Satire requires a deft touch, and clumsy attempts often turn out undercooked at best, toxic at worst. American Sausage Standoff falls into that latter category, as its wildly mean-spirited attempt to skewer the red-meat wedge issues of red-state America churns out an unsavory, stomach-turning experience. Despite some technical merit, the film is confounding in its comedic and tonal ineptitude, trotting out all manner of bigoted, white nationalist tropes simply to point a finger at how messed up they are without offering anything approaching an incisive rebuke. In the end, that just leaves us with some vile characters doing some vile things in a supposed offbeat comedy that elicits far more cringes than chuckles.
Originally titled Gutterbee after the name of the Podunk western town in which it’s set, this film by writer-director Ulrich Thomsen draws its conflict from the tension between a Trumpian alpha-wannabe bully and basically everyone who is different than him. The ludicrously named Jimmy Jerry Lee Jones Jr. (W. Earl Brown) patrols Gutterbee on horseback as though he is the de facto sheriff in town, despite the fact the real sheriff (Chance Kelly) is shoehorned in as our superfluous narrator. The appeal of the small, parched desert town has all but dried up, with most residents leaving for greener pastures, and this flummoxes Jimmy, who hosts and performs at a bizarre annual cabaret meant to pair off the town’s young-folk for good, old-fashioned heterosexual courtship.
Living in the shadow of his late pappy, Jimmy wants to “make Gutterbee great again” and blames the town’s dwindling population on immigrants, going so far as to kidnap, humiliate and mildly torture an elderly Asian-American man (Richard Chong, who conspicuously does not receive a credit on IMDb despite appearing in multiple scenes). So when bipolar German expat Edward (Ewen Bremner) dons his lederhosen and prepares to open up an artisanal Bavarian sausage shop in this backwater burg, Jimmy and his lackey son Hank (Joshua Harto) don’t take kindly to this culinary intrusion upon the trusty American staple of the hamburger.
Of course, we haven’t even mentioned the film’s evident protagonist, Mike (Antony Starr), and that’s because his Kurt Russell knock-off shtick ends up pretty forgettable. He’s fresh out of the clink after taking the fall for some mischief tied to Jimmy, to whom he still owes money. Now a free man, he mostly teams up with Edward in the sausage-making venture and acts as the straight-man to zany, unlikable characters who serve no narrative purpose beyond lazy caricature. Also thrown into the fetid mix is Luke (the late Clark Middleton), a charlatan preacher who holds sway over Jimmy, and Sue (Pia Mechler), a bartender with a prosthetic leg—and also the film’s only notable female character.
Ostensibly, American Sausage Standoff means to send up right-wingnuts and their fear of the Other, with plenty of scorn for evangelical hucksterism on the side. The film actually utters the words “America First” and Jimmy shambles around like an unholy amalgam of those worst xenophobic bits of American exceptionalism, insisting Jesus was white and even refusing in any way to validate his “reformed” gay son who is desperate for his father’s love. Jimmy’s eventual comeuppance is even more repulsive than the bilious hate he dishes out, but to what end? It’s as though the film attaches virtue to terrible things happening to terrible people. Admittedly, desperation and misguided vengeance are America’s meat and potatoes these days, so maybe that’s actually the lone thing this execrable failed satire gets right.
Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films
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