A new Champagne and Bullets review from The Verge’s Terrence O’Brien places John De Hart’s film beside The Room, Troll 2 and Fateful Findings, the familiar shelf reserved for movies whose failures become part of the attraction.
O’Brien, The Verge’s weekend editor, describes the film as a prime specimen of outsider cinema: the kind of project where the maker’s reach badly exceeds the available craft, money and self-editing. His shorthand for the experience is blunt: Steven Seagal crossed with Neil Breen. That is not a studio pitch. It is a warning label with genre credentials.
Champagne and Bullets has also circulated under the titles GetEven and Road to Revenge. The version O’Brien writes about is centered almost entirely on De Hart, who wrote the movie, directed it and stars as Rick Bode. That concentration of authorship explains a lot: the film is not just a vehicle for De Hart, it is a one-man gravity well.
What is Champagne and Bullets about?
According to O’Brien, Bode and his partner Huck Finney begin as police officers and lose their badges within the first few minutes. Finney then falls apart fast while dealing with a divorce after learning that his wife has been unfaithful.
The details O’Brien cites are not subtle. Finney shoots a handgun through his bills, drinks bleach in an attempt to avoid prison and appears to launch a cult. The plot also brings back Bode’s former girlfriend Cindy, who is running from a satanic coven that, in the movie’s account, sacrificed a baby.
The film is nominally an action movie, but O’Brien says the action itself is scarce. He characterizes the fight choreography as more theme-park demonstration than credible combat. For a movie with bullets in the title, that is a fairly efficient indictment.
Why has the Shimmy Slide scene become part of the lore?
One of the film’s stranger moments arrives early, when De Hart performs a musical number called “Shimmy Slide.” O’Brien points to that scene as emblematic of the movie’s off-kilter appeal: a country-rock performance that lands with a stiffness more associated with an emergency briefing than a nightclub act.
O’Brien also notes a reported explanation that has circulated online: De Hart was said to have been on painkillers after injuring his back. That claim comes from a Reddit discussion O’Brien links, so it should be treated as internet lore rather than production documentation.
Still, the scene matters to the film’s reputation because it shows what O’Brien sees throughout Champagne and Bullets: a project committed to its own logic even when that logic has left the building. The review frames the movie less as a conventional failure than as a highly specific artifact, made with enough sincerity and miscalculation to earn a place among cult bad-movie fixtures.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
