Best Review of Bubba Ho-Tep I have seen, thanks Lucius!
Al Jackson
by Lucius Shepard
October 28, 2003
Though most prominent fantasy and science fiction movies typically
cost upward of a hundred million to make, the genre has always seemed
best served by films unencumbered by huge budgets. Many of these
“little” films have brought a fresh sensibility to their
subjects, movies such as The Quiet Earth, Donnie Darko, and Jean Luc
Godard’s noirish satire Alphaville, a movie whose worth is
something about which few agree and yet is usually compared, whether
favorably or negatively, to pictures made decades after it was shot,
this testifying to the fact that it presaged both cyberpunk and the
cinematic legacy of Philip K. Dick, while simultaneously glancing back
at the work of Huxley and Orwell. Alphaville had such a low budget,
its special effects were handled by means of a voiceover—secret
agent Lemmy Caution narrates an interstellar voyage as he drives his
Citroen across the Seine, and, because of the film’s
metaphorical density, we are more than tempted to disbelieve our eyes
and accept what he says as true, that we are crossing the galaxies
rather than a stretch of dirty water and that the lights in the sky
are not the lights of a bridge but astronomical objects.
Not all low-budget genre pictures, of course, either aim or reach so
high. Even more central to the genre tradition are movies like those
directed by John Carpenter and his apparent lineal successor, David
Twohy (Pitch Black, The Arrival, Below). I would argue that apart from
a smattering of films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and
Jackson’s Ring trilogy, not only the most significant films, but
the most entertaining films, set with the genre limits have been
B-pictures . . . and I intend “entertaining” in both the
sense of well-crafted stories and just plain fun. One need only
contrast classic genre films with their more expensive remakes to see
that budget constrictions have little to do with the quality of the
product. True, in some instances the remakes have been better; but
more often than not they have fallen flat, and even when they do not
so fall, when the remake has proven superior to its original, this has
been due to better scripts, direction, and acting, and not because of
enhanced production values or any other big-ticket item. Indeed, the
best remakes of classic genre films have themselves been
B-pictures—Carpenter’s The Thing, Ferrara’s Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, et al—whereas the
worst—Coppola’s Dracula, a bloated operatic nightmare of
the sort that usually follows the ingestion of too much spicy food,
though less well-conceived than most; Independence Day (not
technically a remake, but heavily derived from Earth Vs. The Flying
Saucers); Godzilla; any of the King Kong rehashes; etc.
etc;—have generally been promoted as blockbusters. In light of
these inept monstrosities, when Hollywood talks about plans to remake
War of the Worlds and Forbidden Planet, it becomes necessary to
suppress a shudder.
I doubt that anyone will essay a remake of Bubba Ho-tep, a low-budget
genre picture that passed though the theaters as quickly as Einstein
through Kindergarten . . . though given the eccentricity of studio
decision-making, one can never be sure about these matters. Whatever
the case, director Don Coscarelli, the man responsible (perhaps
“culpable” might be a more suitable word choice) for the
Phantasm series, has made a B-picture that falls into the category of
just plain fun and will almost surely develop something of a following
on DVD due to the cultish nature of its materials and the cult status
of its lead actor, Bruce Campbell. Based on a story by Joe Lansdale
(an attractive book, by the way, containing both the story and
screenplay, along with stills from the movie, is available from
Nightshade Books), Bubba Ho-tep poses the notion that Elvis Presley
(Campbell) did not die in a bathroom at Graceland, but lived on into
his seventies and is now experiencing a kind of decaying pre-death in
a seedy, abusively neglectful East Texas nursing home. Through
flashbacks and the King’s voiceover (as effective a device to
create suspension of belief as the voiceover in Alphaville), we learn
that years before, having grown weary of fame, the real Elvis traded
places with the world’s best Elvis imitator. The two men wrote a
contract establishing that the real Elvis could reclaim his rightful
status whenever he wished, but the contract was destroyed when a
barbecue grill exploded and blew up the imposter’s trailer (into
which the real Elvis had moved). After his replacement’s highly
publicized and ignominious death, Elvis makes his way through the
world, not altogether unhappily, earning a livelihood by imitating
himself until he breaks his hip in a fall from the stage. Now,
afflicted with a penile cancer and forced to get about on a walker, he
has given up on life. Paunchy, his trademark sideburns and pompadour
gone gray, he passes his days limping about the halls of the nursing
home, clad in robe and pajamas, and watching his old movies on a
black-and-white TV. The other residents of the home are equally
deracinated, abandoned by their families, living joylessly and without
hope. Included among their number is one John F. Kennedy (Ossie
Davis), who claims to be the former president of the United States
transformed into an Afro-American by means of surgery and skin dye,
this at the behest of his mortal enemy, Lyndon Baines Johnson. It
seems that Elvis does not entirely believe the old man is JFK, but he
treats him with the respect due a president (the respect due a good
one, at any rate), and this serves to reinforce the sweetness of the
relationship that develops between the two men.
After several of the residents die under mysterious circumstances, and
after Elvis himself is attacked by a flying scarab beetle the size of
small dog, he begins to be re-energized by the awareness that some
terrible menace is afoot in the nursing home. He joins forces with JFK
and learns from him that an ancient Egyptian mummy is loose in the
area. Through a succession of telepathic visions and some doddering
detective work, Elvis discovers that the mummy was stolen by a couple
of good ol’ boys from a traveling exhibition of Egyptian
artifacts. While making their escape, the good ol’ boys ran
their vehicle off the road during a heavy downpour and into the river
that flows past the nursing home. They died in the crash, but the
mummy lived and since that time it has survived by making night raids
on the nursing home, deriving sustenance by sucking the souls out of
the occupants. For some reason glossed over by the movie, perhaps as a
byproduct of the digested souls of the good ol’ boys, the mummy
appears dressed in cowboy hat and boots and writes hieroglyphic
graffiti in the bathroom stalls whereon he voids himself of
soul-residue—thus, Bubba Ho-tep
Having read this far, it should be clear that I am not talking about a
straight horror flick here. “Gonzo” is a modifier that has
been applied to much of Lansdale’s fantasy/horror work and it
certainly applies to Bubba Ho-tep. The movie is more farcical than
suspenseful, more comic than dramatic in its pretensions. What horror
element there is lies not so much with its improbable boogeyman as
with its depiction of the nursing home as a wastebasket for living
human remains. Yet while the script is threadbare in patches, and at
times the budget (or lack thereof) shows, especially in the
realization of the mummy, Bubba Ho-tep is nonetheless successful in
what it attempts, and this is chiefly due to Bruce Campbell.
Campbell is best known for his recurring role as the wise-cracking,
cartoonishly post-modern hero, Ash, in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead
movies, and gained some mainstream exposure as the star of the
short-lived TV steampunk western series, Brisco County, Jr., roles
that displayed his considerable comedic skills but provided him with
no opportunity to demonstrate that he had range. Folks, he’s got
range. In Bubba Ho-tep, his “aging” of Elvis’
various mannerisms is wonderfully managed, particularly his hilarious
take on the King’s hillbilly kung fu moves; but instead of
delivering a mere impression of the septuagenarian Elvis, still
sporting big hair and wraparound glasses, he gives us a
nicely-observed portrait of a man who, though reduced by age and
disappointment, is possessed by a shadow of the macho self-parodying
persona that he adopted along his road to fame. It clings to him like
a ghostly cape, even as he stands in the front yard of the nursing
home, leaning on his walker, craning his neck to see off along the
street. He seems himself not to know exactly how much of the persona
was a put-on, but it is this persona that he must re-adopt in order to
function as a man once again. At the end of the film, like Batman
slipping into his costume, Elvis dons a white leather
rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and cape, fully stepping into his old role
preparatory to a final battle with the mummy; yet it was unnecessary
for Coscarelli to incorporate that detail into his script, because
Campbell has already achieved the effect by means of his actor’s
craft. As Elvis seeks out information about the mummy, Campbell shows
us a man reclaiming his lost dignity and pride. He encourages us to
think of Elvis Presley in a more complicated way than we usually
might—as a man of parts, someone who may have become lost in the
Chinese boxes he constructed to sustain his personality against the
stresses of fame—and he succeeds with a surprising degree of
subtlety in illuminating the process of an individual who is trying to
re-learn how to play himself. In the midst of all the over-the-top
situations and Hee-Hawish redneck foliage and deep-fried dialogue
(”I felt my pecker flutter once, like a pigeon having a heart
attack . . .”), Campbell’s performance is unexpectedly
moving and authentic in feeling, imbuing the absurd plot with a
passion and substance it would not otherwise have had.
Coscarelli, whose previous directorial efforts have displayed little
concern for character, instills the movie with a leisurely pace that
reflects the dreadful slowness of life at the nursing home and gives
Campbell and Davis room to develop their roles. Some of his work with
the movie’s ultra-low-budget special effects is also worth
mentioning. That dog-sized scarab beetle, for instance. When it first
appears, you’re expecting to catch sight of a wind-up key
somewhere on its body; but by the time Elvis has finished with it,
thanks to Coscarelli’s camera, to an expertise doubtless gained
from photographing the flying killer spheres in the Phantasm flicks,
this ludicrous prop has generated a suitable measure of menace. But
Coscarelli’s best move clearly was casting Bruce Campbell as his
lead and doing whatever he did—whether reining him in or giving
him his head—to extract this performance. Was it a fluke? The
result of the director’s sleight-of-hand? Or has there always
been a gifted actor trapped inside Bruce Campbell and waiting to get
out? I wonder if any studio is willing to take a chance and find out?
Probably not. However, at the end of the credits there’s a tag
that appears to promise a sequel. If Coscarelli manages to get it
made, despite my loathing for the very concept of sequels, I’ll
stand in line to see if he and Campbell can do it again, because Bubba
Ho-tep has no CGI monsters, no Brads, no Toms, no Bennifers, no
refugees from -Dawson’s Creek or Roswell desirous of being real
live actors, nothing but an outrageous story and a well-drawn main
character, and . . . Well, all I’ve got to say about that is,
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much.”