Expect the unexpectable
A review requested by STinG, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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The reputation of Who Killed Captain Alex? unquestionably precedes it. The short version of the story behind what bills itself (I have no idea upon what authority) as the first action movie ever made in Uganda is that a group of buddies, under the general guidance of Nabwana I.G.G., had a fun time in January 2010 goofing around in front of a camera until they had a movie's worth of footage, produced at a cost of not more than 200 U.S. dollars (and maybe as little as $85). Nabwana then edited the material into a 67-minute cut, on rebuilt computers, and sold the film on DVD around town. He also uploaded the trailer to YouTube, which is where the film's legend leaves Uganda and becomes part of the shared cultural legacy of humanity. Becuase it was a massive viral success, leading to the film itself being made available in 2015, whereupon it became an object of intense fascination for the kind of non-Ugandan viewer for whom ineffable little quasi-cinematic curious of the "so bad it's a transcendent religious experience" variety are an important part of their film diet. Not least because in preparation for what the film's debut to a baffled but admiring Western audience, Nabwana had a special soundtrack prepared. He was in the habit already of offering commentary tracks on his films (Who Killed Captain Alex? was not his first, and not remotely his last), provided by "Video Jokers", who appear to be some ineffable combination of the Japanese benshi and the heckling robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000: the VJ would explain things, make fun of things, provide sound effects, God knows what. For Who Killed Captain Alex, Nabwana had a certain VJ Emmie provide the commentary specifically for an English-speaking audience (the film itself was in Luganda). And if the remarkable sight of the no-budget footage of a full-scale action epic wasn't enough, the fact that it was all set to the seemingly non-sequitur joking of the incredibly energetic VJ Emmie certainly was enough to turn this into a "you MUST see this incredible object" proposition for the right kind of weird cinephile around the globe.
I confess that I resisted the tug of Who Killed Captain Alex? for some time, and would have continued to were it not for the intervention of longtime friend of Alternate Ending (and Antagony & Ecstasy before that) STinG. It all seemed, shall we say, not-not racist, a bunch of Westerners gawking and hooting and hollering at these Ugandan weirdos who tried to make an action picture for pennies, and the fact that it was always couched as "so bad it's good" experience wasn't much of a comfort. Of course it's bad. I cannot comprehend the possibility that a movie made for between $85 and $200 might not be bad, regardless of the talent or enthusiasm of the people who made it. Laughing at a $200 movie for being bad just felt absurdly cruel.
Having now seen the film - twice, in fact, once with VJ Emmie and once without - I think there's probably still some First World snobbery involved for some of the people who've made Who Killed Captain Alex? into a cult object, and just because Nabwana is obviously in on the joke doesn't really make those people right. But the flipside is that trying to pin this down simply as a run of the mill "so bad it's good" cheapie really doesn't come anywhere close to explaining the remarkable feeling that comes from watching it. Even "outsider art" isn't quite there, though it probably gets closer - it is, at any rate, more generous.
What's peculiar and marvelous and wondrous about it is that everybody seems to be taking it deadly serious - having a blast, after all they're making a movie you guys!, but there's no sense in which any of Nabwana's collaborators are treating this as just some goofy lark that they can smirk their way through. Generally, whenever you see one of these "the cast is packed with the director and producer's friends and family" type movies, there's always that one (or ten) cast member who through some combination of poor discipline, smug attitude, and mere incompetence, just cannot keep it together on camera; they deliver their dialogue with a kind of REALLY over EMPHasised cadence and flat, over-studied hyper-awareness of their lines; they don't have the first clue what to do with their face and hands when they're not the one speaking; they just seem kind of glassy and charmlessly insincere. I might have missed one or two people out of the remarkably large ensemble, but truly, I don't think there's a single such person to be spotted in Who Killed Captain Alex? It is remarkable how earnest everyone onscreen is - and offscreen! The hard limits of what could be done with this level of production value cannot really be ignored or overcome, and the film suffers the greater indignity of the only extant copies being DVD rips (the master videos were erased so Nabwana could fit the files of his next project, Tebaatusasula, on his rickety homebrew hard drive; adding insult to injury, a power surge killed that drive before Tebaatusasula was completed, and thus it has been lost to history), so the film is doomed to an eternity at 480i. But even with those incredible limits placed on it, Who Killed Captain Alex? has some genuinely interesting shots; Nabwana (who was also the cinematographer) had at the time a more theoretical than practical idea of what movies were supposed to look like, but he had terrific intuition, relying on a lot of close shots to escalate tension by restraining our field of vision. There is also a persistent use of low camera heights that give the film a sense of crouched, wary movement, like we're right in there with Captain Alex (Kakule William) and his soldiers as they dart around, trying to infiltrate the lair of the Tiger Mafia, controlled by the nefarious Richard (Sseruyna Ernest).
The film that arises from all of this is a pretty straightforward tale of vengeance begetting vengeance: Alex captures Richard's brother, in a successful raid on the Tiger Mafia compound (apparently an abandoned warehouse somewhere in Wakaliga, the poor neighborhood in Kampala where Nabwana's film company is based), and Richard responds by sending an assassin to kill Alex, although something goes awry, and while the cop does indeed end up dead, nobody in Richard's organisation seems to know - wait for it - who killed Captain Alex. And this is the point where we meet Bruce U (Bukenya Charles), Alex's brother, and a skilled martial artist, who comes to town to avenge the murder and investigate the mystery himself. And along the way, to stop Richard's reign of terror once and for all. It proceeds with great haste, and a decent amount of self-awareness about that fact: the opening scene finds Alex huffily declaring in the middle of a conversation that he can't keep standing around talking to reporters, he has to go right now and stop the Tiger Mafia. It's not quite fair to say that it's non-stop action; there are plenty of moments that slow down to let us see everyone in various stages of confusion and panic (another seemingly intuitive skill that Nabwana has: the pacing is remarkably well-controlled and quite varied for something so short). But it is something of a distillation of all the stuff and nonsense that goes into an action movie, in both American and Hong Kong flavors, at least: it's kind of a "good stuff only" race through the material of the plot.
And this gets us back to the baseline of enthusiasm that courses throughout the film: there's a real sens of delight in the mere fact of making a movie that the filmmakers are almost visibly trying to share with us. Maybe not even "almost" - the opening studio logo for Wakaliwood, Nabwana's distribution company (as distinct from Ramon Film Productions, which is his production company), is a somewhat jaw droppingly bad-looking animation of a photograph of a helicopter speeding down the streets of a city, with a man hanging from it; this then cuts to show that man hanging on a rope in front of a green screen barely larger than he he is that has been tied to a brick wall. And so in one gesture, we get two things: first, a sense of how low-rent and ad hoc the production conditions are, and how damned proud Nabwana and company are of those conditions, and how eager they are to let us know about them.
That eagerness is all over VJ Emmie's narration: he frequently spouts variations on "this is how we do it in Uganda!", a propos of nothing, in between all of his jokes, lines of dialogue, and general comic bits. And while this never really tells us anything about Who Killed Captain Alex?, it is hard not to be swept up in Emmie's joyful pride in the industry he's part of. For that matter, it's worth pointing out that the experience of watching the film with VJ Emmie is extraordinarily different than watching it in subtitled Lugandan. Watching it just as a movie, and it frankly feels like a movie; a cheap one, but a happy and enjoyable one, fearless in trying to blow us away with about ten cents' worth of visual effects. Watching it with the VJ's running commentary is, by comparison, almost indescribably surreal - he talks virtually non-stop, and his commentary is very often not strictly germane to the content at all. It's practically an entirely separate movie laid atop the movie, as Emmie switches from stand-up comedian to spokesman for the Uganda tourism board to carnival barker, loudly insisting on what a wonderfully fun time we're having watching Who Killed Captain Alex? It's infectious enthusiasm and frankly very tiring, even with just 67 minutes. But the beauty of the film is that it's so incredibly short that one might as well watch it twice - it's a pretty delightful experience both ways, and such a substantially different experience, tonally and energetically, that it's fresh both times.
As to the last question: is this "so bad it's good?" In truth, parts of it are indeed. No matter how much ingenious filmmaking Nabwana pulls out, there are still places where the budget insists upon itself, and the overlaid blood splatters and explosions feel so shockingly detached from the live action footage that it almost seems like a dream. There's very little control over it: so, for example, Richard knocks over a TV with a tire iron or golf club or the like, and it explodes in a puff of digital smoke that completely covers the bottom third of the screen. Later, a flashback to Richard threatening one of his wives, Ritah (Nakyambadde Prossy), is framed by a heart-shaped iris, as though what we're watching is meant to be sweet rather than horrifying. The opening and closing credits are marred by the tackiest of text animations.
And there's no denying that the soundtrack is pretty incredibly bad, almost as surreal in its own right as VJ Emmie's narration. Most notably, there's an instrumental cover of Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" that keeps showing up, performed on what sounds like digital pan pipes. There's also a cover of ABBA's "Mamma Mia" that only shows up once (and is sadly not on not pan pipes), but that moment is so baffling that it counts for a lot. Even the rest of the score is pretty silly-sounding, in the way that only something obviously performed on a digital keyboard can sound.
But it's forgivable. Maybe not "Kiss from a Rose". But come one, this was made for pocket change and prayer, and they figured out a way to have multiple gory gun battles and a helicopter attack scene with explosions. And unlike similar "outsider" films driven by a constant sense of "wouldn't it be cool, IF..." (I am thinking especially of something like the adorably hapless Miami Connection), there's actually, like, a movie inside of this. Nabwana has a sense of rhythm, shot composition, and story structure that are far beyond the silly gaudiness of this film's microscopic production. So is it so bad it's good? Is it so good it's good? I don't have the damnedest idea, really, but I do know that I've never seen a "fucking around with a camera" movie that has a tenth of this film's sprawling ambition, and it never seems to think of itself as having any ambition at all - it's just going for it, without a moment of doubt that it might not be able to get there.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
The reputation of Who Killed Captain Alex? unquestionably precedes it. The short version of the story behind what bills itself (I have no idea upon what authority) as the first action movie ever made in Uganda is that a group of buddies, under the general guidance of Nabwana I.G.G., had a fun time in January 2010 goofing around in front of a camera until they had a movie's worth of footage, produced at a cost of not more than 200 U.S. dollars (and maybe as little as $85). Nabwana then edited the material into a 67-minute cut, on rebuilt computers, and sold the film on DVD around town. He also uploaded the trailer to YouTube, which is where the film's legend leaves Uganda and becomes part of the shared cultural legacy of humanity. Becuase it was a massive viral success, leading to the film itself being made available in 2015, whereupon it became an object of intense fascination for the kind of non-Ugandan viewer for whom ineffable little quasi-cinematic curious of the "so bad it's a transcendent religious experience" variety are an important part of their film diet. Not least because in preparation for what the film's debut to a baffled but admiring Western audience, Nabwana had a special soundtrack prepared. He was in the habit already of offering commentary tracks on his films (Who Killed Captain Alex? was not his first, and not remotely his last), provided by "Video Jokers", who appear to be some ineffable combination of the Japanese benshi and the heckling robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000: the VJ would explain things, make fun of things, provide sound effects, God knows what. For Who Killed Captain Alex, Nabwana had a certain VJ Emmie provide the commentary specifically for an English-speaking audience (the film itself was in Luganda). And if the remarkable sight of the no-budget footage of a full-scale action epic wasn't enough, the fact that it was all set to the seemingly non-sequitur joking of the incredibly energetic VJ Emmie certainly was enough to turn this into a "you MUST see this incredible object" proposition for the right kind of weird cinephile around the globe.
I confess that I resisted the tug of Who Killed Captain Alex? for some time, and would have continued to were it not for the intervention of longtime friend of Alternate Ending (and Antagony & Ecstasy before that) STinG. It all seemed, shall we say, not-not racist, a bunch of Westerners gawking and hooting and hollering at these Ugandan weirdos who tried to make an action picture for pennies, and the fact that it was always couched as "so bad it's good" experience wasn't much of a comfort. Of course it's bad. I cannot comprehend the possibility that a movie made for between $85 and $200 might not be bad, regardless of the talent or enthusiasm of the people who made it. Laughing at a $200 movie for being bad just felt absurdly cruel.
Having now seen the film - twice, in fact, once with VJ Emmie and once without - I think there's probably still some First World snobbery involved for some of the people who've made Who Killed Captain Alex? into a cult object, and just because Nabwana is obviously in on the joke doesn't really make those people right. But the flipside is that trying to pin this down simply as a run of the mill "so bad it's good" cheapie really doesn't come anywhere close to explaining the remarkable feeling that comes from watching it. Even "outsider art" isn't quite there, though it probably gets closer - it is, at any rate, more generous.
What's peculiar and marvelous and wondrous about it is that everybody seems to be taking it deadly serious - having a blast, after all they're making a movie you guys!, but there's no sense in which any of Nabwana's collaborators are treating this as just some goofy lark that they can smirk their way through. Generally, whenever you see one of these "the cast is packed with the director and producer's friends and family" type movies, there's always that one (or ten) cast member who through some combination of poor discipline, smug attitude, and mere incompetence, just cannot keep it together on camera; they deliver their dialogue with a kind of REALLY over EMPHasised cadence and flat, over-studied hyper-awareness of their lines; they don't have the first clue what to do with their face and hands when they're not the one speaking; they just seem kind of glassy and charmlessly insincere. I might have missed one or two people out of the remarkably large ensemble, but truly, I don't think there's a single such person to be spotted in Who Killed Captain Alex? It is remarkable how earnest everyone onscreen is - and offscreen! The hard limits of what could be done with this level of production value cannot really be ignored or overcome, and the film suffers the greater indignity of the only extant copies being DVD rips (the master videos were erased so Nabwana could fit the files of his next project, Tebaatusasula, on his rickety homebrew hard drive; adding insult to injury, a power surge killed that drive before Tebaatusasula was completed, and thus it has been lost to history), so the film is doomed to an eternity at 480i. But even with those incredible limits placed on it, Who Killed Captain Alex? has some genuinely interesting shots; Nabwana (who was also the cinematographer) had at the time a more theoretical than practical idea of what movies were supposed to look like, but he had terrific intuition, relying on a lot of close shots to escalate tension by restraining our field of vision. There is also a persistent use of low camera heights that give the film a sense of crouched, wary movement, like we're right in there with Captain Alex (Kakule William) and his soldiers as they dart around, trying to infiltrate the lair of the Tiger Mafia, controlled by the nefarious Richard (Sseruyna Ernest).
The film that arises from all of this is a pretty straightforward tale of vengeance begetting vengeance: Alex captures Richard's brother, in a successful raid on the Tiger Mafia compound (apparently an abandoned warehouse somewhere in Wakaliga, the poor neighborhood in Kampala where Nabwana's film company is based), and Richard responds by sending an assassin to kill Alex, although something goes awry, and while the cop does indeed end up dead, nobody in Richard's organisation seems to know - wait for it - who killed Captain Alex. And this is the point where we meet Bruce U (Bukenya Charles), Alex's brother, and a skilled martial artist, who comes to town to avenge the murder and investigate the mystery himself. And along the way, to stop Richard's reign of terror once and for all. It proceeds with great haste, and a decent amount of self-awareness about that fact: the opening scene finds Alex huffily declaring in the middle of a conversation that he can't keep standing around talking to reporters, he has to go right now and stop the Tiger Mafia. It's not quite fair to say that it's non-stop action; there are plenty of moments that slow down to let us see everyone in various stages of confusion and panic (another seemingly intuitive skill that Nabwana has: the pacing is remarkably well-controlled and quite varied for something so short). But it is something of a distillation of all the stuff and nonsense that goes into an action movie, in both American and Hong Kong flavors, at least: it's kind of a "good stuff only" race through the material of the plot.
And this gets us back to the baseline of enthusiasm that courses throughout the film: there's a real sens of delight in the mere fact of making a movie that the filmmakers are almost visibly trying to share with us. Maybe not even "almost" - the opening studio logo for Wakaliwood, Nabwana's distribution company (as distinct from Ramon Film Productions, which is his production company), is a somewhat jaw droppingly bad-looking animation of a photograph of a helicopter speeding down the streets of a city, with a man hanging from it; this then cuts to show that man hanging on a rope in front of a green screen barely larger than he he is that has been tied to a brick wall. And so in one gesture, we get two things: first, a sense of how low-rent and ad hoc the production conditions are, and how damned proud Nabwana and company are of those conditions, and how eager they are to let us know about them.
That eagerness is all over VJ Emmie's narration: he frequently spouts variations on "this is how we do it in Uganda!", a propos of nothing, in between all of his jokes, lines of dialogue, and general comic bits. And while this never really tells us anything about Who Killed Captain Alex?, it is hard not to be swept up in Emmie's joyful pride in the industry he's part of. For that matter, it's worth pointing out that the experience of watching the film with VJ Emmie is extraordinarily different than watching it in subtitled Lugandan. Watching it just as a movie, and it frankly feels like a movie; a cheap one, but a happy and enjoyable one, fearless in trying to blow us away with about ten cents' worth of visual effects. Watching it with the VJ's running commentary is, by comparison, almost indescribably surreal - he talks virtually non-stop, and his commentary is very often not strictly germane to the content at all. It's practically an entirely separate movie laid atop the movie, as Emmie switches from stand-up comedian to spokesman for the Uganda tourism board to carnival barker, loudly insisting on what a wonderfully fun time we're having watching Who Killed Captain Alex? It's infectious enthusiasm and frankly very tiring, even with just 67 minutes. But the beauty of the film is that it's so incredibly short that one might as well watch it twice - it's a pretty delightful experience both ways, and such a substantially different experience, tonally and energetically, that it's fresh both times.
As to the last question: is this "so bad it's good?" In truth, parts of it are indeed. No matter how much ingenious filmmaking Nabwana pulls out, there are still places where the budget insists upon itself, and the overlaid blood splatters and explosions feel so shockingly detached from the live action footage that it almost seems like a dream. There's very little control over it: so, for example, Richard knocks over a TV with a tire iron or golf club or the like, and it explodes in a puff of digital smoke that completely covers the bottom third of the screen. Later, a flashback to Richard threatening one of his wives, Ritah (Nakyambadde Prossy), is framed by a heart-shaped iris, as though what we're watching is meant to be sweet rather than horrifying. The opening and closing credits are marred by the tackiest of text animations.
And there's no denying that the soundtrack is pretty incredibly bad, almost as surreal in its own right as VJ Emmie's narration. Most notably, there's an instrumental cover of Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" that keeps showing up, performed on what sounds like digital pan pipes. There's also a cover of ABBA's "Mamma Mia" that only shows up once (and is sadly not on not pan pipes), but that moment is so baffling that it counts for a lot. Even the rest of the score is pretty silly-sounding, in the way that only something obviously performed on a digital keyboard can sound.
But it's forgivable. Maybe not "Kiss from a Rose". But come one, this was made for pocket change and prayer, and they figured out a way to have multiple gory gun battles and a helicopter attack scene with explosions. And unlike similar "outsider" films driven by a constant sense of "wouldn't it be cool, IF..." (I am thinking especially of something like the adorably hapless Miami Connection), there's actually, like, a movie inside of this. Nabwana has a sense of rhythm, shot composition, and story structure that are far beyond the silly gaudiness of this film's microscopic production. So is it so bad it's good? Is it so good it's good? I don't have the damnedest idea, really, but I do know that I've never seen a "fucking around with a camera" movie that has a tenth of this film's sprawling ambition, and it never seems to think of itself as having any ambition at all - it's just going for it, without a moment of doubt that it might not be able to get there.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
