Gobsmacking Cinema: THE RISE & FALL OF IDI AMIN (1981)

Some mad numpty from the army overthrowing the government and taking over a country has been a fairly regular occurrence in post-colonial Africa but that doesn't stop it being a ripe subject for adaptation into a movie. And if someone like Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg had tackled it, who knows what we might have ended up with?

But no. Produced and directed by Sharad Patel (who?) and starring Joseph Olita (who?) and a bunch of other unknowns, THE RISE AND FALL OF IDI AMIN is pure bad-taste cinema.

There is undoubtedly a great story waiting to be told about this madman and his gradual ruin of Uganda. That story is still waiting to be filmed. This movie seems interested purely in the violent side of things and little else. There's no attempt to justify his actions, explain his decisions or give any kind of insight into his character, other than to paint him as a raving lunatic with a thirst for blood. Okay, so that's not far off the mark in truth, but that doesn't make this film any less morally dubious.

With little in the way of story, we are simply treated to incident after incident showing what a nutter Amin was (or Big Daddy as he liked to refer to himself) in gruesome detail. This kind of thing might be acceptable (well, almost) in a comical portrayal of some pantomime style villain but this guy was real, and disturbed. And that is what we are shown repeatedly in this hour and a half of exploitative nonsense based on a nation's real-life suffering.

There's Amin's visit to a witch doctor; his eating the flesh of a dead rival; murder of any who oppose him; constant ranting about "eshans" (that's Asians by the way - it's difficult to convey a Ugandan accent through typing). We laugh as he boasts, while bedding two women simultaneously, that he's the "sex champion", or as he hides in a cupboard during the battle with Tanzania. We stop laughing as he sends people before the firing squad. And then there are moments where I had no idea whether I should be laughing or not - the extreme nature of the scenes is rather disturbing, but the whole film is so badly conceived and badly acted (Olita is presumably cast purely for his physical resemblance to the fat belligerant tossbag rather than any acting prowess) that you can't help but laugh as he accidentally shoots an archbishop, or as he invites his children in to see the corpse of one of his wives... a corpse which he has just dismembered so that he can proudly declare that "this is what happens to bad mothers" before letting out a little chuckle as if he's just played a harmless practical joke.

The combination of real life nastiness, no hint of a moral anchor and the ludicrously over the top performances from its dreadful cast ensure that this woefully misjudged turkey is actually a lot of fun to watch (if, like me, you have no shame), even if you do spend the entire film wondering who thought it was a good idea.

Thankfully we now live in more enlightened times. The good news is that such an ill-advised act of folly showing a despotic tyrant and his evil acts in such an exploitative and laughable light would never be commissioned by any film studio today.

The flipside however is that, no matter how much time I've spent polishing it, I just can't find a buyer anywhere for my debut screenplay, MUGABE VS THE LOVEBUG: HERBIE GOES TO ZIMBABWE.