I'm all kinds of goofed by Uncle Sam. This movie is totally appropriate for the 4th of July, and not just because of the title or the fact that a character named Sam (who is somebody's uncle) comes back as a burnt zombie that dresses in an Uncle Sam costume and kills people. It's more because the story is so hyper-patriotic that the movie spends half of its running time setting up exposition.
You see, instead of letting zombie Uncle Sam kill people, writer Larry Cohen (It's Alive, Q The Winged Serpent) and director William Lustig (Maniac Cop) want you to understand that anyone who doesn't go off to war to kill people is a coward and deserves to die. To really drive that home, characters marked for death include a Vietnam Draft dodger, a crooked Congressman, some teenagers that spraypaint swastikas on tombstones and burn the American flag, a pot smoking teenage girl, and Isaac Hayes.
For some reason, Sam isn't particularly interested in killing his wife, who is clearly cheating on him with the local Sheriff before she knows he's dead. If memory serves me correctly, he might not even kill the Sheriff, who could also be a Park Ranger and steals two joints for himself from the Barbeque Girl.
The hyper-patriotism is a little silly and takes forever to establish before Sam kills some dude on stilts who appears to have bought and Uncle Sam costume for the expressed purpose of being a peeping tom. The kills are all right, I guess, with the most notable one being Robert Forster's crooked congressman dying in a hail of fireworks. I can scarcely remember the other kills and the ending just doesn't make sense. We're led to believe throughout the movie that Jody, Sam's nephew, is seriously taking after his "kill all the cowards" mentality, but then the (spoiler) helps blow up Sam with a cannon and burns all of his GI Joes.
The final shot is a slow motion turn of Jody towards the camera, so you're expecting a cutaway to Uncle Sam preparing to kill again (after all, the dude's been burned alive so what was another fire really going to do to him?), but instead the image shatters and credits roll. Are Cohen and Lustig suggesting that this is a Tommy Jarvis "cuckoo for cocoa puffs" setup for future movies, or did they just not know how to end it?
Overall I'm giving this a "pass" because it was Holiday appropriate, but Uncle Sam is nothing to write home about.
No comments:
Post a Comment