionist on this film - if ever there was a name that sounded totally made up, this is it.  Does this mean he's no longer recording?  Watch for a funny, brief shot after the credits of the stilts-guy falling over.  And the band playing at the big fourth-of-July party is The Abe Lincoln Story, who I read about in some magazine; their singer calls himself Abe Lincoln Jr., and climaxes every show with his own assassination.  Now that's entertainment!

At any rate, if you're gonna watch, watch for P.J. Soles as the overbearing mother of the crippled kid.

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