Pass the Ammo Reviews

Set in rural Arkansas, PASS THE AMMO takes aim at a lucrative teleministry run by the greedy husband-and-wife preaching team of Ray and Darla Porter (Tim Curry and Annie Potts). Angry that Porter has conned the $50,000 life savings out of his girl friend's dying grandmother, a young redneck, Jesse (Bill Paxton), leads his girl friend and two ex-cons to invade Porter's fortresslike "Tower of Bethlehem" and rob the vault of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finding themselves surrounded by police, Jesse's gang gets into the television station and on live TV begins blowing holes in Porter's hypocritical persona, telling the audience about his Rolls-Royces and ritzy summer homes. With a gang of angry vigilantes at the back door and a National Guard tank at the front, all hell breaks loose in the studio. A fairly vicious satire with more than its share of hearty laughs, PASS THE AMMO also suffers from a haphazard script that gets the outlaws on the air but then doesn't know what to do with them. Curry is excellent as the cynical preacher; also very funny is Potts, whose character is a direct parody of Tammy Faye Bakker. But once director David Beaird has run through the hilarious litany of accusations against television preachers, the film disintegrates into a show of pyrotechnics.