Movie Malcontent / BUBBA HO-TEP

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BUBBA HO-TEP / Malcontent's Mark: C+

September 25th, 2003

Elvis: Bruce Campbell
JFK: Ossie Davis
Bubba Ho-tep: Bob Ivy
Nurse: Ella Joyce

Written and Directed by Don Coscarelli.
Rated R

Don Coscarelli has made a cottage industry out of writing and directing the Phantasm movies – films not known for their artistry, but for Coscarelli’s bizarre, seemingly drug-inspired palette, always featuring a cornucopia of oddities, particularly a tall man from another dimension and his flying stainless steel balls that slice and dice.

Bruce Campbell has garnered a rabid cult following from his Evil Dead movies, and the wise-cracking cocksure dimwits he plays in B-movies. Teamed up with Coscarelli for the first time in Bubba Ho-tep, you can expect one of the most outrageously unconventional horror films ever.

Bubba Ho-tep is a ready-made cult classic, already equipped with scenes that will be recounted ad nauseam and lines that will be quoted ad nauseam. Indeed, Bubba Ho-tep seems tailor-made for the cult audiences, particularly Bruce Campbell buffs, Elvis fanatics, and conspiracy theorists. That is to say, Bubba won’t be for all tastes, but the chaotic low-budget camp fest could be infectious fun for anyone who gives it half a chance.

Merry prankster Coscarelli could have come up with this story idea by throwing pop culture icons into a blender and pressing puree. The movie relies heavily on the conceit that icons like Elvis and JFK never die, they just go to East Texas nursing homes to fade away peacefully and fend off soul-sucking mummies. It turns out that at the peak of his career, Elvis switches places with an impersonator so he can escape the overwhelming demands of fame. And John F. Kennedy wasn’t really assassinated; instead the CIA transformed him into a black man to force him out of the political arena. And the legend that JFK’s brain is locked up somewhere in Washington? That’s true, but they took only half of the president’s brain and replaced it with a bag of sand. (I went to a book signing for Campbell’s If Chins Could Kill in Seattle and his description of Bubba’s premise alone induced gales of laughter from his huge assemblage of fans.)

One thing you can bet on with a Coscarelli movie, you never know what to expect. Which in many ways is good; you’re often blindsided with clever visual gags and under the radar wit. Yet you also never know what levels he’ll sink to. Bubba includes plenty of potty jokes and off-color humor. And Coscarelli devotes plenty of screen-time to his fetishes: instead of the malevolent, flying pinballs of the Phantasm movies, we get giant flying cockroaches. Also, there’s nary a long dark hallway he can resist staring his camera down.

The comedy is almost entirely juvenile. For example, the mummy communicates in an acerbic Egyptian dialect, spiked with street slang, which is shown in hieroglyphics before fully translated into English. And he writes dirty limericks in hieroglyphics on the bathroom walls, while crapping the remains of a digested soul.

But underneath all the idiocy, Bubba actually exhibits undertones of a satire, poking fun at celebrity worship and conspiracy fanatics. When Elvis describes the cockroaches, he says they are “the size of a peanut butter and banana sandwich.” Above JFK’s bed is a portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald. And JFK says he is being “terrorized by either a foul-smelling, rotting corpse or Lyndon Johnson,” he can’t quite tell.

Casting Campbell as Elvis was truly inspired, yet given the circumstances, slightly surprising: Even though Campbell is known for his slapstick physical comedy, most of his portrayal as Elvis is performed lying on his back. But this also allows Campbell to stretch as an actor (don’t laugh). He lends gravitas to his performance – his Elvis is more emotive than one would expect in this type of movie. He waxes remorseful about leaving his wife and daughter.

Though rendered reflective and poignant, Bubba’s Elvis too often shrugs off the deaths of his nursing home cronies. Trouble is, this will probably be the same reaction from typical cult film enthusiasts. Since the audience can’t fully identify with the geriatric victims, nor would they see mummies as particularly frightening (at least, not in this era of the action adventure mummies), Bubba never quite works as a horror movie. I think most people going in know that a horror movie set in a nursing home won’t be too promising in the scares department.

All in all, you gotta hand it to Coscarelli. In all his 27 years of making movies, he has stuck to his roots and never tried to curry favor with the high-brows and pointy-heads. He just tries to make Bubba fun in all the (limited) ways he knows how. And in these times of over-budgeted formulaic drivel, his low-budget merry-making could prove to be the subversive hit many have been waiting for.

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