Although it is completely ridiculous, never delivers an ounce of tension, and suffers from a cast of actors who deliver wildly varying quality with their performances, Uncle Sam, a satirical slasher movie directed by William Lustig and written by Larry Cohen, is still something I would recommend to people. Mainly because of those two names behind the camera.
David Fralick is Master Sergeant Sam Harper, a soldier killed in Kuwait when the helicopter he is in is brought down by "friendly fire" (quotation marks used because that is a stupid and paradoxical phrase). His body is delivered home just as everyone is preparing for their 4th July celebrations, but Sam's not as unanimated as he should be. And there are plenty of unpatriotic people he decides to punish once he gets his hands on them. One person who seems very safe is Sam's young nephew, Jody Baker (Christopher Ogden), a young man who values patriotism as one of the best qualities that someone can have.
This wouldn't have taken much to turn into something a lot better than what we end up with. Basically, throw some more blood and gore around onscreen and you'd have a gloriously daft slasher to sit alongside the best of the subgenre. Sadly, it doesn't have an inventive enough selection of deaths, nor does it feel like it has a decent enough bodycount (although there are about ten deaths shown onscreen, few of them have any real impact). Maybe Lustig, who did such great work with limited resources to give audiences the likes of Maniac and the Maniac Cop movies, just couldn't manage to get quite the budget required for his final vision, but he's partially saved by a Cohen script that is sharp and merciless.
While the bodies start to pile up and the threat eventually becomes clear to those who are left alive, Uncle Sam is ultimately about three main things. It's about patriotism, what that means to different people and how it is used (wielded) by some. It's about war, about training someone up to kill in a certain environment and then expecting them to just go back to a normal life when they are no longer of service. And it's about looking beyond the uniform. I have always insisted that I cannot go along with the kind of blanket praise that some people love to give to certain groups of people (mainly soldiers and police officers). I like to praise individuals, and it's because they are the ones doing the good work, which they may have found a way to do without the relevant uniform on. To be perfectly blunt, a piece of shit can still be a piece of shit while wearing combat gear. Critics may say this is just a copy of Maniac Cop, which had some very similar themes running through it, but it feels like a very different beast, perhaps because Cohen has decided that hammering home the point he is making is more important than being subtle. It's definitely not subtle.
Ogden is okay as the annoying child at the centre of this, acting in many scenes with his mother (played by Leslie Neale) and his aunt (played by Anne Tremko). Neale and Tremko are both better than the child they are acting alongside, as you might expect, but Ogden overdoes things in a way that helps to underline the heavy-handed script. Fralick is fun in the role of zombie Sam, and Isaac Hayes is wonderful in the role of a fellow veteran, Sgt. Jed Crowley. Other familiar faces in the cast include P. J. Soles, Timothy Bottoms, and Robert Forster, with the latter being a very welcome highlight in his small role.
I can see why people wouldn't like this, and I can easily understand anyone hating it, but I liked this more than I expected to. The rough 'n' ready feel of the whole thing adds to the charm, and I think the way in which the commentary weaves from underpinning the material to being pushed front and centre is a pleasingly ballsy move from Cohen and Lustig. Feel free to like or loathe it at your leisure, but I think it's a nice little slice of . . . independence cinema.
6/10
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