Stop me if you have heard this one before. Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, who is an elderly black man, did not die and are spending their twilight years in a retirement home in Texas. Given a setup like that, it sounds like the beginning of a great joke, or at the very least, a crackpot conspiracy theory. However, this is exactly the premise for Bubba Ho-Tep, and it only gets stranger from here. Based on the short story by Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-Tep tells the "true" story of Elvis' (Bruce Campbell) last years, living in a retirement home in East Texas with an abnormal growth on his penis which he is sure is cancerous. According to this film's version of Elvis, he swapped lives with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian (also Campbell), who promptly died on the toilet, leaving the real King to wither away into anonymity. After Sebastian died, the real Elvis spent the next twenty years of his life playing Sebastian playing Elvis on stage, until an accident caused him to fall of stage and break his hip. To add to the King's misfortune, the accident caused the hip to become infected, and he is now bed ridden with no motivation to "take care of business". His one friend in the home is "Jack," (Ossie Davis) a possibly senile black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy. When an evil, egyptian mummy starts sucking the souls of the rest home's residents, it is up to JFK and Elvis to conjure the spirits of their former, rebellious selves to save their rest home, and save the souls of its inhabitants.
What is perhaps most surprising about Bubba Ho-tep, is just how touchingly melancholic it is. If one can accept early on that the whole thing is a metaphor for ageing, then one will find oneself being pleasantly swept away. Director Don Coscarelli knows that when you take two icons such as JFK and Elvis Presley, who were known trouble makers in their youth, and show them as tired, cranky and ineffectual, we can project a lot of our fears about ageing onto them. When they both decide to fight back against evil, it works, because when you get right down to it, we get to see two people who are thought of as an inconvenience struggling for one last chance at relevance. This is also true for the cancerous lump on Elvis' genitals. It may be an excuse for Coscarelli to get in a few wink-wink, nudge-nudge knob gags, but it is also a hurdle for the character to overcome which makes their struggle all the more resonant. Think, for example, of C.C. Baxter's cold in The Apartment, or John McClaine's cut up, bloody feet in Die Hard, both are used to make us cheer harder when the heroes do eventually triumph.
Unfortunately, while Bubba Ho-tep is a soaring success on a subtextual level, it is not quite as successful as a horror movie or as a comedy. Firstly, the creature design on the mummy, while fairly imaginative, looks creaky. It is named "Bubba Ho-tep" because it is a cross between an ancient, Egyptian mummy, and a redneck from the South of America ("Bubba" being slang for "good ol' boy"). So the design of the creature has some nice, Western additions, such as a cowboy hat and boots with spurs. However, these imaginative touches cannot paper over what looks like a man dressed up in an ill-fitting mummy costume, and all fear or tension disappears once we see him. One wonders how effective the mummy would have been if they had not shown him so early on in the film, and he was just spoken about like the shark in Jaws, who is only ever seen in the last-third of the film.
It is more successful as a comedy, as Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis have an easy going chemistry, bouncing wry one-liners off one another with grace. Surprisingly, it is Davis who turns out to be the funnier of the two, which is nice to see as he is better known as a dramatic actor. Campbell is funny too, but he is the one who carries the bulk of the more dramatic moments. Unlike Davis, Campbell is mostly known for his work as a comedic actor, so it is nice to see him play against type here. Regrettably, while it is fine as a comedy, and okay as a horror movie, it is a shame that neither the comedy nor the horror comes across quite as well as the drama.
Director, Don Coscarelli is no stranger to cult cinema, as it is he who directed the Phantasm franchise, and he works hard to make the more cult pleasing moments work with the more melancholic moments. One would think that Elvis trying to karate kick an evil mummy would work in a film which talks maturely about the fear of age as concept; well, one would be wrong. Credit must also go to director-of-photography, Adam Janeiro, who gives the film a fairly warm, sunny look. One imagines that it is his work behind the camera that managed to make the extremely low budget not be too apparent. Although, despite everyone's best efforts, it always looks a little cheap, and had they managed to raise just another million dollars or so, they could have improved the horror element of the film.
I feel it would be remiss of me not to reiterate just how good Ossie Davis and Bruce Campbell are in their roles. Firstly, they both have to take very broad caricatures of people who are iconic and, therefore, well known and give them a surprising amount of depth. Secondly, both of them are well known as cult actors, and often in academic criticism, actors such as these are underrated or looked down upon. So it is nice to see them do such good work here. As most of you will know, Ossie Davis became best known in the late eighties and early nineties for being a regular in Spike Lee's movies, and Campbell is forever immortalised for playing Ash in The Evil Dead franchise. Due to typecasting both Davis and Campbell seemed unable to escape from B-movie hell, so in a way, they share a similar plight to Bubba Ho-tep's Elvis and JFK, in that they are making one last stab for greatness.
Thankfully, Bubba Ho-tep has become a minor cult classic since the time of its DVD release, meaning that people are still enjoying the film to this day. I hope that when new viewers find the film, they enjoy the subtler subtext to the movie, and not just the gags about Elvis' penis.
6/10
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