There’s something about a movie like The Room, Troll 2, or Fateful Findings that I find irresistible. These sorts of “so bad they’re good” films are marvelous curiosities where ambition far outstrips resources, ability, and self-awareness to become something much greater than the sum of their parts. Champagne and Bullets (also released as GetEven and Road to Revenge) is a film on par with those classics of outsider cinema.
The movie is almost entirely the work of one man, John De Hart. Hart wrote, directed, and stars as Rick Bode in the film. He even performs a musical number early in the proceedings — The bizarre “Shimmy Slide.” During the performance, Hart, who was reportedly pumped full of painkillers after throwing out his back, is stiff and looks around the room as if he’s only performing under threat of violence. And somehow, this lifeless performance of a cringy country rocker isn’t the most awkward scene in the movie.
The relationships and interactions between characters in Champagne and Bullets are just as inexplicable and unnatural as those in The Room. Bode and his partner Huck Finney are cops who lose their badges five minutes into the movie. This precipitates the alarmingly quick mental decline of Finney, who is also going through a divorce after discovering his wife has been sleeping around. He fires a handgun through his bills, drinks bleach to get out of prison, and seemingly starts a cult.
Oh, and speaking of cults, a good portion of the plot revolves around the reemergence of Bode’s old girlfriend Cindy, who is fleeing a satanic coven that “sacrificed a human baby.”
While ostensibly an action film, the fight scenes are few and far between, and staged with all the believability of a theme park stunt show. Hart seemed far more interested in cramming in as much gratuitous nudity as possible. There are three uncomfortably long sex scenes with costar Pamela Bryant, who plays Cindy, all set to songs sung by Hart. In total, they take up 12 minutes of runtime in a movie that is only 90 minutes long. One scene that takes place in a jacuzzi apparently even led Hart’s girlfriend at the time to break up with him. (Warning: One scene not involving Hart and Bryant does depict a sexual assault.)
