Bubba Ho-Tep - B-
Now Playing: (2003, Don Coscarelli) [seen in theatre]
Let's begin with a one-line plot synopsis, shall we?- "old Elvis and black JFK battle a mummy that has invaded their rest home." Sounds like a made-to-order cult movie, right? Which makes this film a rather strange case. The cult elements of the film don't really work very well, particularly not the scenes with the mummy (technically, an "Egyptian soul sucker"). Most of this stuff is hampered by the film's limited budget and the rather pedestrian direction, and as such these scenes aren't nearly as effective from an entertainment perspective as they ought to be. More complicated is the situation with the film's not-dead-after-all characters, since the way they're played has less to do with spoofing the images of sacred cows than in the service of the film's (much more interesting) subtext. That being the sad state of the elderly, who are so often abandoned by their children, and who can feel like they've outlived their usefulness to society (with life in a rest home akin to an old horse being put out to pasture). The reason the main characters are both (allegedly) famous dead people is because they so pointedly illustrate the idea of people who have only their memories- ones we've shared with them, vicariously anyhow- and now simmer with the fact that their relevancy is long in the past. That this subtext is to be taken seriously at all instead of simply being seen as a forced longshot reading of a cheeseball movie is largely due to Bruce Campbell, who plays Elvis, and actually goes out of his way to give a real performance this time out. It's a really good one too, both funny (as we expect from Bruce) and strangely layered (which we most certainly did not). Ossie Davis also makes a fine JFK, for the movie's purposes anyway, but really it's Bruce's show. And if only the culty stuff had been up to snuff, this might have been a little classic here. But I'll take small miracles over none at all.