Uncle Sam

• Directed by William Lustig
• November 13, 1996 (Greece)

A dead Operation Desert Storm vet comes back to life on the Fourth of July to kill the unpatriotic citizens of his hometown.

What a missed opportunity. Uncle Sam had the appearance of being a trashy yet enjoyable horror film much like many movies during the 80s (even though this comes from 1996). Equal parts silly and enjoyable with the possibility of something to say. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by what we got.

This is a very poorly done message horror film. This is clearly a diatribe against the Gulf War and the military. That’s fine but like far too many message stories it places message before story turning what we get into a clunky lecture. That is poor storytelling. You may get your message out, but it will not be well received.

That alone might not be so bad if it wasn’t for the generally atrocious acting. Isaac Hayes is the best actor this movie has and his character of Sergeant Jed Crowley isn’t even a significant player in the story until the closing minutes. Hayes isn’t bad but he plays it like a kid’s movie for the very young.

Jody (Christopher Ogden) is the most significant character and he has the same range of Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. He read the lines nicely and looked natural. The thing is he read the lines but failed to act. No emotion or inflection. Did they film his audition by accident?

Jody is the (somewhat) deceased Sam’s (David Fralick) nephew and looks up to his uncle who in reality was an abusive terror to everyone. Though gone three years, Sam’s wife Louise (Anne Tremko) and his estranged sister Sally (Leslie Neale) still live in fear of his return. So why when his body is found and returned do they keep the crispy corpse in their shared living room rather than the local morgue or mortuary? The world may never know…

Anyway, Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July, eventually rises from the dead and after procuring himself an Uncle Sam costume proceeds to kill anybody that this is un-American in some way from the kid that performs a terrible version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” to a draft dodging teacher to anybody else that is dissing the U S of A. And further tied to this terror is a kid in town who got burned in a horrendous fireworks accident the preceding year on, you guessed it, the Fourth of July.

Toss in a self-serving politician (Robert Forster) and a mayor (Morgan Paull) completely indifferent to the deaths that start occurring during the current Fourth of July festival and you have some poorly done commentary that would appear to be intended as comical but isn’t funny at all.

For a horror film this is rather bloodless and it lacks any significant gore. It doesn’t have any scares and it doesn’t have any real comedy that lands. The biggest thing it has going for it is a lot of bad acting that could make this campy but it never plays into that. The focus was the message here and the message was that military is bad and government is bad. I thought Black Christmas 2019 was a rough ride. This is far, far worse.

Characterization waffles as dictated by the needs of the film at the moment. Jed sounds as if he regrets getting Sam to go into the military because he lost his life but then it seems that he’s afraid of Sam because he was so violent but also Jed is against war in general because he lost his leg in Vietnam but that I didn’t play into anything. Cheap can be overcome with a good story and decent characters but when you have cheap with bad characterization and poor acting and a poorly executed story you’re screwed.

With a few tweaks here and there, this could have been a great bit of low budget camp with a message but as it is Uncle Sam is a missed opportunity. The only audience for this would be horror junkies but beyond that it’s not worth watching for anybody.