Bubba Ho-tep: review

(3 out of 4 chiclets)


Kent and I watched Bubba Ho-tep last night: it wasn't exactly what I thought it was but I still liked it a lot.

Bruce Campbell plays Elvis, who is alive because he switched places with an Elvis impersonator back in the 70s after he got tired of fame and his soul-sucking friends. The impersonator is the one who died from the drugs and so the king is rotting away forgotten in an East Texas rest home, which is cursed by an Egyptian soul-sucking mummy.

Together with a black man who believes he is JFK (Ossie Davis) with dyed skin and a bag of sand where the blown-out part of his brain used to be, Elvis sets out to kill the mummy before the mummy kills him and takes his soul, the one true thing of his he has left.

But fighting the mummy only takes up the last half hour of the movie. Before that, Elvis has to come to terms with how his life turned out. The main mummy of the movie is Elvis.

This isn't one of those New Age-y mid-80s body switching movies. Elvis switched places with the impersonator through a legal contract that was burned to ashes in a big barbeque catastrophe. If Elvis went public with the scheme to reclaim his throne, who would believe him? So after the impersonator died, Elvis was stuck with with his new identity forever. After breaking a hip impersonating himself on stage, Elvis spends the rest of his years in the rest home, all but locked away in a vault.

The inside of the rest home looks not so much like a vault, but more like what Hollywood portrays the inside of an Egyptian pyramid to be. It's very brown: the walls look like they're covered with mud, so much so that the dirt looks like it dripped down the hallway's wainscotting. Dim, torch-like wall sconces light the maze of corridors. And Elvis lies in his bed, almost in state, waiting for death or a reason to come alive again.

Campbell and Davis make a great team and create real characters, not just characatures. At first I wondered why Ossie Davis would want to be in this movie since I didn't think it fit the rest of the body of his work (turns out, Davis was in an episode of Night Gallery), but by the end I knew it was because it's much more than Elvis and JFK Battle the Mummy.