Seth Grahame-Smith‘s historical mashup genre meets Troma attitude and expertise in Garrett Brawith‘s FDR: American Badass — ostensibly a feature looking for a distributor but you never know. It could just be a glorified trailer. Clearly funded with a debit card, this is going to make Timur Bekmambetov‘s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer (20th Century Fox, 6.22, budgeted at $70 million) look masterful, and Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson…forget it.

There’s probably not much difference, tonally-speaking, between Barry Bostwick‘s Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Brad Pitt‘s Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds. Flagrant caricature can work for a trailer, but it’s always hard to take over 90 or 100 minutes if every character in the film is doing this. Ludicrous material has to be played straight or you’re dead. Look at John Landis‘s Schlock, a gorilla-on-the-loose comedy that’s clever and amusing because Landis (who directed and starred) did everything he could to not “announce” that he was spoofing. He directed the actors like they were in something written by Hecht and MacArthur.

The costars are Lin Shaye (Bob’s younger sister), Bruce McGill, Ray Wise (“Shut the fuck up, Einstein!”), Kevin Sorbo and William Mapother.