There are some people out there who think that Uncle Sam was an actual person. That he was some kind of super patriot born on July 4th, 1776 who went over to Nazi Germany on his 165th birthday to personally give Hitler a "Cap slap" (a move so named by me because it was exactly what Captain America did on the cover of his debut issue) and single-handedly win World War II... 4 years before the fact. Those are the same people who think the Easter Bunny carried Baby Jesus to safety from the bloodthirsty vampire stormtroopers of Saruman and delivered the mini-savior to the safety of Santa's sky castle fortress to save Christmas. In reality, Uncle Sam was just a recruitment marketing ploy created by the government based on the heady advertising DNA cocktail of British Secretary of State for War Herbie Kitchener, satirical Canadian comic strip character Sam Slick, and a New York state meat packer named Samuel Wilson (also the alias for frequent Captain America sidekick/collaborator The Falcon)... how ironic that the name for the figurehead of one of the most homophobic democratic governments in the world is taken from a meat packer. I never liked the character myself. Based on that classic recruitment poster, I was always convinced that the guy was one of those grizzled old rapist types. The way he points at you, a look of grim and steely lust in his eyes, possibly intoxicated on cheap whiskey, not just telling you that he wants you, but demanding that he wants you. Not to join the U.S. Army (or just "U.S. Army" as it is, because the old guy's got some kind of stalwart bias against the word "the"), but to "join" him in the nearest dark alley for the most painful and scarring 15 minutes of your soon-to-be miserable life.

We're not here for a history lesson though, because it's 4th of July weekend! Every year American Independence Day comes along and every year I get the urge to dig out this nugget of '97 for a special theme review... and every year the summer heat convinces me that I should preserve as much energy as possible by doing as little as possible. Trust me, I'm a very moist person. When it comes to 90 degree heat, even digging out a DVD can turn me into a man-sized dish sponge of perspiration. But this year I came prepared. I dug out a pile of DVDs back in May before the thermometer started displaying more red than an Evil Dead sequel and put them well within reach of my very stationary position. So gird your loins ladles and germs, cuz 2009 is the year that I finally re-review Uncle Sam.

Competently (though not spectacularly) directed by b-movie mainstay Bill Lustig and written by fellow b-movie icon Larry Cohen, Uncle Sam marked a reunion of the two, who had worked together to bring b-horror fans the Maniac Cop trilogy that still holds a steadfast corner of my heart all to itself. Sam lives again today thanks to Lustig's Blue Underground imprint. Complete with slick new "zombie Uncle Sam" cover to boot! When it first came out on VHS, the movie's distributors pulled one of those "draw in viewers with cheesy box art" stunts by slapping a lenticular graphic on the front, which is usually the only thing most viewers really remember about the damn thing. For those unfamiliar with the term (comic book fans of the novelty drowned '90s know what I'm talking about), lenticular images are pictures that, when you look at them from a different angle, show another image. Much like fellow A-PIX release Jack Frost before it, Uncle Sam's cover include a lenticular image that had a perfectly normal, personable image of the title character pointing at you unassumingly with the message "Uncle Sam wants you...", that turned into the crazy zombie demon image of Sam with the message "DEAD!" when you'd turn the box slightly. This was one of the long since lost marketing tactics of now defunct (and rightfully so...) aforementioned production company A-PIX. "The PIX" shat out wretched straight-to-video colon blockages that haunted much of my high school life. From Breeders to Bleeders to Grim to Werewolf, those crusty motherless scrotadactyls produced and/or distributed over 100 of the biggest wastes of time, money and effort that the home video market had ever seen. If you thought Full Moon was pinching celluloid loaves in their heyday, obviously you've never had your face melted by an A-PIX flick. For those younger viewers out there, you dodged a very large and painful bullet. A bullet covered in jagged shards of glass and Ebola. For those of you ravaged out there like myself, our support group meets every Thursday in the fallout shelter of the old abandoned elementary school. We're here for you guys and girls, and together we'll make it through this.

Anyway, Sam Harper is a Master Sergeant in the US Army. He didn't join out of duty or honor or the paid college tuition or the free hats, but because he's one of those mentally unstable types that's always wanted a nice legal outlet for his seething psychotic rage, and saw the opportunity to kill other cultures overseas under the employ of the US government as the perfect avenue! While over in post Dessert Storm Kuwait keeping the "towel heads" in line, Sam's chopper gets popped out of the air by friendly fire. Inexplicably, he ends up surviving the crash and becoming some kind of militant super zombie (now with glow-in-the-dark Agent Orange eyeballs!) who kills the search party sent to investigate his wreckage. I guess that his random resurrection as a super zombie means he doesn't have any vital signs to speak of either, since he plays dead long enough for the next search party to locate his corpse and ship his body back to his home in the states, namely the generic town of Twin Rivers, USA (aka La Verne, CA... not to be confused with Shirley, AZ). You know Twin Rivers, it's just east of Any Town, USA and shares a border with Small Town, USA to the south. I have a feeling Sam's undead self isn't going to be too happy that in the 3 years since he left Twin Rivers his wife Louise has taken to shacking up with local law enforcement officer Deputy Dog... errr, Deputy Phil.

The heart of our tale though is impressionable youngster Jody, Sam's nephew. Jody was still fairly young and ignorant when his uncle left to follow in the tracks of such military greats as Gomer Pyle and Pauly Shore, and he fondly remembers ol' Sam as a kind hearted man who took care of his loved ones and could kick anyone any pantywaist flag burner's un-American ass. Ah, the blissful stupidity of children. I remember liking my uncles more when I was a kid too... before I realized they were all toothless, gas station robbing, wife beating, alcoholic dickheads. When news of Sam's death hits home though, Jody starts acting like a douche bag to fill the role now vacated by his beloved uncle. He can't jump into doing donuts in his pick-up truck, wasted on Pabst Blue Ribbon and beating up guys he's attracted to to scare off his gay thoughts until he's older though, so he'll start by calling his wussy hippie teacher Mr. Crandall (Timothy "That's My Bush!" Bottoms) a coward for pussing out and running to Canada during 'Nam, calling his mom's IRS fighting lawyer boyfriend Ralph a lying cheating criminal, and vowing to join the army in 8 or 9 years so he can be a good little automaton for the government too, because the president should never be questioned because he always knows best... Well, yeah, if you're talking about Clinton getting hummers from chubby chicks under his desk during office hours! You just gotta make sure you do the JFK thing and have them killed and their bodies vaporized at Nuke test sites afterwards.

The only one who can talk some sense into G.I. Jody is local war hero Jed (Isaac Hayes), who gives the effeminate little creep a reality check on what it means to go to war, watch your friends die, and get sent back home a few limbs lacking than what you left with, traumatized by survivor's guilt the rest of your life. This is about the point where Sam finally slips out of his casket and starts doing his patriotic duty (he's dropping red, white and blue deuces?) all over the draft dodgers and flag burners of Twin Rivers, starting with a parade stilt walker in an Uncle Sam costume that will provide him with his serial killer novelty costume of choice, followed by some drunken flag burning teens that he catches desecrating his own freshly dug grave. One he buries alive while the other he give the old "flagpole lynching" treatment. The rest of the movie heeds by the basic slasher formula with Uncle Sam offing people every few minutes with nothing of real significance in between murders. Mr. Crandall gets his eyebrows split with a hatchet (you know, cuz George Washington did that whole hatchet job dealie on his cherry tree?), cleaver decaps anothier unruly teen for doing a "Vince Neil meets Rosanne Barr" rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, assassinates Ralph with an air rifle (while he's dressed as Abe Lincoln *wink*wink*), roasts a picnicking pothead in her own cooker, scorches a crooked congressman in the middle of the town's annual 4th of July fireworks display, impales his wife's 5-0 boyfriend on an American flag (doesn't defacing Old Glory with another man's innards go against his whole obsessively patriotic personality?!), and found the time somewhere in between to kill the Sergeant sent to escort Sam's corpse into town and dump the guy's body into his now vacated casket. Speaking of which, the day before Sam rose from his shiny aluminum resting place Jody unlocked one of the seals on it, thus allowing his zombie uncle to slip out with little fuss... except that later we learn there are THREE locks on the damn thing! My nitpicker sense is tingling! It's not a pleasant Head & Shoulders tingling either. More like a "thistles being dragged across my taint" tingling.

P.J. Soles pops in as the mother to a little fat kid who got his face melted while fucking around with firecrackers, but Fatty McBlind & Deformed's story isn't just kinda there to fill space. It's possible that the movie was also partially funded by an Anti-Fireworks special interest group, or some organization for the prevention of child mutilation by pyrotechnics and Chubs was thrown in to appease them. That would've been fine actually, except the characters gets exponentially more irritating for reasons I'll cover shortly. And no, P.J. doesn't pop out her iconic horror knockers... cuz she's old now... and I didn't spend $15 on lunch just to paint my keyboard with it.

Eventually Jody's mom and aunt let him in on the dirty truth behind his big hero's abusive past toward both of them, and the kid actually listens. Teaming up with Fatty (whom it seems has somehow developed psychic powers over the course of the last few hours...) and Jed, Jody's unstoppable team of wiener kid, wheelchair bound blind kid, and gimped up old black guy go hunting for their bad guy. Instead of just calling the cops or setting Sam on fire (after learning that gunshots do nothing), Jody keeps his uncle occupied with a long chat while Peg-Leg Jed drives his pick-up out to the town square, hitches up the official town cannon, and brings it back to Louise's place where he proceeds to load it up and fire it directly into the house... blowing the place into a thousand flaming fragments! Yep, all with two simple lead balls. In the long run I guess it's better for Louise to lose the house this way, since there was apparently some MASSIVE gas leak that she didn't know about! That, or the fucking contractors made a mistake at Home Depot and packed the walls with C4 instead of insulation!

The flick ends on a seemingly positive note with Jody burning all of his dollar store "G.I. Moe" knock-off toys in a garbage can while his mom watches on approvingly, but then tries to confuse us with a still frame of the kid accompanied by some gloomy "Tales From the Darkside" type music and a badly done computer shopped "shattered glass" effect, as if they're still offering up the possibility that Jody will turn out to be a massive piece of shit like Sam after all, despite being the instrument to the guy's downfall... well, that and those blockbusting cannonballs. This possibility also requires Jody to completely ignore the fact that Sam not only salughtered a bunch of (mostly) innocent people, but also used to rape and beat his own wife and sister... What works moderately well for 80 or so minutes as just another harmless slasher flick that comes off as a little left wing (not all that surprising given writer Cohen's past flicks) from time to time, wraps up with a10 minute nonsensical out-of-nowhere "what the fuck?!" finale that will either elevate the movie for you or just irritate the shit out of you depending on your tastes. I'm more of the latter than the former myself, but to each his bone... uhm, own.

Uncle Sam actually isn't as wretched as I remember it. I know when I first saw it I was disappointed that the movie didn't deliver on the "crazy mutant demon" Uncle Sam shown on the original VHS cover and that was a pretty big downer. I also remember hating Jody with a passion, though I understand him better now as the naive little kid who doesn't understand the true life of his dirtbag uncle because no one ever clued him in to the real story, because he was "too young" to understand. I find myself hating the little wheelchaired tub of guts kid more so now though, because he just comes off as this "knows way too much" little turd who's so damn sure of everything he says. He has this deadpan delivery that feels like someone jamming an icepick between my teeth every time he says something like "I know who he is. You know who he is too. He's your uncle, Sam Harper." or "If I were him, I'd want to take back my wife. He's at your aunt Louise's house." There's no urgency to his delivery, there isn't even a hint of pain or anger when he talks about how his face was mutilated. You just wanna wring his fat neck out of curious rage to see if he'd even give a damn that you were doing it!

The Sam mask itself is actually pretty creepy. Too creepy at that, considering it's supposed to be used in a positive way during the town's Independence Day parade. Putting that mask on a guy is like dressing up as a clown for a kid's birthday party, only you cover your face in swastikas, put on red contact lenses, and glue in some demonic dental appliances! The ghoul makeup for Sam sans mask is pretty good though, especially after he's had some time to rot a bit. The gore was serviceable and the kills had some nice variation throughout. Costumed killers who spend an entire movie just getting stabby on some unruly teens with a butcher knife for 90 minutes tends to bore, so it's always nice to see the guys in creative flexing the reptilian part of their brains to cook up something new and nasty from victim to victim. You don't expect anything like this to be a blood orgy of massive proportions, nor do you pop open the DVD case in the hopes of finding the next unsung hero of the slasher genre, so for what it's worth, if you're looking for a watchable "stabby stabby" movie with a holiday twist, Uncle Sam will scratch your itch. Just make sure you're prepared for the occasional nut-twister moment (including one scene where Sam has presumably borrowed Jason Voorhees's teleportation engine to make a kill amidst a grove of orange trees) and you'll be fine.

You know, as mixed a bag as The Tripper was, I'd still like to see a Freddy Vs. Jason style costumed killer crossover between said titular neo-conservative serial killer and Uncle Sam. It's apparent that Lustig still owns the rights to Sam, and I doubt Dave Arquette is so stern about his own creation that he wouldn't be willing to at least loan out the rights to the Tripmeister for a feature. Even if he wasn't interested in actually being involved with the production in any way. It'll never happen, but it's a fleeting fantasy we horror geeks can play around with in our heads during those long trips to the water closet on the mornings following $1 chimichanga nights at Taco Bob's House of Earthly Deliciousness.