Larry Cohen and William Lustig's 1996 Dark Comedy Uncle Sam is Not the Timeless Masterpiece it Promises to Be
Because I have so many obligations and so little time I generally only watch movies that I have to see for work, or at least I do when I am alone. It’s different when I go to the movies with my wife or son.
It feels like cheating to watch movies for pleasure when there are so many movies that I need to see for work. I probably shouldn’t, but I feel guilty. It wasn’t always that way.
That’s one of the tricky things about my life and career. My time doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to my family and my various failing businesses. When I see something solely for the sake of enjoyment, it feels like I’m stealing time.
I recently stole time to watch the first and third films in Larry Cohen and William Lustig’s Maniac Cop trilogy. My deep dive into Maniac Cop was inspired by my love for Maniac Cop 2, which I legitimately think is one of the greatest and craziest b-movies ever, as well as a viewing of King Cohen, a wonderful documentary about Larry Cohen’s life and career that I watched for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies about filmmaking.
As is almost invariably the case, my extracurricular activities as a pop culture lover inform my career as a pop culture writer.
Watching the Maniac Cop trilogy was excellent preparation for Ti West’s incendiary new provocation MaXXXine. The concluding entry in the X trilogy takes inspiration from the Maniac Cop series and other degenerate exploitation movies made by talented hustlers playing the angles.
Watching the Maniac Cop trilogy and MaXXXine similarly made me want to revisit the final collaboration between screenwriter Larry Cohen and director William Lustig: the 1996 horror movie/social satire Uncle Sam.
I reviewed Uncle Sam for The A.V. Club when I was one of three employees, and my beat was direct-to-video schlock. I panned it in the late 1990s when I was still a college kid overjoyed at the opportunity to write for my favorite publication.
I panned Uncle Sam initially, but I did not remember a goddamn thing about it because I used to smoke a lot of pot. Also, twenty-seven years is a LONG time.
On paper, Uncle Sam looks like an irresistible proposition. It’s a genre-blurring social satire/action movie/fright fable from the legendary creator of God Told Me To and The Stuff and director of Maniac and the Maniac Cop trilogy that takes aim at our country’s regrettable penchant for performative patriotism by making the titular personification of our previously great country its mad slasher.
Incidentally, Uncle Sam is so lazily derivative of its writer and director’s previous work that it’s essentially Maniac Soldier.
Uncle Sam boasts supporting performances by beloved figures such as Isaac Hayes, Robert Forster, Bo Hopkins, William Smith, Timothy Bottoms, and P.J. Soles.
How could a movie with that much going for it not be at least a little bit awesome?
Then I watched Uncle Sam on Shudder and learned exactly how a movie with that much going for it could be a total dog.
The problems begin with the setting. Larry Cohen and William Lustig are New York guys. They’re city guys. They’re cinematic outlaws who didn’t give a madass fuck about permits or permission or the safety of their cast and crew, for that matter. It is consequently a huge mistake to set Uncle Sam in a blandly All-American suburb.
Uncle Sam chronicles the posthumous misadventures in the murder of Sam Harper (David “Shark” Fralick), a physically and sexually abusive soldier who died from friendly fire while serving in Kuwait.
The mean bastard stubbornly refuses to stay dead, however. Why reside six feet under when you can be out and about killing people indiscriminately?
Sam’s long-suffering wife and sister are secretly grateful that Sam died half a world away because they know him to be a sex criminal and a sadist, but his painfully patriotic nephew Jody (Christopher Ogden) reveres him as a real-life G.I Joe.
The women try to disabuse Jody of his delusions by talking about the physical and sexual abuse Sam subjected them to, but he zealously holds onto his conception of his undead uncle as a hero.
Cohen delighted in making authority figures exemplars of pure evil. He made horror movies where the bad guys are cops and soldiers because those are two of the only jobs where you’re honored and get promoted for killing people. Jobs where you can legally kill people understandably attract people who want to kill and get away with it. They’re violent jobs that unsurprisingly attract violent people and people who are attracted to the tremendous power that comes with a badge and a uniform.
Uncle Sam takes forever to get going. The murder spree doesn’t begin until the film is half over. Lustig and Cohen seem lost outside of their beloved New York City. Uncle Sam is pokily paced and devoid of horror or laughs.
This would have been a much deeper, darker, and more satisfying satire if it had acknowledged the seductive nature of patriotism. There’s something innately appealing about taking pride in your country and your countrymen, but Uncle Sam depicts Jody’s flag-waving jingoism as joyless sociopathy.
Uncle Sam fatally lacks the sleazy energy and unstoppable forward momentum of Maniac Cop 2. Cohen is an exploitation filmmaker of ideas, but all of the ideas at play here are heavy-handed and derivative.
The grim, serious scene where Jody learns that his beloved uncle is a monster seems to belong in a different, darker, more serious movie. The same is true of Hayes’ bewilderingly out-of-place, heavy, dramatic turn as a Vietnam veteran who can never forgive himself for being the only member of his squad not to be blown to bits.
If Cohen wanted to comment meaningfully on the horrors of war or the insidious nature of PTSD, he should not have made a silly B-movie where a burned-up revenant in an Uncle Sam get-up murders the insufficiently patriotic in moderately creative ways, like shooting fireworks off the body of a corrupt politician played by Forster or impaling someone with a flag.
Uncle Sam closes with a freeze-frame of Jody looking angry following the second and presumably final death of his beloved Uncle.
It’s a cheap knock-off of the simpatico but far superior Silent Night, Deadly Night, which similarly closed by teasing a new slasher eager to pick up where the old, dead one left off.
I’m afraid that the twenty-two-year-old me was right. Uncle Sam realizes roughly zero percent of its enormous potential. I didn’t think that was possible, but then life and pop culture are full of unwelcome surprises.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here