“Badassery is not born, but often thrust upon you.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Because tragedy plus time famously equals comedy, we can laugh along with something like FDR: American Badass!, a low-budget film built upon bad taste, but with the skills good enough to pull most of it off. “Who ordered the burnt honky with a side of polio?” is but one example of its anarchic and anachronistic sense of humor.
Appearing to have more fun onscreen than ever before (The Rocky Horror Picture Show included), Barry Bostwick tears into the role of POTUS 32 like the old pro he is, portraying the Depression-era prez as a trash-talkin’, freestylin’ blowhard who’s okay with never walking again as long as his penis still functions. His legs stop working when he contracts polio from the bite of a werewolf, naturally.
As the film posits, the werewolves (whose makeup makes them look like stand-up comedian Richard Lewis) are the doing of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a bid to rule the world, thus kick-starting World War II. The only thing standing in the pack’s way? FDR and his Einstein-pimped machine-gun wheelchair.
This hysterical historical is an extension of the literary mash-up craze that quickly infiltrated Hollywood with the likes of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. But what that megamillions project forgot is something FDR: American Badass! does not: Don’t let the humor end at your film’s title. This entry may be dirt-cheap, but good jokes cost nothing to deliver. You have nothing to fear but the fact that Ross Anderson’s script bears too many gags relying on oral sex (inching toward either homophobia or latent desire?), but blessedly more that do not. It helps that the entire supporting cast is game and without shame.
Directed by Garrett Brawith (Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury), FDR is a spirited spoof with enough LOLs to merit multiple terms of office; today, we call them “viewings.” —Rod Lott