Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #225 Champagne and Bullets (1993)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.
One of the many reasons why I love Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 is because it empowers you beautiful readers/patrons to act as scouts finding crazy, unique, wonderfully terrible movies for me to experience and share with the world.
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I’m lucky in that the people who commission Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 generally have a very good sense of what kind of movies I love writing about and make their selections accordingly.
They understandably discerned that I would flip over the exquisite madness of Miami Connection, inarguably one of the greatest and most important movies ever made, as well as 1993’s Champagne and Bullets.
Under the name Champagne and Bullets and the alternate titles Road to Revenge and GetEven, this glorious piece of outsider art has been making waves in the bad movie sphere for a few years now.
It made RedLetterMedia’s “Best of the Worst” and all three cuts were released on Blu-Ray by trash specialists Vinegar Syndrome for a very good reason: this is bad movie nirvana, outsider art that suggests what might ensue if Tommy Wiseau were to write, direct and star in addition to composing and singing the soundtrack of a Cobra knock-off.
Like the films of Neal Breen, Tommy Wiseau and Easy Rider: The Ride Home’s Phil Pitzer, this is a crazed vanity project from someone who lacks the looks, charisma, magnetism and presence to be a background extra in a real movie yet cast themselves in a lead role as pretty much the single most impressive human being in the history of the universe.
In that respect Champagne and Bullets sometimes feels like the end product of a Movie Fantasy Camp that allowed a complete amateur like John De Hart to make what can very generously be deemed a genuine film alongside veteran actors like Wings Hauser and William Smith.
It’s unseemly to critique someone’s appearance harshly but when a movie casts its writer-director-star as the ultimate stud, a mustachioed Casanova who broods his way through an endless series of gratuitous sex scenes it seems appropriate to point out that De Hart looks like your hard-ass second grade gym teacher or a security guard in Reseda more than a movie star. That’s his vibe as well. De Hart seems like a second-shift supervisor at Home Depot who inexplicably got to live out all of his action hero fantasies thanks to the inexplicable kindness and perversity of the universe.
De Hart doesn’t have the looks to be a movie star. He doesn’t have the talent. He doesn’t have the charisma. He doesn’t have the experience. Yet that somehow did not keep him from making a movie all the same in violent defiance of God’s will.
GetEven casts writer-director De Hart as Rick Bode, a tough, honest cop in mom jeans who is kicked off the force alongside partner/best friend/roommate Huck Finney (Wings Hauser) after getting set up by corrupt cop Normad (William Smith).
Normad is also the leader of a Satanic coven and a drug kingpin but that does not keep him from failing upward and not just getting a position as a judge but getting appointed to be a judge in a case involving Huck, a former coworker he framed. That to me is one hell of a conflict of interest but I guess when you worship the Prince of Darkness and flood the streets with hard drugs, judicial ethics don’t seem terribly important.
So many bullets! So much champagne!
Rick gets a job as a limousine driver but when the teenagers he’s driving to prom fail to treat him with sufficient respect he drives away while they’re using away the bathroom while delivering the immortal line, “Adiosi, Bela Lugosi!”
Incidentally, from now until my dying day instead of saying goodbye I will always say, “Adiosi, Bela Lugosi.” I don’t care if my wife murders me because of it. De Hart’s wooden, monotone delivery of that line had me in stitches. I guffawed out loud for a solid minute. Honestly if all Champagne and Bullets had going for it was “Adiosi Bela Lugosi” it would still be worth watching for that magical moment alone but Champagne and Bullets offers an embarrassment of riches of the richly embarrassing variety.
At a bar one wasted evening Huck cajoles his best buddy into performing what he sees as a swell party trick: reciting Shakespearean monologues spontaneously. A man whose acting seems stuck permanently at the “just barely remembering his lines without needing to look at a script” stage of his craft hilariously cast himself as a natural born thespian adept at performing the words of the immortal Bard.
De Hart isn’t just a non-actor, he’s an anti-actor. So it is a very good thing that the film skips abruptly from him reciting a soliloquy from Hamlet to the end of another speech entirely.
De Hart is perversely, hypnotically untalented in a way that calls to mind the terrible trio of Wiseau, Breen and Pitzer but he somehow manages to one-up them in terms of crazed narcissism by using the medium of film to promote his singing, songwriting and production as well.
When not favoring barflies and beauties with highbrow recitations of timeless prose, Rick sits in with the band and performs a sub-“Achy Breaky Heart” bit of bubblegum country dance pop called “Shimmy Slide.”
Ah, but Rick/De Hart is not just a Shakespearean actor and the second coming of Johnny Cash: he’s also a skilled lover who spends much of the movie fondling the disproportionately large naked breasts of his love interest in a way that sometimes makes it seem like he made the movie specifically so that he would have an opportunity to fondle the boobs of someone paid modestly to pretend to be attracted to him.
In addition to being a tough, honest cop and limousine driver, Rick is an actor, a country crooner and a lover but he’s also a fighter we inexplicably see practicing his moves because you have to fill 90 minutes of screen time somehow. But that STILL is not all.
In addition to being a lover, a fighter, a gifted interpreter of Shakespeare’s prose and a country singer everyone agrees is great Rick is also a funnyman who favors his adoring girlfriend and a waiter with not one but two distinct doctor jokes told in their entirety.
“You always have the good jokes!” gushes the waiter, one of many voices assuring Rick that he is sexy and funny and a wonderful singer and terrific in bed and also the most magnificently mustachioed man alive.
As in Easy Rider: The Ride Home, the experienced veterans in the cast make the first-timers seem even more poignantly pathetic by comparison. Jeff Fahey may be a dependable journeyman character actor under any other circumstance but when placed next to the weathered wood that is Phil Pitzer he’s goddamn Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
On a similar note Hauser seems to be acting in a movie all his own about an ex-cop on a steep downward spiral that only occasionally intersects with the rest of the film. He’s clearly improvising all of his lines, trying to create a real character with real emotions in an utter vacuum.
Champagne and Bullets isn’t just a uniquely, fascinatingly inept train wreck of a vanity project that never should have seen the light of day: it’s outsider art, the vainest of vanity projects, a movie so defiantly, aggressively, spectacularly awful that it comes all the way around to being great and utterly essential.
Rick gets back together with his busty ex-girlfriend who has a dark history as a former member of Normad’s coven of devil-worshipper drug freaks. They aren’t too happy about her leaving the fold so Normad dispatches his goons to kill her, leading Rick to seek revenge.
Champagne and Bullets is eminently quotable in that inimitable The Room fashion as well. Here are some winners from the film, many involving the film’s delicate handling of the topic of Satanism:
“We love you, Satan!”
“That bitch isn’t good enough to follow Satan!”
“You’ll be serving our Master whether you like it or not!”
“They sacrificed a human baby!”
“Who are you, another drug-contaminated devil worshipper from Hollywood?”
“I don’t do drugs OR worship the devil!”
I absolutely adored Champagne and Bullets. It’s the best kind of trash, the kind that takes itself very seriously and is utterly devoid of irony, winking, self-awareness or purposeful camp. Like the makers of Miami Connection, De Hart obviously genuinely believed in himself and his vision. That just makes everything more beguilingly insane and oddly pure.
De Hart never made another movie. That's understandable, as he had no business making a movie to begin with but that’s also a shame considering what a gift Champagne and Bullets represents. Still, if De Hart only made one movie, it was one unlike any other, a movie that’s miraculous in its own weird way.
Champagne and Bullets deserves a place of distinction in the great pantheon of movies that are so bad they're great alongside other crazed vanity projects that provide a fascinating, eminently re-watchable glimpse into the psyches and impossibly bloated egos of their creators.
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