I missed the first half-hour of this film because I was eating dinner. As it was, I wish I had eaten desert too. Fortunately the predictable plot twists and tired story line made it easy to fill in the blanks. UNCLE SAM is the story of an American Soldier who dies in Operation Desert Storm but returns to his sleepy California hometown as a zombie to exact revenge on well, no one specific group. Sam's blitzkrieg of violence goes largely unnoticed by the townspeople who are consumed by the excitement of their annual 4th of July celebration. Donning a latex mask and the familiar stars-and-stripes of America's great recruiter, Sam blends into the hoopla of sights and sounds.

Enter Sam's nephew. While his name and acting are both forgettable, his character is central to the story. The child has unshakable faith in his fallen role model Sam until he learns the dark secret of his abusive past. It is then that he becomes a crusader to put an end to Sam's bloody reign of terror.

Some people don't hold children to the same standards of quality acting as their adult counterparts. I'm not one of them. In perhaps the worst display of B movie acting since the Toxic Avenger series, Sam's nephew befriends another child, a blind psychic bound to a wheelchair with unconvincing scar tissue make-up running the length of his cheek and neck. We would have all been better off had this character died in the event that caused these injuries. To watch the blind cripple in his ill-fitting sunglasses is an exercise in patience and tolerance. Speaking in cryptic "I may be blind, but can see more than most people" rhetoric, the crippled boy helps the nephew hunt down Sam into an anti-climactic showdown.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The beauty of this film is that it doesn't try to be something that it is not - good. As a finely woven tapestry of B movie violence, Sam manages to gauge, rip, shoot, and dismember his way to low-budget horror mediocrity. Especially memorable scenes include the decapitation of a sack-race contestant, the impaling of a police officer with a flagpole which impressively included the flag itself, and death of a public official by sparklers.

The best part of this film is the performance turned in by Isaac Hayes. With a dynamic range of emotion and on-screen presence, the former Shaft superstar proves again why he is the best man to play the role of hero when Sydney Portier is unavailable. When Sam loses his mask to reveal a face damaged by what we can only assume to be Iraqi chemical weapons, he is confronted by Hayes in a typical showdown between good and evil. Guess who wins.