Sam’s sister, when we meet her, is handling the affairs related to her late brother's expiry. This isn’t because Sam’s family are sociopaths who are averse to grieving – rather, it’s because everyone in the family seems to acknowledge that Sam was kind of a terrible dude - the kind with a penchant for substance abuse, as well as other, more innately cruel forms of harm directed at other, more vulnerable individuals in his life. Even when his corpse is transported back to the States just in time for his hometown’s 4th of July celebration, mourning is kept to a minimum. Uncle Sam is the story of Sam Harper, an American military sergeant who is killed in Kuwait as a result of friendly fire in the movie's first scene.
#Small soldiers game rom movie
Much like the Maniac Cop films indirectly address police brutality by couching an incensed political message in the Trojan Horse of a grimy drive-in movie experience, Uncle Sam addresses our nation’s cyclical, still-ongoing love affair with the military industrial complex by setting a murderous fascist zombie loose in an apple-pie American suburb. Look past the hammy dialogue and over-the-top gore, and you’ll find a surprisingly cutting critique of jingoistic fearmongering, military fetishism, and toxic nationalism disguised as patriotism. It would seem that, with Uncle Sam, Lustig and Cohen were after a lot more than simply rehashing themes and techniques from their old work. It is a true-blue Midnight Movie that punctuates moments of terror with the goofiest manifestations of cartoon brutality that the viewer can imagine.Īnd yet… and yet. Club in 2002, Nathan Rabin panned Uncle Sam, claiming that Lustig’s final movie was “ every bit as lazy and uninspired as the Maniac Cop films that preceded it.” Indeed, Uncle Sam is deeply silly and undeniably slapdash: that's part of its charm. In a retrospective write-up that was published by The A.V. It’s a movie that proudly owns its amateurish qualities, often laughing at itself as a form of beating audiences to the punch. (Coincidentally, Uncle Sam boasts a screenwriting credit from one of the B-movie trailblazers that was mentioned in the first paragraph, Larry Cohen.) It’s easy to see why Uncle Sam was greeted with derision in some circles. One of Lustig’s more unfortunately overlooked movies is Uncle Sam, a hilariously funny and satirically prescient horror-comedy that went straight to video in the mid-90's and is currently available to stream on the horror home streaming service Shudder. RELATED: Why 'Alien’s Gender-Neutral Script Worked So Well For the Horror Classic Lustig's grim 1982 street thriller Vigilante is also an underrated gem, beating the Death Wish films at their own sadistic game. In later years, Lustig would become (in)famous for his wild Maniac Cop series, in which a corrupt police officer is slain in the line of duty before proceeding to rise from the dead to exact murderous revenge. Lustig is perhaps best known for 1980's notorious Maniac – still, to this day, one of the nastiest, sleaziest slashers of the decade, which is really saying something. Even when juxtaposed against the rest of this scuzzy bunch, William Lustig stands out from the crowd.