It is a rare signifier of the kind of incompetence, stupidity and supreme callousness of a hack director like the infamous Uwe Boll that he is capable of starting a film attempting to make a joke out of 9/11, and still manages to spiral downwards from then on into the bowels of cinematic hell. The poster offers the the sentiment that Postal is a “live action South Park“, in which respect I humbly beg to differ. South Park is vulgar, course and often obscene, but never simply for its own sake. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut was packed to the brim with cursing, violence and toilet humour, but its core message was that censorship of language is absurd when censorship of other things, in this case violence, is so lax. It’s definitely not out of the norm, especially more recently, for South Park to get downright preachy about whatever message they mean to convey. Not so with Postal. This is vulgarity for its own sake. I question who this film was marketed to, as the humour is too infantile for anyone over the age of 13 to enjoy and even a hyperactive prepubescent with a penchant for indiscriminate violence would quickly tire of the inanity on-screen.

This feels less like a film and more like a series of crude non-sequiturs, but I’ll do my best to try and weave them into something resembling a narrative. We begin in Paradise Winds trailer park, where we meet our pasty and unoriginally-named protagonist Postal Dude (Zack Ward), living in a caravan with his hideous beast of a girlfriend. Within literally one minute of being on-screen, he has already vomited up curdled milk and stepped in dog faeces. Needless to say, my expectations are plummeting with every passing minute, even from the subterranean level that they began. The appearance of J.K. Simmons as a local politician spouting conspiracy theorist nonsense on a street corner certainly doesn’t help, and it’s almost a relief when he is killed by a suicide bomber. While Postal Dude attends a job interview, local cult whacko Uncle Dave (Dave Foley) is busy sleeping his way through every credulous young woman in town, when his dogsbody Ritchie (Christ Coppola) informs him that the I.R.S. have been causing problems, and they now owe the tidy sum $1,300,00.75. This largely seems like an excuse to have nudity, just to draw in those teenage crowds, and later to have women in bikinis with Hitler moustaches. Boll’s psyche is clearly damaged beyond repair. And in a third pointless plot-line, the local Taliban fan club (including a hiding and American-accented Osama “Sammy” bin Laden, portrayed by an admittedly quite funny Larry Thomas) are awaiting a shipment of dolls that they hope to infect with avian flu to cull the child population of America. And fourthly, the local police are busy brutally murdering innocent people for no apparent reason. Finally plots begin to converge as Postal Dude goes to Uncle Dave and hatches a plan to hijack the same dolls that the terrorists are waiting for, but not before going to the welfare office to witness the most boring and superfluous shoot-out in cinematic history. These dolls are so sought-after that they are selling for $4,000, and should take care of both Postal Dude and Uncle Dave’s money troubles.

While they formulate their plan to steal the dolls from a Nazi-themed amusement park, the terrorists plan their own heist. There’s a brief interlude with a conversation between Osama and George W. Bush, who is played by possibly the worst impersonator I’ve ever seen (Brent Mendenhall) and which serves no purpose. The theme park is run by Uwe Boll himself, acting as a Nazi sympathiser, a paedophile and a terrible actor, and I cannot tell you how gratifying it is when he is choked by the original creator of the Postal video game, and later shot in the crotch during the gunfight between the cultists, the terrorists and the police. Postal Dude and Uncle Dave escape, only to find the cult HQ taken over by terrorists but they manage to make their way into a bomb shelter beneath it. But Ritchie decides to go insane and bring about the Apocalypse by having Verne Troyer raped by a thousand monkeys. I could point out that the poorly-animated chimpanzees featured in the movie are not monkeys, but that’s the least of its problems. Ritchie shoots Uncle Dave and Postal Dude escapes heavily armed to take revenge. And the rest of the film features the Postal Dude shooting anything that moves, people yelling and nothing of any interest happening. Postal Dude hooks up with the coffee shop girl Faith (Jackie Tohn), and he lives happily ever after, before dying in an atomic attack by China. But no-one viewing the movie will feel happy ever again without considerable psychiatric help, and the living will envy the dead.

Nazis, terrorists, stolen lines, gratuitous violence, ill-informed “satire”, child death, pointless drug references, toilet humour, crummy C.G.I., there’s no end to the ways in which this film shoots for “edgy”, but falls short and only hits “pathetic”. The acting is unconvincing, the music is dreadful, and the narrative moves along with no unity of style and feels engorged by countless pointless scenes. It’s an attempt to be shocking that falls completely and utterly flat, simply because the shocks are unconvincing, and it’s never actually offensive enough (with the exception of the opening sequence) to merit the energy it would take to condemn it. A tad hypocritical, since that’s what I’ve spent the last few hundred words doing, but I felt a public service to the people – don’t watch this film. Not because it’s offensive, gory or damaging, but because it’s an insult to the intelligence of every single viewer and, indeed, humanity as a species.