You know the legends… Now learn the truth.
Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) is alive, but far past his glory days, to put it mildly. He has become a bedridden old geezer, who rots away in a small nursery home somewhere in Texas, filled with bitterness, grief, lost identity, and can’t say one sentence without spewing sarcasm. To make it worse he has a cancerous growth on his willie. And how much worse can it get from here? No one thinks he’s the real Elvis. Because, hear this: Once upon a time Elvis had to retire from showbiz and pass the mic to the Elvis impersonator Sebastian Haff (Bruce Campbell again) when his hip went bye-bye. When Sebastian Haff died of an overdose, Elvis never got the chance to reclaim his identity. So here we are. Life is unfair.
The one and only who believes he’s The Elvis is none other than a senile, weird old man who claims to be John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis). And he’s.. well, uhm… black. Ok. And guess what; an ancient Egyptian Soul-sucking Mummy starts to terrorize the oldies at night who ends up dead at a high rate at the nursing home. JFK is strongly convinced that a mummy called Bubba Ho-Tep is behind all of this. Of course it is. And since Elvis hasn’t got much better to do than shuffle around with a walking chair, he teams up with JFK and puts on his iconic stage-outfit one last time to kick some mummy ass.
Bubba Ho-Tep is written, produced and directed by Don Coscarelli, based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale which mixes drama, thriller, horror comedy, fantasy and an overdose absurdism. The premise itself is so bizarre, and far-stretched to oblivion that it’s hard to actually see any directors at all able to translate this to a coherent feature that walks a fine line between the absurdness and seriousness in a sober way. But Don Coscarelli certainly did it, and also wrote the script and produced Bubba Ho-Tep as a passion project which quickly became a modern cult-classic. The result, with a budget of one million dollars, is pretty solid, to say the least, with Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis as the most unlikely duo ever put on film, in its bizarre plot that doesn’t look like anything else. But for those who expects blood n’ gore, you will be disappointed as Bubba Ho-Tep relies far more on atmosphere (an eerie one I would say) surreal character study, and dialogue-driven scenes with some really rough language your mom probably wouldn’t appreciate.
A horror comedy where Bruce Campbell portrays an old Elvis is enough of itself to get anyone’s attention. But we shouldn’t underestimate Ossie Davis (1917-2015), who was an unknown name for my part. A serious actor who’s inducted to the American Theatre Hall of Fame is one of the last actors you’d expect to see in a film like this. Even his manager at the time meant he was too good for a film like this, and recommended him to skip the role, but the power of a good script convinced him otherwise. We could easily get an over-the-top goofy JFK, but Ossie plays him in a very serious and calm down-to-earth demeanor, how hard, unlikely and utterly bizarre that sounds like. The chemistry between Bruce and Ozzie really shines and they seemed to have a blast on set. Bruce Campbell does one of his greatest performance ever. He completely disappears into the role of Elvis and clearly shows that he’s a lot more than a certain Ash with a chainsaw. I also have to mention the soundtrack by Brian Tyler which is just plain and simply beautiful.
Director: Don Coscarelli
Country & year: USA, 2002
Actors: Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce, Heidi Marnhout, Bob Ivy, Edith Jefferson, Larry Pennell, Reggie Bannister, Daniel Roebuck, Daniel Schweiger, Harrison Young, Linda Flammer, Cean Okada
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0281686/
Charlie (Chad Lowe) and his girlfriend Rachel (Kristy Swanson) is on their way to Las Vegas to get married. On the road they take a detour and stop by a gas station, where the owner Sam warns them about two Joshua trees and not driving while falling asleep… eh, okay, thanks for the warning. Bye. While they drive past one of the aforementioned Joshua trees, they’re pulled over by a police car. Little do they know that they’ll encounter the notorious Sgt. Bedlam Hellcop: a scarred big dude with some obscure biblical text inscribed on his face, who kidnaps young virgins to take them to Hell and hands them over to Satan.
A young girl (Melissa) is playing nearby the pond close to her family’s residence, and finds a cute little crab whom she names Pee-Wee (yeah, you could probably make some STD jokes here). She decides to keep it, and starts to feed it some of the weird fruit from her father’s laboratory where he’s experimenting on a formula to make things grow larger. Soon, Pee-Wee starts to grow much bigger (I’m talking about the crab, of course). After an accident that kills both of Melissa’s parents, she lets Pee-Wee back into the pond and goes to live with her uncle, the town sheriff. Many years later, Melissa is still caring for her secret giant crab pet (who is, despite the name, actually a female). All is well until “Pee-Wee” gets some huge crab babies that start to cause trouble all over town…
Brodie is a heavy metal-outcast whose meth-head mom is sent to a mental ward after trying to give a mall-santa a blowjob, and thus he needs to live with his uncle, aunt and cousin. They are “some good Christians”, by the way, who thinks Ricky Martin is the heaviest thing they’ve ever heard. Not much in common between him and them, in other words. His cousin is a complete sport-idiot-psychopathic douche who calls Brodie a “devil worshipper” and bullies him at school, but at least he’s got two friends at school who thinks playing board games at lunchtime is the most badass thing to do.
Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a young medical student whose fiancee, Elizabeth Shelley, gets overrun by a lawnmower at a backyard party and gets shredded to pieces. The only thing left of her is her head, which he puts in the freezer. He’s determined to get her back in some way, and arranges his garage into a typical “mad scientist” lab. Then he drives around New York’s dark streets to pick up the finest hookers to assemble body parts for his new girlfriend.
Edward Tor Swenson (Johan Rudebeck) is editing dull swedish drama-films that nobody wants to see. When the former editor in the building’s “Splatter and Gore Department” became mad and stuffed a grenade in his mouth, Ed is set up to replace him, a task he would quickly regret. Ed gets his own, dark house in the woods where he sits through the newest film in a horror movie series called “The Loose Limbs”, which serves as a parody of all of the trashy horror sequels we got in the 1980’s. Ed becomes increasingly influenced by all the cruel violence he must sit through and it drives him crazy, or drives him “Evil Ed”, if you will. Now the world shall pay for making these influential garbage films, and he goes on a wild rampage.