1982, UK/Kenya. Starring only: Joseph Olita, Thomas Baptiste, Leonard Trolley, Geoffrey Keen, Denis Hills, Louis Mahoney, Andre Maranne, Diane Mercer, Tony Sibbald, Norbert Okare, Ka Vundla, Martin Okello, Ann Wanjuga, Gordon Gardner, Alf Joint. Directed by Sharad Patel.

Sharad Patel was sitting around one day, wondering what he could contribute to a world still reeling from wars and terrorism and hostage situations, from gas rationing and out of control inflation. It was the dawn of the 1980s, and in a world where a drastically escalating Cold War brought with it the promise of mutal assured destruction at almost any moment, thrusting us all into a dusty future in which we strut about in big shoulderpads and assless leather pants, what could one man do to contribute something positive, something that would give this world hope during such troubling times? What could one man produce, what could he make that would lift our spirits, make us cheer -- maybe even make us believe again?

If your answer to this profound question is, "He could make a sleazy exploitation pic about 1970s cannibal dictator Idi Amin!" then you, too, could be Sharad Patel!

It's been a while since we got to lay any history on ya, so bear with me as I indulge my fascination with the long, rich cauldron full of bad news that is our human past.

Uganda, the country where Idi Amin did his dirty work, was doomed from the start of the so-called modern era thanks to its unique location in the middle of some of the most vicious, chaotic, and violent countries in Africa. To the Southwest is Rwanda, where civil war between Hutu and Tutsi tribes resulted in one of the bloodiest, most terrifying campaigns of double genocide in history. After the Rwandan president was killed in a plane crash, the Hutu majority blamed it all on the Tutsi minority and began slaughtering them en masse. Just as the bodies were beginning to really pile up, the Tutsis decided to surprise everyone by turning the tables on their oppressors, besting them at their own game and launching their own war of genocide. To Uganda's North is Sudan, a torn country that occupies an uncomfortable position smack dab on the border between Africa's Islamic Arabic north and black south. Islamic fundamentalists have swept through the country, enforcing their laws and religion on a black majority that was none too interested. Civil war and poverty resulted, turning Sudan into a killing field and an effective training ground for terrorists. To Uganda's west, you get Zaire. With locals like that, what chance does any country have?


Uganda was also the victim of colonial border drawing during the 1800s, one of the main reasons much of Africa is still in a state of chaos. Different tribes, often antagonistic toward one another, suddenly found themselves forced to live together by randomly drawn borders concocted by colonial leaders with no real understanding of the tribal politics upon which much of Africa was based. The result was, and continues to be, a near constant state of civil war and anarchy, which is the perfect breeding ground for authoritarians like Amin and his predecessor, the allegedly mild-mannered, well-spoken former school teacher Apollo Milton Obote, who actually has more deaths to his name than Amin.

Obote became president of Uganda in 1966, and before too long he was doing mild-mannered things like rewriting the country's constitution to grant himself more and more power. When he and his military buddy Amin were caught in a gold and ivory smuggling scheme, Obote dealt with the potential scandal, complicated by the fact that people had just discovered the dynamic duo's involvement in secret wars in The Congo, by having all his political detractors arrested, then going on to tweak the constitution a bit more to give himself even greater power. People were really starting to get tired of the guy, and in 1969 he tried to salvage his formerly respected name by beginning a new quasi-socialist program meant to revive Uganda's ailing financial and social state. It didn't work. A rift also began to form between Obote and Amin. After having Amin placed under house arrest for the misappropriation of military funds, Obote left Uganda to attend a summit in Singapore. When he attempted to return home, he was less than delighted to discover that Amin had grown bored with sitting at home all day, and had gone out and taken over the country.

Idi Amin isn't as well known as he used to be, but back in the 1970s and into the 1980s, few were the people who didn't at least recognize the name of the infamous Ugandan dictator. Amin began his career as a successful but notoriously brutal leader in the Ugandan army, generally regarded as one of the best in Africa at the time. After his successful coup and the overthrowing of his old parter in crime, Amin became the big man (literally and figuratively), and he flexed his newfound muscle by making time with scores of ladies, murdering foreign journalists, and on special occassions, eating the flesh and internal organs of his enemies in acts of ritual cannibalism. He was an out of control party animal, whose lust for members of the opposite sex (the younger the better) was matched only by his lust for blood. He was also probably the only world leader up until Bill Clinton to refer to himself as "Big Daddy."

Initially, Western governments took a ho-hum attitude toward Amin. At least he wasn't a Socialist, like that Obote character was starting to become. Amin's tendency to arrest or simply kill foreign journalists and dignitaries soon lost him a lot of his international pals, however. As fun as the Amin regime was, Ugandans eventually got tired of being eaten by their president, and in 1979 Amin was overthrown by a resistance army lead by rebel fighter Yoweri Museveni, who had joined forces with the army of neighboring Tanzania to put an end to Amin's reign. Obote was eventually reinstated as president, failed miserably, and was overthrown again in 1985. As far as murderous madmen go, Amin's 500,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the collected works of men like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the people responsible for releasing Willa Ford albums, but 500,000 is still a respectable enough number to get you into just about anyone's great big book of psychopathic assholes. Besides, while Amin lacked the sheer volume of many of his fellow tyrannical thugs, he more than made up for it in flamboyancy and weirdness. As far as I know, Stalin never ate anyone, and the Russian's didn't have a dancin' head of state until Boris Yeltsin.

Amin escaped, retiring from his life of crushing the masses and eating their livers to a life of orgies and wealth in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, like his contemporaries Pol Pot, Baby Doc, Pinochet, and countless others, Amin's legacy for Uganda was bankruptcy, poverty, starvation, violence, and disarray. While the cannibal lived the high and easy life in Saudi Arabia, surrounded by sexy naked chicks and more food (non human meat, presumably) than even a big fat-ass like Amin could eat, the country he ruined wallowed in bloody turmoil. That's justice for ya. In August of 2003, after slipping into a coma, the big fat murderous lug finally breathed his last breath, and all of Uganda could be heard to breath a huge sigh of relief seconds later. That sigh will undoubtedly be brief, because Africa has proven to have a particularly deep well when it come sto plunging the depths for depraved and outlandish mass murderers in business suits and military uniforms. Take, for a simple example, those guys in Liberia who think dressing up in wigs and evening gowns will give them supernatural powers in battle. All things considered though, if I was an opposing force I guess I'd be suitably freaked out by a bunch of rage-crazy, foaming-at-the-mouth-drag queens whacked out on weed and brandishing AK-47s. So okay, it's effective in it's own twisted way, but that doesn't change the fact that it's just, you know, really fucking weird.

A movie about Amin's rise to power and eventual fall from grace is certainly potentially powerful subject matter for a film, but films about real-life atrocities, especially ones that didn't happen too long ago, are a tricky subject. One has to walk a fine line. Obviously, the goal is to use the atrocities to highlight folly, criticize our brutality, and perhaps elevate a few stories of human perseverance and strength. At their best and most successful, the movies come out looking like The Killing Fields, an account of rise in Cambodia of the murderous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. More times than not, however, the director is not talented enough to walk the line, and instead of The Killing Fields, we get Angkor: Cambodia Express.

Amin: The Rise and Fall falls somewhere in the middle, which may actually work to its detriment to some degree. It's too exploitive to be considered an actual, important political film. At the same time, it's not quite exploitive enough to satisfy a lot of the harder core exploitation fans, who no doubt would delight in endless scenes of cannibalism and bloodshed and, to a slightly lesser extent, Amin strutting around in his flowery little poolside robe. It does, however, deliver enough bloody squibs and violent action to make it a decent little film, even if it fails to be the important piece of history someone was hoping for.


I really doubt anyone renting a movie called Amin: The Rise and Fall, made by the man who would later executive produce Bachelor Party, and with a cover depicting an insane drawing of a screaming Idi Amin is picking the movie up thinking, "Hey, I might learn a thing or two about history from this!" Unless, that is, they are the same people who rent A Knight's Tale because they've "always wanted to learn more about those King Arthur times." They're picking it up because it looks silly. Oh sure, they may posture after the fact and go on about how "it powerfully depicts the mania and insanity of one of history's most notorious dictators," but if that's really what they were looking for, they would have rented a documentary. That there is any historical accuracy at all is nice, but it's hardly the reason this movie is around. Movies like this exist to parade around a big fat cannibal in a litle bathrobe. Maybe if more movies had big fat cannibals in fancy bathrobes, the world would be a better place. That's probably the director's thinking, anyway.

This movie not so much as an educational piece on "the folly of man" as it is around to dish out some violent exploitation, and it does that, though the time spent on history detracts from it as an exploitation film, and the time spent reveling in low-budget exploitation discredits it as an historical piece, although I don't really know if I can come up with an effective way to make a movie about a murderous cannibal president and not have it smack of exploitation to some degree. So, you know, it's not like I'm flat-out criticizing the movie. Nor will I sit here and lie to you, pretending like I'm some high-brow Poindexter who was offended by the base use of exploitation elements to snare the seedier viewers. One need only look at the body of work discussed on this website to know that's not the case. Remember, my argument is that the movie sometimes tries to have it both ways, resulting in a more tepid affair than I expected. Not bad, and not unenjoyable, but then, maybe part fo the fault is that you really shouldn't be enjoying the movie at all. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the performance of lead actor Joseph Olita, it's hard not to enjoy the movie, and it comes across as something of a hoot.

Sure there's plenty of cheap exploitation sex and violence. We get to see Amin chow down on a fallen foe, hide heads in his icebox, and court ladies. We get to see the army mow people down with machine guns and do a lot of running around in the streets. We also get to see see weird stuff like Amin take part in an off-road rally and cut a little rug (both activities see the big man sidetracked by his love of whatever woman happens to be closest). It made me wonder what would happen if someone made a movie about Hitler that showed not just in insatiable lust for power and the eradication of the Jews, but also showed him goofing off, dancing, and being an otherwise amiable fellow. No one wants a movie in which Hitler is going up to wide-eyed, blond little German kids and doing the "I can take my thumb off" or "Why, you've got a Deutsche mark in your ear!" tricks. I guess there was that documentary that featured lots of Eva Braun's home movies of Hitler doing just that (well, maybe not the thumb trick), and folks reacted pretty negatively to the whole thing. After all, God forbid we should have to deal with the fact that men like Hitler and Amin are not supernatural monsters who are pure evil 100% of the time, but are in fact just human beings. It reminds us that any one of us could sink to that level in different circumstances.

At the same time, I don't think we have to worry about a slew of "They Saved Amin's Brain!" type movies after the guy kicks the bucket.

I'm guessing part of the reason most of us in The West do not get all that upset about Aminspoiltation is because we don't really relate to it in the same way we do the reign of Hitler. In fact, we don't really relate to anything the way we do the atrocities of Hitler. Stalin may have killed more, Mao may have starved and murdered millions of his own people, but their epic cruelty still seems to pale in comparison. With Amin, we as a nation simply don't know that much about Africa, so atrocities there - especially ones so ridiculously flamboyant as cannibalism by a major head of state - seem alien and unreal. Why these other bastards get such an easy ride from history is beyond me. But I guess I'm not here to critique history or our inconsistent worldview of genocidal madmen.

Joseph Olita plays Amin, and if nothing else, he certainly looks the part. Difficult at times to understand, he performs with an uneven skill, giving us an Amin that is equal parts big bully, big silly, and big crybaby. That's how he was, of course, but the movie does better at communicating the comedy of his personality than it does showing us the truly nightmarish aspects. Yeah, we know Amin is a murderer and one of the worst dictators of the 20th century (as opposed to the good dictators we've had?), but Olita and the film simply can't make the evil stick. You could argue that it was the whole point. After all, Amin got off more or less scot-free and lives a better life than any of us do. The evil didn't stick. I doubt that irony was what the film was aiming for, though.

It fails to make you realize that the fun-loving party animal Amin and the insane killer Amin are the same guy. As such, Amin comes off almost as comical, just a step or so shy of everything he does being accompanied by that "wah wah waaahh" type wacky music. I've no doubt that this was a big part of his personality, but the challenge for the film is in making you realize the frightening change from "nutty fat guy in Bermuda shorts" to "man responsible for 500,000 deaths," and it does not have the talent or money behind it to pull this feat off. Amin, like Hitler and countless other dictators, possessed tremendous charisma, sometimes even charm. Just witness the scenes of him shaking his booty during a street parade. What's not to love about a big, fat guy shaking his bon bon? That's comedy gold, like old men dressed in sailor boy outfits or stuffy British explorers who don't realize they're sinking in a pit of quicksand as they rattle off some boring anthropological facts.

We seldom realize that "funny" guys can commit the most evil acts in history, or that evil men can be witty and throw good parties. Witness Carrot Top, not that one would necessarily consider him a funny guy. But he's meant to be funny, and there's very little doubt in my mind that he's one of the most evil people on the planet, behind Adam Sandler and the cast and crew of 7th Heaven. And whoever thought Mary Kate and Ashley Olson needed to have their own magazine. I guess there's a lot of evil in this world, and if it seems flippant to compare the evil of Carrot Top to the evil of Idi Amin, it's only because this movie is tremendously unsuccessful at getting the horror across. The trick is that Amin's actions were insanely over the top, and as a result Olita plays the man insanely over the top. Something gets lost though. Idi Amin shouldn't seem like your wacky uncle, but he does. Heck, maybe that's why he was able to gain power. It's a duality that constantly catches us off-guard, and Amin isn't movie enough to really communicate this paradox.

Part of the problem is Olita, who delivers some lines with a run-on sentence sort of matter-of-factness that makes even the most vicious of proclamations sound funny. Sometimes, it's even hard to tell whether or not it's intentional. Near the end of the film, Amin gets angry during a conversation with an arch-bishop, and he settles the debate by shooting the guy in the head. Having heard gunshots, Amin's cronies rush in, and Olita as Amin flatly proclaims with no real emotion, "Oh no I have shot the arch bishop he made me mad what do we do?" As said by Olita, the line is pretty hilarious, conjuring up the image of an Amin who is simply horrible at faking any shock over his own heinous deeds. But again, it totally undercuts any power the assassination might have by turning it into something out of The Little Rascals. Not that Spanky ever assassinated a major head of the Catholic Church - at least not that we know of - but I'm pretty sure there was one episode where they dressed up as pirates and threw Limburger cheese at the Pope.

Other times, Olita is more successful, and ultimately, his portrayal of Amin, be it a result of intention or simple lack of talent, is one of a man completely disconnected from reality and possessed of not even the slightest notion that anything he's doing might be a tad naughty, let alone one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated upon a population of people. There is no soul searching scene, no moment of doubt where he confesses guilt for his sins. He's unrepentant to the end, and in true Magnificent Ambersons (or Homer Simpson) form, he never gets his come-uppance. I suppose that's effective, even if the comedic elements of it lessen the harshness of the blow considerably.

The history of the film is more or less accurate, beginning with Amin celebrating his newfound power by hustling ladies, killing opponents, eating some of their more vital organs, and stashing their heads in the fridge so he can crack himself up every time he sends someone in to get some ice. We see initial positive reactions to Amin from the British, French, and American delegates, which slowly begins to sour as Amin enforces his increasingly brutal vision of what Uganda should be like - which is basically one big party for him. One world government after the next eventually forsakes Uganda and their lusty, boastful leader, until only the Soviets stick around. International incidents get even worse when Amin delights over a hostage situation, which results in Israeli commandos storming the Ugandan airport and dealing some justice to the terrorists. Just like I don't want to fight Shaolin monks or angry ninjas, I'm really not looking to ever piss off the Israeli Special Forces. I don't really want to piss off the special forces of any country, but I'd rather have the special forces of, say, Samoa after me than Mossad or some other elite Israeli unit. Sure, your average Samoan could crush me like a bug and still have time to wander on down to the beach for some relaxation time, but at least I have a pretty good chance of outrunning the Samoan Special Forces.


Amin gets so bad that after a while even the Soviets don't want to stick around. Amin has to haul his fat ass out to the airport and do the whole "No, no! It was all a joke! I wasn't seriously insulting you guys. It was a joke! Hey, did you know I can take my thumb off?" Or perhaps more Amin's style would be, "Did you know I can take off the thumbs of those who oppose me?" Then he could actually deliver. Instead, what he does is a ridiculous Russian jig dance while playing the squeeze box and mangling sometraditional Russian song. If this is historical fact, then it's gotta be one of the best things an insane world leader has ever done. See, that's what I'm talking about. I hear Saddaam Hussein usefd to love to dance with the ladies and do the Saddaam Shuffle. If so, it's a damn shame he gave it up in order to pretend he was a Musilm. I know it worked out pretty well for him politically, at least until the United States blew his stuff up, but it's still a shame. Maybe we wouldn't have bombed his ass into hiding if he spent less time shooting guns into the air and more time shaking his groove thang. Look at Amin, after all. He was as bad as Saddaam, and at least Saddaam wasn't going around making threats like, "George Bush, you can bomb our cities, but one day I swear I will eat you." And that would have been a good threat, too, because being a burly Texan, George Bush probably tastes like BBQ ribs. As long as Amin kept dancing and playing the squeezebox, how could we stay mad at him?

Eventually, everything for Amin goes to hell in a hand basket, and he is forced out of the country after a failed invasion of neighboring Tanzania results in a counter-attack from the Tanzanian army and anti-Amin rebels in Uganda. Apparently, it never occurred to Idi Amin that it might be a bad idea to declare war on a well-organized and well-armed neighbor when you and your secret police have massacred the majority of your army for being uppity or smiling at the wrong time, or whatever excuse Amin and his thugs used. Haiti's Baby Doc learned a similar lesson when he was overthrown after marching some of his elite guard off a cliff to prove their loyalty. Note to crazed dictators of the world: if you used military might to rise to power, don't piss off your own military. They overthrew the last guy for you, and they'll overthrow you for the next guy. A word of advice for any aspiring dictators who may be surfing the web right now, though I'm sure if they were like Amin, they'd be spending most of their time online downloading porn.

As we know, Amin himself goes on to receive his just desserts by living a life of indulgence and luxury provided to him by our good friends in Saudi Arabia. The movie's climactic battle between the remains of Uganda's military and their pissed off neighbors and local freedom fighters seems to be where they blew most of their budget. Although brief and hardly an epic involving thousands upon thousands of troops, it's edited well enough to accomplish the illusion of being a bigger scene than it actually is. And they do blow up at least one truck.

There are dozens of powerful political roads Amin could have taken, but those are primarily turned into back story in favor of more scenes of Amin bedding some young chick or screaming to have someone killed. When historical facts are presented, they are done with decent enough accuracy, but with very little explanation. If I didn't know about the Israeli commando raid, I would have had no idea that was what was going on - partly because it just sort of happens, and partly because the Israeli commandos look like they were outfitted in the Wal-Mart Halloween aisle.

Part of the failure is in the budget. It's not easy to communicate the mass extermination of thousands when you have a cast of dozens. A really clever filmmaker could pull it off, but it doesn't happen here. Scenes of military execution and the oppression of the people carry very little gravity because there is no real emotional investment in them. It's just a montage of thugs grabbing a handful of guys and shooting them with machine guns, all set to blaring 1970s action music that only further weakens the proceedings. You can't take anything seriously set to music that sounds like it's about to herald the entrance of Huggy Bear.

There's no real exploration of underlying political events either. Sure, they are mentioned, but like everything else that doesn't involve Amin striding around in a military uniform or pair of boxer shorts, they get glossed over. We skim over the fact that the US and British governments thought at first that "this Amin guy might be alright." Sure, they didn't know he was going to be eating people and stuff, but it would still seem worth noting that the US has a bad track record when it comes to chosing which Third World leaders we're going to back. Idi Amin. Pol Pot. And those guys down in Indonesia who invaded Timor and slaughtered thousands all for the hell of it. And there's most everyone we supported in South and Central America. And of course, there's the Taliban. Like Amin, we didn't exactly support them as much as not give a rat's ass that they were riding around in a pick-up truck claiming Afghanistan was theirs.

Now, before you fire off an angry email and think I'm some knee-jerk leftist with no actual concept regarding the history of any of these relationships or the fact that those were very different times, allow me to defend myself. It has become a popular if not totally ignorant rallying cry in regards to the "War on Terrorism" to point out that The United States funded the training that eventually gave us bin-Laden and his boys. And while that may technically be true, it completely ignores the facts surrounding the situation, that what we were doing was financing rebels attempting to fend off a war of aggression on the part of the Soviet Union. Hell, back in the day, it was even noble to stick up for Afghanistan. Part of the reason even bitter enemies of the Taliban are hesitant to give up Taliban leader Mullah Omar is because, bad as he may have been in recent years, he's still something of a folk hero for having been one of the guys to stand up to the Russians.

No one could have predicted the way in which it would turn around and bite us in the ass decades later. It was a different time, and we were fighting a different war. In hindsight, we can sigh and shake our heads all we want, but the fact of the matter is that allegiances change, often drastically. Russia was our ally during the two world wars, and they ended up being one of our bitterest enemies for decades after that. Then they sort of became our friends again. China was our ally during World War II, and we followed that union up by going to war with them over Korea mere years later. Hell, we fought a war against England, and they ended up being our best friends. We dropped two A-bombs on Japan, who viciously tortured American POWs during World War II, and now we're buddies with them as well. National allegiences are fickle, often dramatically so.

Criticizing US foreign policy as a big reason so many people hate us is certainly valid, though I'm willing to bet most of the people who throw that line out can't name a US foreign policy to save their life, but this whole, "Hey, we trained the Taliban, so we deserve what we get" nonsense is just that. It betrays a complete lack of understanding regarding what was going on, that the Afghans were, during their war with the Soviets, more or less the good guys. Unless you were a Russian, I guess.
In the greater scheme of things, we had during most of the Cold War the fault of fighting Communism to the exclusion of noticing any other evil. A world leader could be a cannibalistic mass murderer and average dancer, but as long as he wasn't a Communist, we'd give him the benefit of the doubt. This was why we supported the Indonesians when they invaded Timor, which had been leaning to the left. This was why we supported Afghanistan. We got tunnel vision hard, and we're still paying the price for our obsession with fighting Communism while turning a blind eye to atrocities far worse than anything depicted in the movie White Knights.

And it's not that we exactly supported Amin. We just didn't oppose him, and more likely than not, that was probably because we simply didn't give a damn what was going on in some Central African country in the early 1970s. The US was, after all, concentrating on other matters at the time - little things like Vietnam, Cambodia, massive amounts of social upheaval, and a President who was caught being a very dishonest man. So far more likely than us giving our blessing to the Amin regime was the likelihood that we really just didn't have time to bother.

Amin: The Rise and Fall is hardly the serious piece of historical film making that the horrors perpetrated by the man demand. As exploitation, and as a cheap early 1980s action film, however, it's not bad, and you have to keep reminding yourself how terrible it all was in real life, because on screen, the nightmare of Amin's rage plays second fiddle to his silliness. While I wouldn't call this an Idi Amin comedy, it's certainly not a powerful enough film to communicate anything serious. With that in mind, it's ultimately best to dismiss any attempt at taking it seriously, and simply watch it for the goofball shock value, which it has enough of.

The direction is flat and utterly uninspired, but it gets the job done. The primary technique of filming is to set the camera up and then act out a scene in front of it with no need to move anything around. The writing can be summed up by the fact that at one point, a prisoner actually yells, "You can kill me, but you will never kill the spirit of the Ugandan people!" Do political prisoners really yell this cliche? I mean, sure it probably pretty powerful the first thousand times someone yelled it seconds before being shot by a firing squad, but it has lost a lot of its punch since then. It's only a step away from using the old, "This time, it's personal" line.

There's some bloody action, but given the subject matter, this movie is far less gory than you would probably expect. Most of the blood comes via squibs, and Amin's cannibalistic tendencies are restricted to one scene where it looks like he slices a pre-cooked piece of roast beef off someone. All in all, it's just inept enough to be interesting, and if nothing else, it maintains a fast pace, skipping gleefully from one insanity to the next. This never gives you any time to dwell on the evil, but it also never gives you any time to lose interest. In the end, you simply have to ask yourself if you're the type of person who can watch a stupid movie about a cannibalistic military dictator and not take it as something overly serious. The real-life Idi Amin was a nightmare. This film about him, disturbingly enough, is bad and exploitive enough to just sort of be goofy.

If you are that type of person, then Amin: The Rise and Fall is a decent enough action exploitation flick. It's not nearly as mean-spirited as it could have been, nor is it nearly as respectable as it probably hoped to be. There's a smattering of history, a smattering of exploitation, and when you mix that all together, it's not a bad film even if it's not entirely successful. I wonder if Idi Amin has ever seen it. I bet he'd actually think it was pretty good.

Labels: Action: War, Year: 1982