*** (out of ****)
Starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce, Heidi Marnhout, Larry Pennell, and Bob Ivy
Directed & written for the screen by Don Coscarelli, from the short story by Joe R. Lansdale
2003
92 min R
So here’s the set-up: Elvis Presley is alive in a sucky East Texas rest home after having switched identities with an Elvis impersonator. In the rest home with him is a man claiming to be JFK. Trouble is, he’s black. Undaunted, this JFK insists that he was dyed black by Lyndon Johnson in order to stay hidden. Together, they join forces to do battle against a cowboy hat-wearing mummy who roams the rest home halls by night, sucking the souls out of the old folks through their…well, through any major orifice.
So that’s the most ridiculous premise you’ve ever heard for a movie, right? Yet that’s hardly what “Bubba Ho-Tep” is about. All those things happen, but it’s in the background. The movie is really about old men without hope, ambition, or a purpose. Elvis has nothing left to do but wait for death, bicker with his nurse, struggle with his bowel movements, and bemoan how long it’s been since he had an erection. When his recently-deceased roommate’s seriously hot daughter shows up to throw away all his roommate’s meager possessions, he criticizes her for never visiting. She doesn’t care. She bends over in front of him, giving him a peak up her skirt, and he realizes she doesn’t care about that either. A senile old coot that thinks he’s Elvis sneaking a peek is as meaningless to her as a housecat looking up her dress.
So the attack of Bubba Ho-Tep becomes a last chance at purpose and dignity for the two old men. “Bubba Ho-Tep’s” rather bizarre tone can be summed up in one scene: as the mummy stalks past Elvis (Bruce Campbell of the “Evil Dead” movies and “The Adventures of Brisco County”) and JFK (Ossie Davis, most recently in “Baad Asssss!”) one night in the hall, he’s followed by Kemosabe (Larry Pennell), an old dude convinced that he’s the Lone Ranger. His mask on, his two toy revolvers popping and clicking, Kemosabe stumbles after the offending mummy, muttering “asshole!” over and over again. Then he has a heart attack and keels over stone dead. The scene is, of course, one of the most ridiculous ever put to film. But as the rest home workers heartlessly pull off his mask and leave it on the floor, Elvis and JFK reflect that Kemosabe died on his feet, both guns blazing, and his soul in tact. The two old men are filled with admiration and, by God, so are we. When Kemo’s brothers needed him, he didn’t let them down, even if that cost him his life. And in this world, what more can a man hope for? Such is the strange, magical tone of “Bubba Ho-Tep:” absolutely ludicrous, yet genuinely moving.
So when Elvis isn’t bemoaning his bowels or the potential cancer on his dangling bits he spends long stretches missing his wife and daughter, both driven away by his obsession with stardom. We get slow-motion flashbacks to his days as the King, roaming the country with an aura of larger-than-life Shakespearean tragedy. Then, when he has swapped identities with the impersonator, his life is a glorious celebration of the open road, of maleness, of driving with the top down and singing for fun…until he breaks his hip and ends up in East Texas. Perhaps there are too many flashbacks, but I didn’t care. “Bubba Ho-Tep” had me wrapped in its spell of moist-eyed sentiment and utter silliness, set to melancholy, days-gone-by rockabilly (but no actual Elvis music; the movie’s budget is so very, very low that it could not afford one of the King’s songs).
So Bruce Campbell does a fine Elvis, the voice, the clothes, the kung-fu, the lingo. If it’s hard to believe that Elvis is alive in East Texas, it’s even harder to believe that he would still have the same haircut and glasses, and still use all the hackneyed phrases like “takin’ care a business.” When attacked by one of Bubba Ho-Tep’s scarab beetles, Elvis later reflects that it was about “this big, about the size of a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.” Ossie Davis uses the opposite approach for JFK: he adopts absolutely none of Kennedy’s speech patterns or mannerisms. If we accept that the rest home’s Elvis really is Elvis, then it’s almost impossible to accept that this JFK is the real thing. Davis plays him with such gusto and enthusiasm for everything that it would be impossible to argue with the man. And he sleeps in the presidential PJs, has a red telephone, and a portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald over his bed. Both Campbell’s Elvis and Davis’s JFK are completely of the movie: they perform as if they don’t know how funny they are and play straight the inherent tragedies of these two men, once great, now fallen.
The malevolent mummy (Bob Ivy) is in many ways just another old man, concerned with bowel movements, ignored and marginalized by the rest of the world, and moving about irritably. The effects and make-up are as good as they need to be—which is to say, not very—but if they were any better they might be distracting. The locations used for the rest home are just perfect; the long, dim, and shabby halls do look haunted, and director Don Coscarelli (writer-director of “Phantasms” II thru IV) is not above shooting them with wonky, “Batman”-style camera angles.
The final conflict between man and mummy definitely goes longer than it needs to. But when it was all over I felt like I had seen a real, heart-and-soul movie, not a perfectly packaged product. Perhaps no medium besides film can make us laugh and be moved in the exact same moment. Listening to Bruce Campbell’s ridiculous Elvis impersonation made me blind with laughter but, simultaneously, when he said “I’d lost the woman I loved, I’d lost my baby”…I was right there with you brother.
Finished July 28th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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