Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010, Nabwana I.G.G.) (Patreon)

46/100

Ultra-micro-budget Ugandan cinema had escaped my notice until now, as I've never really been a so-bad-it's-good guy. (Didn't get to The Room until 2021, and then only because I wanted to catch up with The Disaster Artist.) Dunno how representative Captain Alex is, but it lands squarely in between flagrant Birdemic-style cheesiness, which holds little appeal for me, and the sort of charmingly scrappy enthusiasm that produced Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Actually, what I keep thinking of during the film's surprisingly accomplished action sequences were The Fabelmans' depictions of boy Spielberg at work—Nabwana doesn't possess that degree of instinctive talent, to be sure, but a similar joy in staging physical movement definitely comes across, particularly in some dynamic camera angles. (This film features one of the best slaps to the face I've ever seen. Legitimately. "How did nobody else ever think to shoot it from there?" I wondered.) At other times, you really have to be more of a cheerful-ineptitude connoisseur than I am, relishing e.g. a TV newscaster who couldn't more evidently be someone's little sister, drafted to play the role and doing her visibly self-conscious best while looking faintly amused by the experience. I actually did smile at that particular example, but a little of such endearing clumsiness goes a long way for me. Likewise multiple shots with what I guess must be a sizable drop of water on the lens (it comes and goes throughout, as Nabwana evidently didn't shoot in sequence), preposterous digital blood spatter, forest scenes that bleed green so garishly that even I, a colorblind dude, began to comprehend the importance of color timing by dint of its absence, etc. And whereas those Mississippi teens had a classic template to duplicate, Nabwana puts no effort whatsoever into crafting his narrative. Indeed, so inconsequentially slapdash is the story that I literally did not know, when the movie ended, why it had ended, what had been resolved. (Not the mystery of who killed Captain Alex, certainly. Maybe that's revealed in the sequel.)

Obviously, all of the above constitute selling points for a certain audience, and are potentially enhanced by VJ Emmie's narration/commentary/advertisements/jokes. I did watch the Emmie version, both because it was readily available on Tubi and because, unlike the Rocky Horror simultaneous performances, it was commissioned by the director himself, as part of what seems like a fairly widespread practice in Uganda. And just as I sporadically enjoyed the film proper (mostly when characters are fighting and/or shooting, which isn't frequently enough), I likewise sporadically enjoyed VJ Emmie (mostly when he's cracking wise in MST3K fashion, which isn't frequently enough). He gets off a few hilarious lines, solemnly intoning, when a group of people are walking in slo-mo for no good reason, "They are all slow...'cause they think slow." I laughed when he assured us, during a boring stretch, that more action was imminent, and couldn't argue when a shot of numerous large birds, cranes or the like, elicited the exclamation "Dinosaurs!" Which is true, they are! There was pretty clearly no prepared script, though, and a lot of the time he's just filling dead space with generic hype about the unstoppable awesomeness of Ugandan cinema, or repeating the word "commando!" (or is it Commando?) every time we see anyone holding a gun. Who Killed Captain Alex? barely cracks an hour but felt significantly longer than that to me, and I can't honestly say that I'm now eager to watch other movies in the same "Let's just stick 'Kiss From a Rose' on top of this bit and this bit and also this whole sequence, why not, wait no not the Seal recording this other one" vein. As if often the case with these grassroots phenomena, though, it's a journey I'm happy to have taken at least once.