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Heed my warning: No matter where you land on the political spectrum, do not watch Underdoges: A Pro-Donald Trump Political Comedy Film. You know how old maps used to warn you about the monsters you might encounter if you ventured into uncharted territory? Reader, I have stumbled upon a monster.
Remember when “Hillary’s private e-mail server” got all that coverage?
Let me back up. Amazon Prime’s instant video service is padded out with weird junk you’ve never heard of, and which it’s hard to imagine anyone ever choosing to watch. But I try to keep an eye on this section—both because you’ll occasionally discover a genuine diamond in the rough, and, more often, because you’ll routinely discover some of the craziest shit you’ve ever seen. And that’s how I found Underdoges, which offers this gem of a synopsis:
"SMART PEOPLE LOVE THIS COMEDY," says the single pull-quote on the poster, awarding the movie four stars. The quote is not attributed to anyone, so I’m assuming it’s an endorsement from the movie’s own writer/director/star, Junson Chan.
I’m hardly the first person to note that there’s a weird dearth of right-wing comedy—an untapped market that could, conceivably, be insanely lucrative if someone found the right way to do it. Out of professional obligation and morbid curiosity, I’ve sought out pretty much every failed attempt to launch a conservative comedy. I’ve seen An American Carol. I’ve seen The 1/2 Hour News Hour. How could I resist sampling this "pro-Donald Trump political comedy film" for myself?
Do not make the same mistake I did. I might say Underdoges is the worst movie I’ve ever seen—but that would require stretching the traditional definition of "movie." Does a movie require a plot? A lineup of characters that isn’t just replaced with a lineup of new characters whenever an actor drops out? A runtime that’s longer than 77 minutes? (To be fair, a more accurate runtime for Underdoges would be "endless.")
We are introduced to Kevin (Chan)—the ostensible hero (and the titular underdoge, I guess?)—as he sits in front of his laptop and jacks off to porn. He’s cranking it through a paper towel with a hole in it, for reasons I don’t really understand and would prefer not to think about. The movie thinks this joke is funny enough to repeat it more or less verbatim about 20 minutes later.
Joshua, Kevin’s roommate, walks in on this particularly grim tableaux. Joshua deals drugs to Hollywood filmmakers who travel the "cocaine festival circuit." Joshua is also a Bitcoin enthusiast, which he describes as "the new money that’s been around for years now." This is easily the funniest line in the entire movie, and is clearly not intended as a joke.
After a title card that says Kevin is "communiting" to work—Underdoges is entirely devoid of more natural scene transitions, like a person walking down the street or getting on a train or whatever—Kevin arrives at his job: standing in a park and holding an anti-IRS sign for his boss, a tax lawyer. Kevin and his boss get into a shouting match, and Kevin quits. In what quickly becomes a pattern for Underdoges, this boss is never seen or mentioned again—presumably because Underdoges couldn’t find a consistent stable of actors who would commit to a role for the duration of the shoot.
Soon after, Underdoges introduces its villain, Bobby Vandenberg, who is paying off an abortion doctor in a public park. "One, two, three, four… ten abortions today? Not bad. But business is slower than usual," Vandenberg frets. "Abortions being illegal past 20 weeks is going to kill business. I can’t believe those stupid conservatives and liberals passed a law because it’s scientifically logical. Good thing I bribed enough governors to veto it down."
In a movie full of bizarre and outlandish characters, Bobby Vandenberg is the worst of them all—a straw-man so cartoonishly evil that you’ll long for the depth and poignancy you’d find in your average Scooby-Doo villain. Many of Vandenberg’s screechy speeches devolve into misogynistic rants about women; at one point, he physically attacks a female colleague. In a later scene, he explains why he’s such a psychotic asshole in a single breathless rush: "God didn’t save my mom and dad from the car crash. And conservatives abandoned me to the church nobody donated to. Liberals stole my food stamps. And all you stupid women who play all these dating mind games."
Later on, Kevin becomes a successful Bitcoin miner, netting $20,000 per week and patching things up with his girlfriend Sarah. Vandenberg gets arrested, Kevin parties with the DEA agents who helped him, and celebrates his triumph by delivering a long, terrible, self-penned poem about the difference between being a winner and being a loser. (Everyone applauds at the end anyway, because if it’s your movie, you can make the other actors do whatever you want.)
But attempting to follow the plot of Underdoges is basically missing the point, because the screenplay is really just a Trojan horse for the mini-rants Junson Chan wants to deliver. Sometimes these rants are political, attacking the pro-choice movement or undocumented immigrants. More often, they’re stepped in various pop-cultural touchstones, making ham-handed references to Star Wars, The Dark Knight, and Pulp Fiction. And more than anything, there are a shit-ton of scenes about gamer culture, with long, pointless digressions devoted to subjects like online trolling and rage-quitting. "I just found out that booth babes are banned at all my favorite video gaming conventions," says Kevin in one of many gaming-related non-sequiturs. "Hot women were a favorite staple of my video gaming experience since I was a little kid, and other gamers feel that way too. And now it’s all going away."
Even if the script were brilliant, or the acting were Oscar-caliber, the sheer technical ineptitude of Underdoges makes it basically unwatchable. The dialogue in one outdoor scene is totally drowned out by the drone of a plane flying overhead; for whatever reason, no one involved had enough time or interest in the scene to reshoot it. And one recurring character—a brutally unfunny caricature of a burnout hippie, who delivers incomprehensible rants about Mommy Nature and her fish children—shouts his lines at such an uncomfortably loud pitch that I was worried Underdoges might blow out my speakers. ("I think George Lucas was right. The technical aspects of filmmaking are easy," says Chan in a blog post about the movie—a sentiment so obviously undercut by his own film that I briefly wondered if Underdoges was just an elaborate troll.)
The best-case scenario for this movie is probably the kind of ironic grassroots support that eventually greeted Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen. I suspect Underdoges is ultimately too dull, inept, and alienating to acquire the so-bad-it’s-good cult that keeps movies like this alive. But the qualities that make Underdoges such a bad movie also make it a fascinating test case for the lengths that viewers will go to support a movie that affirms their political beliefs. Chan complains his movie was banned "by Hollywood movie Theaters, and film festivals" because it centers on "pro-life characters that deal with illegal immigration." The reality, of course, is that no movie this incompetent—of any political persuasion—ever stood any chance at a major release.
But Underdoges has nevertheless amassed a small stable of champions. I refuse to believe anyone—conservative, liberal, or independent—could actually enjoy Underdoges. But the movie’s reviews on Amazon are basically divided down the middle, between one-star pans from liberals and five-star raves from conservatives. On both sides of the aisle, most reviewers confess that they haven’t actually watched the movie.
You might have noticed by now that nothing I’ve said about Underdoges has anything to do with Donald Trump. There's a good reason for that. An unsuccessful 2014 IndieGogo campaign billed Underdoges (originally called Losers) as a "comedy feature about Bitcoin and Dogecoin," with no reference to Trump whatsoever. In a blog post, Junson Chan explains that he retrofitted the script to include references to Trump in June 2015. This late-breaking shift to pro-Trump comedy may have been motivated by passion, or pragmatism, or both—but whatever the explanation, the few Donald Trump references in Underdoges have been awkwardly wedged into a story that obviously wasn’t designed to include them.
So what does this movie have to say about Donald Trump? An early scene—clearly filmed later and cut into the film’s introduction to ensure that Underdoges would live up to the pro-Donald Trump branding—finds Kevin addressing the camera and heralding "the great Trump-ening" to come. Much later, when a character expresses concern that Trump might start World War III, Kevin launches into a lengthy defense: "I think he’ll do great. He’s a world-class businessman, and he built himself an incredible company, and his buildings are all over the world. It’s hard for him to collect fat rent checks if bombs are going off all over the place."
And then there are the closing credits, which are played over a supercut of quotes from Trump’s various stump speeches. Underdoges ends with this dedication, which doubles as a threat:
And whatever else you can say about Underdoges, Junson Chan clearly was dedicated to this peculiar passion project. He spent years of his life making it, and shrugged off failures—like, say, making $32 in a crowd-funding campaign seeking $107,000—that might have dissuaded other would-be filmmakers from pursuing a project any further. He funded the movie himself. He is credited with eight separate jobs on Underdoges: Director, actor, writer, cinematographer, casting director, editor, producer, and sound department.
Despite that overwhelming roster of roles, I’d argue that Chan omitted the role that ultimately proves his greatest talent: marketing. When his pitch for a pro-Bitcoin comedy failed to light the internet on fire, Chan belatedly rebranded his movie as a "pro-Donald Trump" comedy. It’s a provocative, curiosity-baiting idea designed to separate Underdoges from the thousands of god-awful movies that remain buried in the all-but-ignored corners of Amazon’s streaming service—and here I am, like the Ancient Mariner, sharing this dark story with anyone who will listen. So who got the last laugh here? Because it certainly wasn’t me.
