Key Takeaways

  • John De Hart wrote, directed, starred in, and sang for a movie where 12 of 90 minutes are sex scenes set to his own songs
  • A supporting character drinks bleach to escape prison and apparently starts a cult — all after losing his badge in minute five
  • The "Shimmy Slide" musical number features Hart stiff on painkillers, looking like he's performing at gunpoint
  • Champagne and Bullets sits comfortably alongside The Room and Troll 2 as outsider cinema where ambition obliterates competence

Champagne and Bullets belongs on the Mount Rushmore of bad movies. Not as a guilty pleasure. Not as a so-bad-it's-good curiosity. As a monument to what happens when a single human being decides he is the entire film industry and nobody stops him.

John De Hart is the writer, director, and star. He plays Rick Bode, a cop who loses his badge five minutes in. He also performs "The Shimmy Slide," a country-rocker musical number staged in a bar where Hart — reportedly pumped full of painkillers after throwing out his back — stands stiff as a fence post, eyes darting around the room like a hostage reading a ransom note. The song is cringeworthy. The performance is lifeless. And somehow this isn't the most awkward scene in the movie.

The character dynamics mirror The Room's alien logic. Bode's partner Huck Finney suffers an alarmingly quick mental collapse after the badge loss and a divorce revelation. He fires a handgun through his mail. He drinks bleach to get out of prison. He seemingly starts a cult. The movie treats this as narrative connective tissue rather than a scream for help.

Meanwhile a satanic coven reenters the picture. Bode's old girlfriend Cindy flees them because they "sacrificed a human baby." That phrase lands with zero weight. The film drops it like a grocery list item and moves on. The coven vanishes. The baby stays sacrificed. The plot shrugs.

For an action movie, Champagne and Bullets has remarkably little action. Fight scenes arrive rarely and with the conviction of a theme park stunt show. Hart's real interest manifests in three agonizingly long sex scenes with costar Pamela Bryant. All set to songs Hart sings. Twelve minutes of a ninety-minute runtime. One jacuzzi scene reportedly drove Hart's real-life girlfriend to break up with him. Another scene — not involving Hart and Bryant — depicts a sexual assault. The movie doesn't earn that image. It just uses it.

If you catalog bad cinema, if you chase the podcast How Did This Get Made, you owe yourself this viewing. Champagne and Bullets streams on Hoopla, Amazon Prime, and Tubi. Watch it once. You won't forget it.

The Mount Rushmore comparison isn't hyperbole. The Room, Troll 2, Fateful Findings — these films share a DNA. Ambition so vastly outstrips resources, ability, and self-awareness that the result transcends failure. It becomes artifact. Hart didn't make a good movie. He made a document of a mind that refuses to recognize its own limits. That document is more honest, more revealing, and strangely more entertaining than a thousand competent mediocrities.