Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Viewer’s Choice
I hate the phrase “so bad it’s good.”
It suggests you are using your own barometer to judge others’ work, when you should just enjoy movies for what they are.
Also, this upsets me because in my head, the movies people laugh at are my scriptures.
Tom “cTom” Charley is one of those directors that people laugh about. But you know, I don’t think about any major directors daily. Like, I don’t care what Gaspar Noé, Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet are doing right now. Do I care what Jess Franco had for breakfast every day? Obsessed. Do I want to know what Neil Breen reads on the toilet? Oh my God, tell me right now. Tell me twice. Do I want to hug Alejandro Jodorowsky? If Jess Franco was alive, would I make him dinner?
So yeah, this is my first Tom movie, and it won’t be my last.
The film opens on the President of the United States (played with stiff, searching-for-the-cue-cards energy by Chip O’Neal), a man who believes he is genuinely more powerful than God. His First Lady (Grace Ann Prevost) is right there to validate his ego when she isn’t verbally abusing the domestic staff. How evil is this POTUS? When asked to speak at a benefit for wounded veterans, his unfiltered response is essentially: “I don’t give a damn about injured or dead veterans… They voluntarily signed up. Tell ’em to go to Hell!”
Keep in mind, this was made pre-Trump, and a lot of the evil things this President does in this are cute by comparison. Sorry to bring reality into this.
Naturally, divine karma comes knocking in the form of a massive stroke while the President is clutching a mysterious box. He’s rushed off to the hospital—played by the actual hallways at the North Oakland Medical Center in Pontiac—while his presidential residence is quite clearly a random two-story home in suburban Michigan.
Other than my wife, Michigan has brought me the Evil Dead movies, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and The Carrier.
And now this: a movie with a dead president hanging out in a surreal, liminal-space dining room to address the audience directly. Meanwhile, his First Lady hires various religious leaders to pray over him (naturally handing the Rabbi two envelopes of cash). But when an Imam utters the word “Allah,” the Secret Service casually offers to take him out back and shoot him—reassuring her, “We do it all the time.”
This all happens while the attending nurses accuse the bedridden President of profiting off “1/11″—presumably because cTom thought 9/11 was either copyrighted or too subtle. By the end of all this, the President undergoes a sudden, unprompted conversion to Islam with the help of a mysterious girl who somehow escapes from a looping five-minute VHS tape like a Dollar General Samara, gets flown illegally to China for stem-cell therapy (since his own legislation banned it), and has his plane shot down off-screen. Naturally, the film caps off with an abrupt, full-cast dance party set to “Lal Meri Pat Rakhiyo” by Sain Akhtar Hussain.
To call this film a “satire” gives cTom way too much credit. Satire requires an objective, or at least a recognizable point of view. Here, Charley wields political commentary the way a head-man offers a haircut: blunt, violent and utterly devoid of finesse. Second takes, too. I mean it, if you flub a line, you just keep going. He alternates wildly between bottom-tier internet conspiracy theories and absurd caricature. Is the President redeeming himself when he converts to Islam? Is it a sincere spiritual awakening, or just another opportunistic gamble? Does he actually go to Heaven when his plane gets blown up? The film refuses to answer because it almost certainly doesn’t know.
The acting across the board feels like a table read where half the cast lost their pages. Lines are delivered with the stilted, hesitant cadence of non-actors terrified that cTom will roll camera on their rehearsal, which he did. And then, of course, there’s Kerry Bentivolio—the actual real-life Michigan Republican who played the hospital’s chief surgeon (whose wife leaves him for the lawn guy mid-movie and moves away from America). Years later, when Bentivolio actually ran for Congress, his political opponents unearthed this film and ran attack ads accusing him of being a 9/11 truther based purely on his involvement.
He told Splice Today: “He’s making movies and basically he doesn’t pay anybody. He does these jokester-type, ridiculous movies, and he gives them to his friend, the editor, and then the editor gives him a bill, and he submits the bill to the state of Michigan, and the state of Michigan pays him to make that movie. And then he goes to India, and he shows those movies in India at 10 cents a ticket.”
There’s also a book of this, and I’ll just paste the sales copy with no changing the grammar, syntax or spelling: “The President who was more powerful than God himself and his First Lady made plans for an easy life using the funds stashed away in their secret Swiss Bank account. While looking for the secret codes for the account, President suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. First Lady tried Euthanasia to preserve dignity of the President. President was given a second chance to repent and make everything right so that he may enter Heaven. First Lady will stop at nothing in her search for the codes for the secret account. The Chief Surgeon spent days and night trying to bring the President back to health. His family life was ruined. Will he find happiness in his family life? Will First lady find the codes for the secret account? Will the President enter Heaven? True stories are more fantastic than fiction. Names and other details have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.”
I have no idea what this cover is, because it has nothing to do with anything I saw in the movie, which makes it a perfect representation of the film.
“You were once the most powerful man in the world…and now you pooped your pants.”
You can watch this on YouTube.
