The 1970's were full of larger-than-life human monsters: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, etc. Their exploits seemed too sleazy to be true and tantalized public curiosity, thus inspiring exploitation film moguls to pump out grotty little exposes based on their evil deeds (Manson alone inspired an entire subgenre). Idi Amin Dada was one of the very worst - given the genocidal reach of his crimes- and, though it was late in the game, he finally received his own exploitation mini-epic with Amin: The Rise And Fall.

This film plays like a Cliff's Notes version of Ugandan history, as if it were overseen by mondo-meisters Jacopetti and Prosperi. Amin (Joseph Olita) takes over Uganda in a military coup and immediately begins indulging every demented whim he can dream up. He has dissidents and suspected traitors murdered by firing squad, tries to strong-arm other countries into supplying him with weapons or money and even bans all Asian peoples from the country. Since Amin: The Rise And Fall is an exploitation flick, we also get tabloid-worthy moments like Amin eating pieces of his enemies, bringing schoolkids into a morgue to see a dismembered corpse and him seducing (sometimes forcibly) every woman in arm's reach.

Amin: The Rise And Fall is never at a loss for morbid spectacle - there's a killing or beating literally every five minutes - but it becomes numbing after a while. Even if you are up for the film's breathlessly sleazy approach, Wade Huie's script is merely a string of vignettes of Amin committing the same basic crimes again and again. The plot is so focused on Amin's reign of terror that it forgets niceties like characterization and subplots so there is never any dramatic tension or urgency.  It also suffers from flat-footed direction by Sharad Patel, who lacks the visual flair or dark sense of humor filmmakers like Jacopetti and Prosperi might have brought to it. Worst of all, there's an abrupt non-ending, although this is sadly as much a reflection of history as it is the script's problems.

Still, Amin: The Rise And Fall offers some trashy fun for patient sleazehounds. The acting is amusingly awful across the board - this is a blessing in disguise because the movie's catalog of horrors would be tough to endure if the acting was convincing. As Amin, Joseph Olita is incapable of delivering a decent line reading but is so bombastically into his role that his badness has a perverse charm to it ('Nobody mess with me! Big daddy!').  

And though Sharad Patel's direction never rises above perfunctory quality, he maintains a breakneck pace and crams in an astonishing amount of production value (parades, huge war scenes, plenty of soldier extras) for a quickie.  Bonus points for the amusingly overemphatic score by Christopher Gunning - the orchestral bombast fits in nicely with the film's 'beat you over the head' aesthetic.