Bubba Ho-tep

Some circles in which I usually find myself are very high on this Bruce Campbell/Ossie Davis 2002 flick but in this instance I’m on the outside looking in. Karina Montgomery captured my feelings well when she wrote “If you tilt your head just right, it looks like a beautifully shot student film with a bunch of community theatre actors having a great time.”

Campbell, who seems to play the same lovable rogue in every movie and TV show but does it really well, is the still-living Elvis Presley and Davis claims to be a transformed John Fitzgerald Kennedy with an all-over tattoo to change his skin color and a “bag of sand” where his brain was. Elvis says it wasn’t him who died in 1977 but a really skillful impersonator with whom he traded places shortly beforehand because he got tired of his life.

The title character is a revived mummy from ancient dynastic Egypt and the source of the intended horror in the film, as he stays alive only by sucking the life force from living people. He preys on the elderly–this is set in an old age home–because while their life force is weak, meaning he must feed frequently, they’re weak enough for him to handle. And to add to the horror, he often sucks a soul out through the anus. There are also oversized scarab beetles involved.

Elvis and JFK team up to defeat the mummy before he can get them. The former president is confined to a wheelchair so he’s the bait, carrying a tank of vile, flammable liquid. Elvis, feeling alive (with his first erection in eight years to show for it), plans to spring out and finish the job.

This was the second time I watched Bubba Ho-tep; the first I couldn’t get past 15 minutes and this week I only watched to the end because there wasn’t anything else on, plus I was mainly working on the computer. It never really got me laughing nor frightened and director Don Coscarelli never got the pace moving at a decent speed.

not recommended