Uncle Sam (1996)

Uncle Sam is something that takes me back to being a child and looking at all the VHS covers in Hollywood Video’s horror section. If I’m recalling the layout of my childhood Hollywood Video accurately, the horror section was in the back near where if you walked up one stair, you were in the corner where all the WWF Coliseum Video tapes were. It’s incredible how much material is readily available and people are more miserable than ever. Nobody back then could fathom a moment where something like WWE Network existed as well as 100s of hours of wrestling programming on YouTube, and people are still saying bullshit like “o to be a kid in 1987 again eating a Macho Man Randy Savage ice cream bar.” Nostalgia has fucked more people up than Ezra Miller.

So 20-25 years later I finally saw Uncle Sam. Sometimes you find gems on Tubi, other times you put something on and think “hey, it’s free.” There was a time when people left the house and possibly paid money to rent Uncle Sam before, god forbid, also paying late fees. You really gotta go out of your way to romanticize such a dark past.

Uncle Sam is at its worst when it attempts having a dramatic backdrop that focuses on the family of the serial killing zombie. The more random moments balance out that skippable filler. One of the highlights in Uncle Sam was when Sam finally leaving his coffin because his magical powers inform him of teens spray painting swatiskas on gravestones while waving a burning flag around their head like a helicopter Petey Pablo style. Christ, I just remembered being in Wal-Mart years ago with a girl who said she never turned down a dare. I dared her to take her shirt off and wave it around her head like a helicopter in the middle of the aisle. She did, and her shirt got caught on a nearby shelf. She’s trying to get her shirt back, she finally does and before she can put it on, an employee with Down syndrome started walking towards us. Before he could see any cleavage, she leapt into the bottom shelf and hid behind the paper towels while putting her shirt back on. It’s been awhile since I recalled that, well at least I got that from Uncle Sam.

Along with hoodlum teens spraying swatiskas on tombstones, another thing that made me laugh was the sudden addition of a blind child in a wheelchair. The conclusion of this movie features the serial killing corpse covered in flames slowly walking towards his nephew while Issac Hayes is getting ready to launch cannon balls at it, and off to the side there’s a blind child in a wheelchair waiting to receive the results of how this supernatural altercation went. I now believe every horror movie should feature a blind child in a wheelchair off to the side. I want a werewolf movie where the werewolf is viciously ripping apart a corpse before eating the now unrecognizable flesh, and the camera pans out to reveal just several feet away there’s a blind child in a wheelchair who says “dad? Did you hit it with the silver bullet?”

I think 10-20% of Uncle Sam was amusing and that’s pretty good for some straight to video slasher I recall being an option at Hollywood Video 20+ years ago. It’s a free option now if you’re in need of some holiday themed programming. You also have Born On The Fourth of July on Peacock, Tom Cruise’s apology for promoting the military industrial complex several years prior in Top Gun. It’s impressive that during the Reagan Administration, someone got Tom Cruise to feel guilty about something like Tom Gun. What’s scary is I can’t see a similar level of guilt campaign penetrating Tom Cruise today. If Oliver Stone tried that today, Tom Cruise would just look at him with those dead eyes and say “Oliver, you lost. This country is getting into wars no matter what social commentary you got up your sleeve. You made Platoon, you made Born on the Fourth of July, we still reached a point where we spent 20 years in the desert accomplishing nothing before immediately segueing into a Cold War reboot. No message is saving us so you might as well cash in like me before someone inevitably presses that red button of doom.”

Happy 4th of July!