Now that I've watched Don Coscarelli's John Dies At The End a couple of times, I wanted to rewatch Coscarelli's previous film, Bubba Ho-Tep. The film knocked me out the first time around...
Elvis hit America like a bombshell with his hips and sneer and voice. He was raw energy. You had to shoot him from the waist up for television, because the rest was too obscene. You had to make him do something stupid like dress up in a tux and sing Hound Dog to a basset hound to take the edge off. For a time Elvis had the world wrapped around his finger. Then his manager Col. Parker started controlling him and making him appear in god awful movies and recording crap music. So, after a while Elvis became nothing special. He still had fans. He still made money. It was a price to pay and so far away from the hillbilly cat he once was.
Starting in 1968 Elvis
began to shrug off the bubblegum pop that had weighed him down and stripped him
of his raw animal coolness. There was the comeback special where he
appeared head to toe in black leather, looking badder and more dangerous than he
ever had in 1956. This wasn’t just the Elvis fans had been missing for the last
decade, this was a new and improved, mature, sexier Elvis. It was an Elvis in his
thirties. He was not just back from a long slumber to reclaim rock and roll, but to
reclaim the world.
It was the Memphis
record backed by Neil Diamond’s band that showed the world what this hillbilly
cat from Tupelo could really do. Never had his voice sounded so good. Never had
he been given such a wealth of great material to work from. Never had he shown
such range; from raucous R&B to smooth southern soul to pure shit kicking
country to weeping ballads. It was a middle finger to critics and those who’d
lost faith. It was a middle finger to his peers who spoke ill of him through
the 60’s. And perhaps it was a middle finger to Col. Parker, because Elvis
always knew he was better than all those crap films. Perhaps he realized what
‘Elvis Fucking Presley’ meant to the world and that he’d just spent ten years
not meaning anything.
Unfortunately, after
the comeback there would be less than a decade left for the King for Rock and
Roll. The 70’s were a fast decline in health, mental and physical. Drug
addiction and erratic behavior
that would’ve been laughable if it weren’t so
damned sad. But he never failed to
put smiles of adoration on the faces of those who’d pack the venues to see him.
They cheered, clapped their hands, stomped their feet-right up to that day when
that putrid walking corpse Rock and Roll fell for the last time, again.
The faithful gathered
at Graceland and wailed and sang his praises. They left flowers and exalted him
to the TV cameras. A nation mourned, as they had for Kennedy as they would for
Lennon. Elvis lives on though. Metaphorically for most, very physically for
many others.
In Bubba HoTep, Elvis
didn’t die on a toilet. That was merely an imposter Elvis had traded places
with. The real Elvis was off performing as an Elvis impersonator,
doing what he’d always loved with out all the bullshit he’d always hated. But
not dying young has its disadvantages, like being 70, bedridden
with a large
cancerous growth on your dick, and no one believing whom you are. Not to
mention being stuck in an East Texas rest home with a bunch of senile freaks and
a soul sucking mummy on the loose.
Written by one of the best modern horror writers, Joe Lansdale, and directed by the great
Don Coscarelli, who brought us the excellent Phantasm movies, Bubba HoTep is an
anomaly in a genre bloated with recycled plots, that were weak the first time
around.
Bubba HoTep isn't just one of the
greatest horror movie ever made, it’s one of the best movies ever made. It’s got action, laughs, drama, tragedy, an over the top story line
that sucks you in, great special effects and performances from two of the finest actors to grace the
silver screen.
Bruce Campbell’s performance
as Elvis (in three different periods of his life) are spot on and undeniable.
He is Elvis and you believe
it. Then you have Ozzie Davis playing John F. Kennedy, who, like Elvis, didn’t
die when he was supposed to and has wound up at this nursing home in east
Texas. Ok, you say, Ozzie’s character is just crazy, right, because JFK was
white. Well, Lyndon Johnson and his cronies dyed him black and filled the
bullet hole in his head with sand.
An inept staff, the Lone Ranger, a kleptomaniac,
some generally normal old people, and a couple of big, nasty bugs round out the
cast. Then there’s the title character himself. Bubba HoTep is a soul-sucking
mummy from ancient Egypt, who was stolen from a carnival sideshow, then lost in
a bus accident, not far from the nursing home, where he goes to feed at night.
Elvis and JFK are the
only ones who know about Bubba, and feel that it is their duty to put a stop to
him. “Ask not what your nursing home can do for you, ask what you can do for
your nursing home.” But the destination
wouldn’t be worth the ride if it weren’t for the characters’ stories and the
actors’ performances. Ozzie Davis is comical without doing anything funny. He’s
so earnest and straight about
playing JFK, and delivers his lines about
conspiracies and Lyndon Johnson sincerely, never hamming it up, never nudging the viewer in the ribs with a wink.
The same can be said for Campbell’s Elvis, who spends nearly half the movie in
bed lamenting over the lost years with his daughter and his inability to get a
hard on. If there was no mummy in this film, and it was just an hour and a half
of Campbell and Davis being these people and dealing with the everyday aspects
of being forgotten, unloved senior citizens, the film would still be riveting.
There’s little to
compare Bubba HoTep with. To compare it to anything you’d have to split the
movie in two, the drama half and the horror half. The drama half is a quirky
character driven piece similar to The Royal Tannenbaums, while the horror half
is something like Evil Dead meets Santa Clause Vs. The Martians or something Ed
Wood would have pitched. It would be hard to imagine anyone besides Don Coscarelli pulling off such a masterful piece of filmmaking with such a
bizarre premise.
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