Movie Review: Bubba Ho-Tep
I don’t know where to begin with Bubba Ho-Tep. I avoided this movie like the plague whenever I saw it in the video store. It stars Bruce Campbell as Elvis in a rest home. Given that Campbell is a legend for his campy overacting, I could never bring myself to spend money to watch this film. The amazing thing is, it’s actually quite a good movie, if extremely bizarre. Bruce Campbell does a great job as an old Elvis who traded places with an impersonator years ago, and has been living in obscurity ever since.
At the start of the film, Elvis is lying in bed at a rest home, where no one really believes that he actually is Elvis. He’s got a friend in Jack (Ossie Davis), a black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy, patched up and dyed black by Lyndon Johnson. If this sounds weird, it only gets stranger when an Ancient Egyptian mummy starts stalking the halls of the rest home.
It’s a story about Elvis and JFK, a story about a mummy sucking the souls out of elderly people, a story about purpose and aging and our culture’s abandonment of the old. The film tries to be a comedy, a drama, and a horror story all at once, and it is surprisingly successful at it. Bruce Campbell’s performance here is almost certainly the best of his career. It’s almost like he was born to play Elvis, and he and Ossie Davis manage to transform this film into something poignant and nuanced.
Despite being about two old men who can barely get around without walkers or wheel-chairs, there’s more drama in Bubba Ho-Tep than there is in most action movies. With a story so bizarre, it’s a wonder that this film was ever made in the first place, and an even greater wonder that it turned out so well. Even with a shoestring budget, this “redemptive Elvis/mummy movie†is one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen in some time.
Bubba Ho-Tep, staring Bruce Campbell. Directed by Don Coscarelli. 2002. Available on DVD. Amazon link.