Uwe, brother! What's that?
Postal has a spot on many a “worst movies ever made” list. You’ll find it nuzzled up against legendary bombs Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate. And that’s unfair to Postal (and, for that matter, Plan 9 and Manos). Its director, Uwe Boll, was in the middle of a five-year run as the movie world’s preferred punching bag, churning out dogshit video game adaptations that, per a since-shuttered loophole in German tax law, paid him more the worse they performed. (He made bank.) Postal opens with a 9/11 gag (terrorists on a hijacked plane phoning Osama bin Laden mid-flight to negotiate their afterlife virgin allotment) that single-handedly tanked its theatrical release from a planned 1,500 screens down to 4 once it leaked. On paper and by reputation, especially for someone like me with little appetite for transgressive cinema, this should be the most miserable 100 minutes ever committed to film.
And yet it isn’t! It is nauseating, obnoxious… and almost fun. Bracing, even.
Watched with an open heart and a steeled stomach, though, Postal is stranger and more interesting than its reputation suggests: a baseline-competent piece of 2007 button-pushing comic violence and irreverence with a punk spirit; often misogynist, frequently racist, occasionally clever, and very much following the beat of its own drum. It is so tasteless and aims so low that I never really considered for a moment that it might actually be “Good,” at least until the no-holds-barred Dr. Strangelove finale that would make Trey Parker and Matt Stone blush, and which I genuinely admire and even love. But I also never really considered Postal a travesty against the medium of cinema that its known as. (And I’m not the only one doing some reclamation; the most common rating for the film on Letterboxd is 5 stars – that rating, of course, being as ridiculous as a claim of it being one of the worst movies ever made.)
The plot, such as it ever gels together, follows an unnamed Postal Dude (Zach Ward, looking not unlike Glen Powell) as he stumbles into a heist scheme for a shipment of penis-shaped plush toys called Krotchys. He is roped into the operation by his cult-leader Uncle Dave (Dave Foley), who is behind on his cult’s taxes and wants to sell the dolls. Meanwhile, an al-Qaeda cell is hunting the same dolls, having laced them with bird flu as a means to bring down the United States. The cell is led by Osama bin Laden himself, played as a beleaguered middle manager by Larry Thomas (better known as Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi), who makes the role as funny as possible by playing it with total restraint. We also repeatedly bump into two recurring cops whose self-interest and lack of nobility must have felt dastardly a few years after 9/11 but feels startlingly clear-eyed about institutional rot in 2026. We also get a brief plot-thread following J.K. Simmons as a filthy-mouthed streetcorner Alex Jones running for mayor.
Part of what makes Postal a charming curio rather than the all-time disaster of legend is that it is, under the hood, a functional piece of filmmaking. The cinematography has real lighting and polish and a few moments of visual ambition. The squibs are relentless and professionally rigged so that the frequent violence is a splattery delight, and the tasteless special effects are fully realized. The film’s editor, Julian Clarke, would receive an Oscar nomination two years later for District 9. And some of the gags genuinely work in an absurdist way, typically the ones that lean more deadpan: e.g. a job interview where Ward is asked nonsense questions as he gawks over a horizon of cubicles straight from The Crowd. The third act is the movie’s best: The ending is total narrative nonsense, but resolves Postal Guy’s conflict once, twice, three times – the final time with apocalypse, because what is more resolved than oblivion?
Other parts of Postal are exhausting, and several are putrid. The Postal Dude’s wife is credited solely as “Bitch” and exists solely as a fat joke punchline (and, eventually, a dismemberment punchline). The shock-comedy batting average would get the film demoted to the minors, and the racial caricature is constant low background radiation, no matter if portions of it have some wit or good delivery. By the time the climax arrives at the simulated rape of Verne Troyer by a thousand chimpanzees, even an admirer might be second guessing themselves.
Whatever Postal is, though, it is an artifact of 2007 puckishness in ways that both age it and immortalize it as a time capsule. I was a freshman in college, and I remember the mood well: Bush at historic-low approval, the post-9/11 patriotism cycle decisively soured, Colbert and South Park mandatory viewing, Team America the most essential film on the planet. Or, perhaps, I was 19, and 19-year-old boys are by default cynical about the institutions around them.
And while not all of Postal feels relevant anymore, some of it is so prescient for the Trump era that it doesn’t even seem like satire: For example, Simmons’s mayoral candidate rants about a sex-trafficking ring run by the wealthy class. Hmm. And the 9/11 punchlines, unspeakably taboo in 2007, are standard TikTok fare these days. It offers a bizarre double exposure of our shifting culture: a film once nuked from theatrical distribution for being too offensive to release, now screened in a culture that produces the same jokes daily by the dozen on your FYP. C’est la vie.
Postal is too crass and too long to recommend without significant caveats, and a fair percentage of it is just genuinely unpleasant. But it is also a Uwe Boll film that hints at a director who, in some parallel universe where he chose to follow his impish instincts over German tax loopholes and shit horror, might have grown into a real Lloyd Kaufman heir.
Watch at your own peril, but if you are of sufficiently black heart and resilient intestines, Postal might charm you.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.
One reply on “Postal (2007)”
On the one hand DANG those pretty ladies are having some fun in that headline image: on the other hand, I’m not sure this sort of thing is my cup of tea.
On the other hand Uwe Boll was pulling a Bialystok-and-Bloom all along? Holy Moley!