director/screenwriter
Don Coscarelli
based on
the short story by
Joe R.
Lansdale
producers
Don Coscarelli
Jason R. Savage
cinematographer
Adam Janeiro
music
Brian Tyler
editors
Scott J. Gill
Donald Milne
cast
Bruce Campbell (Elvis)
Ossie Davis (Jack)
Ella Joyce (The Nurse)
Heidi Marnhout (Callie)
Bob Ivy (Bubba Ho-tep)
Larry Pennell (Kemosabe)
Reggie Bannister (Administrator)
Daniel Roebuck (Hearse Driver)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 92m
u.s.
release: 6/9/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
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Here's a movie in which a geezer
who may or may not be Elvis and an old black man who says he's
John F. Kennedy team up against a mummy who's been stealing the
souls of rest-home patients out of their assholes. Yet the film's
director Don Coscarelli can refer to it as "a serious drama,"
and you see what he means. Bubba Ho-Tep, a ready-made
cult film if ever there was one, has been a grassroots sensation,
selling out festivals and now, on DVD, flying off store shelves.
Why? Because Coscarelli, mainly known for his 1979 horror oddity
(and classic) Phantasm and its sequels, is at home with
the weird and sees no need to emphasize it. The premise, taken
from a Joe R. Lansdale story (collected in Writer of the Purple Rage, then published
earlier this year in a hardcover along with Coscarelli's script),
is left-field enough, and Coscarelli digs inside it and comes
up with surprising moments of poignance and delicacy.
Consider the broken-down Elvis
(Bruce Campbell), with hip problems that necessitate a walker,
and a possibly cancerous growth on his penis. Or Jack Kennedy
(Ossie Davis), who gets around okay sometimes, but is later seen
using a wheelchair. These are very fragile heroes, and when the
mummy shows up at the rest home, we are worried about Elvis and
Jack in a way we wouldn't be about hale and hearty young heroes.
When Elvis tumbles down a hill, we wince. And the first reel
or so of what's being marketed as a fun and funky cult flick
is about as depressing as anything you'll ever see: rest homes
are no fun -- people are left there to die, alone, and when they
die they're tossed into a hearse with the eulogy "Aah, who
gives a shit?" When was the last time you saw a raw and
unblinking treatment of these places in a movie? How fucked-up
is it that we have to see it in a movie about Elvis vs. a mummy?
Relax, though: fun is in store,
and Bruce Campbell's Elvis, viciously cynical in his obsolescence,
keeps us entertained in his narration: "I woulda thought
of 'Cilla and popped it by jackin' off," he says of his
penis growth, "except I hadn't had a hard-on in years."
Too much info, but dead-on funny. Elvis needs a purpose, and
the mummy gives him one; he forges a bond with Jack, the only
one who believes Elvis is really Elvis, and they work on a plan.
(It involves fire, not a lot of CGI. In fact, no CGI.
How low-budget was the movie? Put it this way -- they didn't
even have enough scratch to film a bus crashing off a bridge;
Coscarelli gets around it with as much ingenuity as his heroes
use against Bubba Ho-tep.)
Elvis famously posed for a
photo with Nixon, and pledged his services
to that president as a DEA agent (while high on drugs at the
time); and there's been some joking speculation (at least I hope
it's not serious) that Elvis killed Kennedy. So it's fun to
watch these two icons of the 20th century together, and the movie
even winks at conspiracy theorists when Jack asks Elvis flat-out
if he had anything to do with what happened in Dallas. (Jack's
explanation for his appearance now? Best to let the film explain
it.) We're given a not-too-implausible theory of how Elvis, sick
of the fame and excess and hangers-on, might have switched places
with an Elvis impersonator and doomed himself to more obscurity
than he bargained for. I wouldn't have minded seeing Jimi, Janis,
and/or Jim Morrison along for the ride, but I guess Coscarelli
has to save something for the sequel, projected to be called
Bubba Nosferatu.
Most of the movie is Elvis
and Jack talking -- Coscarelli clearly didn't have the time and
money for too many shooting days involving Bubba Ho-tep and his
little scarabs (pulled along on charmingly obvious strings) --
and Campbell and Davis have an easy rapport, playing the material
absolutely straight, as if the two actors had decided over lunch
that the premise was bizarre enough to deserve their utmost commitment
and offbeat enough to need it. Bubba Ho-Tep is not the
wacky camp-fest you'd expect; if it were anyone but Coscarelli,
Campbell and Davis involved in this, I would've been wary of
it. (I mean, 50,000 Elvis fans may not be wrong, but 50,000 Elvis
parodies get old after a while.) It is, surprisingly, a meditation
on aging and the place of the elderly and infirm in our society.
Of course, it's also a horror-comedy with Elvis kicking mummy
ass. After all these years -- and 25 years after Phantasm,
a movie that had nothing in common with any horror film before
it, and which is still unlike any horror film after it (except
for its own sequels) -- Don Coscarelli still doesn't know how
to make cookie-cutter genre films. Let's hope he never learns
how.
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