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Uncle Sam
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (10th October 2025). |
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The Film
 Two days before Independence Day, the body of Lieutenant Sam Harper missing for three years after his helicopter went down in Kuwait in a friendly fire incident is returned to his home town of Twin Falls. It is an open secret that his widow Louise (Anne Tremko) has been seeing Deputy Phil Burke (Swimming with Sharks' Matthew Flint) and she and her sister-in-law Sally (Honey, I Blew Up the Kid's Leslie Neale) are dreading his return as if he were still alive. The only people have not moved on in the aftermath of Sam's disappearance are one-legged former Lieutenant Jed Crowley (Escape from New York's Isaac Hayes) who mentored Sam and feels partially responsible for what he turned into and Sally's son Jody (SLC Punk!'s Christopher Ogden) who idolizes his hero uncle, measuring every other man in the town including his mother's boyfriend tax attorney Ralph (Mercury Rising's Tim Grimm) up against him. When a trio of teenagers vandalize the cemetery and his open grave, Sam rises from his coffin on display in Sally's living room and dons the Uncle Sam costume of peeping tom on stilts Willie (Mark Chadwick) meant to play him in the parade the next day and targets the unpatriotic in a Fourth of July Twin Falls will never forget. Although Uncle Sam looks like another holiday-oriented slasher film – indeed, one wonders whether this film might have been the inspiration for Eli Roth's faux trailer "Thanksgiving" for Grindhouse (less so the awful feature film Roth actually made of it – it is actually more of a supernatural revenge flick that wants to share the company of the moving Vietnam-era "Monkey's Paw" riff Deathdream but is more of a rehashed, underbaked spin on Maniac Cop and its sequel first sequel with which the film shares director William Lustig (Maniac) – who later established the genre physical media Blue Underground after working on transfers and producing special features for Anchor Bay Entertainment in his heyday – and screenwriter Larry Cohen who has his own quirky action/horror filmography as a director with films like Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff, The Ambulance among others. The film does suffer from genre expectations with Sam shown undead long before the flag-burning provocation, not better establishing its hit list in the first act like one would expect with a more EC Comics treatment, and more than a few bodies discovered after the fact – one would think that the assassination of a tax cheat dressed up as "Honest Abe" would be a very public act that would send the parade into chaos rather than that of Robert Forster's special appearance corrupt congressman whose backstory is tossed out minutes before his pyrotechnic death scene. There does appear to be a certain logic to these shortcomings in that rather than being an anti-war film that turns Sam into a product of the government killing machine, he is established in backstory as a born angry psychopath who terrorized (and molested) family members and got into the army in order to move up from killing animals to killing humans. None of his victims – including Jody's conscientious objector teacher Mr. Crandall (Johnny Got His Gun's Timothy Bottoms), a pot-smoking teenager (Desirae Klein) attending the rib smoker, and a snotty jock (Talisman's Jason Adelman) who gives a Roseanne Barr-esque treatment to the National Anthem – may actually deserve to die, but the mildness of their infractions, the personal nature of his targeting his wife's lover, and even his psychically claiming to Jody's friend Barry (The Santa Clause's Zachary McLemore), wheelchair-bound, scarred, and blind since a fireworks accident, that he is there to avenge his suffering suggests that Sam is indeed just looking for reasons to kill rather than being the agent of an inevitable reckoning to a rotten town. The climax consists of Jody seeing his uncle for who he really is while Louise and Jed get past their own feelings of fear and guilt and forcing him to relinquish his hold on them (which seems easy enough because when he speaks he is a sub-Freddy Kruger wisecracker). If the sinister final shot seems utterly nonsensical in light of what has come before, it is less a slasher film twist than a direct homage to the bewildering final shot of Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (followed by the dedication "To Lucio"). While Ogden gives a reasonably good child performance, Jody never really seems as if he could turn into another version of his uncle, only showing anger in emotional moments. McLemore's Barry is not introduced until fifty minutes into the film making his connection to Sam seem either haphazardly thrown in or added to a reshoot of the third act. He might have made either a better lead character full of rage and resentment at his friends for the accident and being put on display by his parents (Halloween's P.J. Soles and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge's Thom McFadden) to make the parents of his friends uncomfortable, or even just introduced earlier on as Jody's friend treated during his silences like a sounding board to Jody's frustrations. While Jed is presented as the good soldier who went into the service with ideals who tries to convey to Jody the reality of combat, and Sam represents the bad soldier acting out of self-interest, the film's only other military characters of note are a major in the prologue played by William Smith (Grave of the Vampire) who shuts down any speculation on friendly fire in Sam's death – and also gives a monologue over the end credits – and Sergeant Twinning (The Wild Bunch's Bo Hopkins) who accompanies Sam's coffin and is a serial seducer of widows with his eye on both Louise and her sister-in-law who gives a neutral response when Jody voices his ambitions to go into the army (Hopkins has so little screen time that viewers might have forgotten about his character or at least his intentions when his body turns up late in the film). Morgan Paull (Blade Runner) and Frank Pesce (Midnight Run) also make brief appearances. The scope photography of James Lebovitz (The Toxic Avenger) gives the film a nineties slickness and production values are respectable apart from the special make-up effects of Ron Nyrim whose company SOTA F/X has been working since the eighties on many of the films KNB EFX were too busy to do including several nineties and 2000s B-tier Dimension Films titles along with a mix of major studio theatrical releases and direct-to-streaming works since then. Uncle Sam's undead make-up is about on the same level as Amityville Dollhouse which also featured a similar-looking undead soldier dad character trying to turn his son against his stepfather but most of the prosthetic effects including a hatchet to the head and a decapitation look rather poor possibly due to the bright lighting. While there is a sense of scale to the parade scenes, one gets the sense that editor Bob Murawski – later of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, the reconstruction of Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, and the genre label Grindhouse Releasing – was severely limited by coverage in some of the action sequences. Made the same year as Scream but not released until 1998, one wonders whether the film might have been better-appreciated if released around the same time or if the MPAA might have been more lenient following the Craven film (which did receive some cuts for an R-rating but nowhere near as severe as earlier horror films in the eighties and early nineties). 
Video
Although shot in Super 35mm for Panavision-compatable anamorphic projection, Uncle Sam went straight to video two years after its completion in 1998 with wide distribution from A-Pix whose catalog of low-budget horror, sci-fi, and erotic thrillers could be found on virtually every video store shelf. Fortunately, fans could see the film in its intended aspect ratio early on with the 1999 Roan Group laserdisc which also featured the film's intended theatrical Dolby Digital track and a commentary by director Lustig and actor Hayes. The non-anamorphic master was ported to DVD by Elite Entertainment the same year while Lustig himself would give the film an anamorphic overhaul with Blue Underground's 2004 DVD followed by the film's Blu-ray debut in 2010 and a 4K UltraHD edition in 2022. Apart from the menus and audio (see below), 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray appears to be identical in content to the 2010 Blu-ray but it might utilize the 4K master since the red are a tad less hot than the U.S. Blu-ray edition and the night scenes slightly brighter while retaining their moodiness (Hopkins first appearance stepping out of the shadows is less murky). The make-up effects have never looked particularly good and the brightness does not help here any more than the slightly darker levels of the earlier transfers. 
Audio
The film was mixed in Dolby Digital with the 5.1 track available on the aforementioned laserdisc and DVDs while Blue Underground rechanneld the 5.1 mix to 7.1 for their Blu-ray – including the original 5.1 as a lossy Dolby Digital track – and then did a Dolby Atmos remix for the 4K edition and included the original 5.1 in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio. 88 Films' edition includes the 5.1 mix in DTS-HD Master Audio and an LPCM 2.0 stereo downmix. The 5.1 track gets the job done with sedate atmospehere and gets more active during the kill scenes, parade scenes, and the climactic pyrotechnics but it is nowhere near as active as the Dolby Stereo mixes for the Maniac Cop films which provided Lustig with more to work with when he did discrete surround remixes for physical media editions of them. Optional English SDH subtitles are also included. 
Extras
The two commentaries have been ported over starting with the 2004 audio commentary by director William Lustig, writer Larry Cohen, and producer George G Braunsten created for the Blue Underground DVD in which the three discuss how the film came about due to their long friendships at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to mount an independent horror movie going up against Dimension Films (working in conjunction on the direct-to-video arm with Neo Art & Logic who reworked Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence when Lustig walked off the film). Lustig reassess some of his choices in the film including the mistake of casting two actresses who looked alike for the sisters-in-law which caused confusion for viewers early on while Cohen seems more at peace with the finished film to the point of cracking jokes that could be taken for erroneous facts by the less-attentive viewer. There is a lot of discussion about shooting on location – and having to get a waiver for SAG to make an exception for additional cast fees associated with shooting outside Los Angeles – issues with child working hours in spite of the enthusiasm of Ogden, Lustig's and Cohen's shared fondness for character actors, and shooting with crowds of extras. Cohen also reveals that he shot some of the parade footage in a different town earlier as he did with the St. Patrick's Day parade sequence of God Told Me To. The disc also includes the original laserdisc audio commentary by director William Lustig and star Isaac Hayes in which Hayes is tuned into the entirety of the film not just the his own scenes, sharing some of the same references as Lustig in discussing the film, the story, and working with the cast. Here, Lustig also reveals that Cohen's treatment did not engage him as a New York resident until he went to Nashville to shoot a film and saw firsthand a Fourth of July parade and got a sense of what it means in other areas of the country (comparable to the aforementioned St. Patrick's Day parade in New York and some other Northeastern states). Lustig also provides some more information about his shooting methods, including framing the dinner table sequence between Jody, his mother, and her boyfriend tighter so he did not have to worry about continuity when it came to food and utensils handled by the actors.  The rest of the extras are also ported from the earlier editions including behind the scenes video of "Fire Stunts" (9:45) with 2004 audio commentary by stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos (Cameron's Closet), the deleted scene (0:53) from the workprint mentioned in the commenatires featuring Lustig's brother Jason who never let him forget about cutting his one line, the juvenile gag reel (0:40), a poster & still gallery (4:20), and the film's red-band theatrical trailer (1:34). 
Packaging
The first pressing includes a double-walled O-ring slipcover and booklet liner notes (neither of which were supplied for review).
Overall
Uncle Sam suffers from audience expectations of a holiday-oriented slasher film and is not without other conceptual faults but it remains an entertaining minor companion effort to the Maniac Cop films of director Bill Lustig and writer Larry Cohen.
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