Like everything Uwe Boll makes, POSTAL received negative buzz and a rock-bottom IMDB score even before anyone had actually seen it. (And, like most Boll movies, this $15million film shot back to back in Canada with SEED, is adapted from a video game). In the case of POSTAL, being well liked in the American film-going arena was always going to be tough for a movie that opens with two Taliban terrorists arguing about the volume of virgins in the afterlife right before they crash their hijacked passenger plane into a strangely familiar Very Tall Building. Yep, that’s right, Boll has opened his new movie with what plays like a parody of the climactic scenes of UNITED 93. What’s surprising is that the scene is genuinely funny, and sets the fearless, anarchic tone for the madness to follow.
This grim farce is equally influenced by SOUTH PARK (and, by extension, TEAM AMERICA : WORLD POLICE), FALLING DOWN, Russ Meyer and Troma Films. In this stifling PC climate, the relish with which Bolls shoots down sacred cows is impressive in itself. Engagingly bad taste gags take pot-shots at “Sammy” Bin Laden (in a close relationship with a predictably ridiculed, conspiratorial George Bush), Jews, gays, cops, fat women (the age-old joke about covering a naked fat chick with flour in order to find the wet spot is graphically visualised here), the government, scientology, Nazism, Hollywood, Bible Belt America and Oprah. Lots of people will be offended, but those people will know if something like POSTAL is going to offend them, so if they pay money to see it in theatres or on DVD, phrases like “fuckin’ stupid” spring to mind.
In the ironically titled city of “Paradise”, a milquetoast loser known only as “Postal Dude” (Zach Ward) leads a miserable life in a series of unfulfilling jobs while coming home to his grotesquely obese, cheating wife, referred to only as “Bitch”. He unsurprisingly snaps and sets off on a rampage while teaming up with his cult-leader uncle (Dave Foley, whose role is introduced via a jaw-dropping, extended full-frontal sequence) in a bid to heist an amusement park. The “Doom” cult’s terrorist plot happens to coincide with the latest Bin Laden / Bush – induced mass-murder plot, which involves the use of the currently-hip “Krotchy” dolls to spread the Bird Flu virus around the U.S.A.
POSTAL’s free-wheeling, episodic approach sometimes feels like a series of over-the-top sketches loosely strung together. There are too many characters, and it’s too long at nearly two hours, with an unfunny Verne Troyer cameo (as himself) among the weaker elements. Boll’s film, however, is also ballsy and wildly unpredictable as it veers from gruesome Monty Python-ish sight gags to Zucker Bros-style throwaway background gags. Many of the incidental jokes are very funny in the queasy should-I-be-laughing kind of way you don’t get with tepid mainstream comedies : listen out for the TV broadcast detailing the varied reasons why the World Trade Centre victims “deserved to die” (“kicking a dog” is among them).
The movie is a successful departure for its much-reviled director. Not only does it benefit from solid production values and a bold, well chosen cast (with amusing bit-parts for the likes of J K Simmons and Seymour Cassell) but it also takes a generic video-game premise and turns it into something subversive and interesting. Avoiding the straight genre picture expected of him, Boll has made an in-your-face, deliberately heartless satire of political and religious lunacy / hysteria in contemporary America. Even the most videogame-like sequences, the shoot-outs, go hilariously over the line of taste by blowing away old women, casually gunning down children and indiscriminately offing babies. (Just to be sure, Welfare Office workers are run down several times).
Although occasionally resorting to shit and fart humor, POSTAL is best when at its most bizarre and callous. The anything-goes approach allows for everything from sarcastic mockery of Hollywood movie clichés to moments of surrealistic flippancy (for the first time in movie history, someone is shot through a cat). Boll even finds time for a self-deprecating cameo as himself : following last year’s infamous boxing match, the director here is seen paying his cast and crew in Nazi gold and gets into a violent confrontation with videogame honcho Vince Desiderio (“What the fuck have you done to my game?!”).
This is an unsubtle and mean-spirited movie, to say the least. But it’s also, in its own self-consciously outrageous way, a scarily on-the-nose commentary on the insane state of a world where nothing of significance will be done about major threats like global warming because too many cultures and religions are too busy trying to destroy each other.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Although very funny throughout and broadly performed, this nihilistic comedy is as grim as they come, a fact reinforced by the ending – arguably one of the most subversive fade-outs to any movie this decade. In a kind of 21st century variant on the close of DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, good buddies George W Bush and Osama Bin Laden skip into the sunset together, reciting the parting line from beloved American classic CASABLANCA as mushroom clouds rise above the city and the nuclear holocaust begins. For this astonishing finale (and for the fabulous line “What’s the difference between a duck?”), POSTAL is essential viewing.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
