4^th July has always been a holiday I’ve never fully got to grips with. The majority of Americans I’ve been lucky enough to know, have always placed a lot of credence on this holiday. Ask most Brits and they’ll tell you that 4^th July is about fireworks, community, celebration and the good ol’ red, white and blue. I know it’s to do with independence and then there’s something about a tea party in Boston. It’s not a historical strong point for me, but I get the gist. Sorry for any insult caused here.

Being a guy who grew up in the countryside of the North West of England, 4^th July has a distinctly alien feel to it and pretty much the entirety of my knowledge comes from pop culture references. An American historian, I am not. The reason it feels so alien to me, personally, is that I have never really celebrated a lot of the values “true brits” uphold when talking about my country. This is not a political blog (much of the time) but that feeling of national pride is something, from the outside, which feels different in America, to anywhere else on earth. From a personal point of view, I see the rise of “patriotism” with Reform UK and MAGA to be more in line with fascism and racism than anything else, so I struggle to find my patriotism in the modern climate. The Brexit referendum left me in a place where I struggle to understand how I share a nationality with so many people who didn’t hold the same values as me and I’m sure a lot of my American readers will feel similarly at present.

It’s not on purpose, but I decided to watch this film and write this piece, around the time of the murder of Charlie Kirk. It was purely on the basis of scrolling through Amazon Prime’s fucking appalling interface. I scroll across the horror section until I find something I’ve either, not seen OR haven’t seen in a long time. Uncle Sam falls into the latter. I remember being half pissed and not a lot else from my first watch.

It really is a pretty simple plot on the whole. Sam Harper, a Master Sargeant in the US Army is killed by friendly fire whilst on a military operation in Kuwait. For completely unexplained reasons, Sam comes back to life as a decomposing zombie-like creature, on the 4^{th of} July to punish anyone who isn’t…patriotic enough? Congratulations if you’ve maybe figured out where I’m going with all this…

Let’s get this out here right now: the acting in this film is terrible, the make-up is pretty ropey and the kills are, for the most part, pretty tame. It is however, unintentionally, in this writer’s opinion, hilarious. I consider myself to be big on family but Jody, the patriotic nephew of the titular Sam (Uncle Sam, get it?!) is fucking obsessed with his uncle. He’s also obsessed with war, violence and the army. I can tell you straight up, I would have avoided this kid like THE PLAGUE at school. I can picture him walking around the playground pretending to throw grenades and crawling through trenches. After slamming the acting, I probably need to provide a few examples. Step up Anne Tremko playing Sam’s widow who greets the news of her newfound widow-dom with all the emotion of a candle stick holder. Bouncing off this performance is Bo Hopkins as Sam’s leading officer (if you hadn’t guessed, I’m not a military man so I have no idea what the terminology is) brutally and flatly telling this woman her husband is dead on the doorstep of her home. Later we meet Barry, a paraplegic and blind child who has a mental connection to Uncle Sam (again unexplained) who wheels around like Professor X without a shred of acting ability. He is without a doubt the highlight of the film. After one of Barry’s many weird outbursts, his father suggests “we should have left you in the shade” and following the outbreak of a series of violent murders at a 4^th July Jamboree, said father also abandons his son with some bollocks line about taking the mother to hospital. Not a great set of parents but Barry is so weird, you kind of understand it.

We then move on to the script. Fuck me. I’m trying to not make this too long but a few highlights to pick apart are a peeping tom on stilts, a character breaking their leg and not realising, a character questioning the widow’s refusal to move on from her ex-husband by stating “he’s long dead and you’re still thinking about him”, despite the husband not being buried yet. This all reaches a crescendo with the resolution of the film, through Uncle Sam being blown to smithereens by a historic re-enactment cannon, fired by Issac Hayes of South Park fame. Again, I’m no military expert but do cannon balls explode on impact to the level that they could destroy a house? I also must throw a quick comment in on the line Jody uses to lure his uncle out of the house which could be one of my favourite cinematic lines of all time; “he’s my uncle, we belong together” …

It’s a pretty standard, paint by numbers slasher comedy. Uncle Sam doesn’t really tread any new ground or provide anything genre defining but there are a few great kills like the flagpole hanging or the sparkler death. Why then, have I written so many words on it. Well…as I said at the beginning, I watched this around the time of Charlie Kirk’s murder, and it got me thinking. On the surface, you’d see the poster for this and assume it was going to be incredibly patriotic, pro war, pro military etc etc. It’s not. It’s probably one of the most anti-war films I can think of. It questions the military and what kind of people sign up to serve their country. It questions who should gatekeep the levels of patriotism that are “acceptable”. I’d even go as far as to say it throws questions about the importance placed on 4^th July. There’s a reading to be made on everyone being so wrapped up in the celebrations they don’t notice the murders and carnage unfolding around them until it reaches a level that impacts them. Is there something we could learn from this 1996 slasher/comedy in the present day?

A big phrase I throw around a lot is “do whatever you want to do, so long as you’re not negatively impacting someone else”. I have absolutely no qualms with people celebrating their culture, their identity, their beliefs or views. Quite the opposite, that’s what makes the world go round! However, there’s a line that can be crossed and the Uncle Sam’s of this world show us that. Uncle Sam’s shouldn’t dictate how we live, how we celebrate our heritage, forge our communities or make life and death decisions   Like I said though, this isn’t a political blog…