FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN:
NEW: FATIH AKIN'S HEAD-ON AND DANIEL BURMAN'S LOST EMBRACE
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
READ MARCH E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
WALTER READE THEATER
FILMLINC.COM HOME
COMING IN March/April 2005:
Dustin Hoffman
Bulle Ogier by Gary Indiana
Hirokazu Kore-eda by Chuck Stephens
Amitabh Bachchan by David Chute
Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl by Kent Jones
And much more
REVIEW: BUBBA HO-TEP
(Don Coscarelli, U.S., 2003)
Reviewed by MICHAEL ROWIN
a Film Comment online exclusive
Certain story ideas are foolproof-an aged, sad-sack Elvis Presley joining an African-American John F. Kennedy to battle an ancient Egyptian mummy feeding off the souls of East Texas rest home patients is, to my mind, one of them.
Based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep, while no masterpiece, is a strange yet inspired picture featuring cult B-movie icon Bruce Campbell as the King of Rock 'n' Roll. Campbell fans may be disappointed that the dizzying, cartoonish pace and tone of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy, the trend-setting comic-horror hybrid in which Campbell starred, is absent from Ho-Tep, but there are enough eccentricities and gross-outs to keep the film afloat-if barely.
The plot finds Elvis in present day Texas, rotting in a convalescent home after coming out of a 20 year coma. Those around him suppose his identity to be that of an Elvis impersonator the King had really traded places with during the nadir of his entertainment career in a desperate bid to get away from it all, naturally. At the home, giant insects and a very large undead being in a cowboy suit lead Elvis and friend JFK (Ossie Davis) on the trail of a cursed mummy. (Just go with it). The JFK character is a hilarious, ingenious creation-we all know he was the victim of an international conspiracy, but it may come as a surprise to many viewers that part of his brain was replaced with sand and his skin dyed black to assure no one would recognize him. Here Lansdale and Coscarelli brilliantly find the ridiculous core of American paranoid fantasy.
Bubba Ho-Tep's story takes care of itself for the most part, but Coscarelli, famed director of cult classics Phantasm (79) and The Beastmaster (82), nearly blows it. He relies a bit too much on silly bathroom humor (there are at least five jokes too many about the King's withered genitalia), as well as deploying cheesy flash frames and accelerated motion shots putatively convey hallucinatory subjectivity. Supporting cast members like Ella Joyce-a nurse forced to, er, assist Elvis in his personal matters-play thankless roles in weak attempts at comic interludes. The final confrontation between Elvis, JFK, and the mummy is a huge letdown, especially after the film has already bogged itself down with expository noodling.
But Campbell's performance is so spot-on, never for a moment kitschy or condescending, that he ultimately reclaims the freakshow spotlight. His Elvis is not the clichˇ punch-line he has come to be in the pop culture landscape, but comes across as actually human-a decrepit, fallen good-ole boy burdened by memories of fame and wealth squandered, mistakes made, wife and child taken for granted. Campbell acts with his trademark ironic amusement, but also with unexpected restraint and warmth. Behind the film's low-budget horror beats a melancholic heart. Bubba Ho-Tep is, in the end, a redemption tale made all the more endearing due to the audience's knowledge of Elvis and JFK's unfulfilled potential, often the result of their own vices and weak wills. They symbolize the American dream thrown away with a shudder of fatalism, surrendered to the lure of money, mass recognition, and empty thrills, fading into the heartland before it's even striven for. Perhaps no moment in the film better exemplifies this blending of pathos and myth than the one in which Elvis, tired and ailing, watches from his lonely bed a TV commercial announcing a marathon of his own cringe-inducing films. Aware of their pathetic mediocrity, he once again recounts in voice-over his past misjudgments and wasted opportunities. He then rises and proclaims, in the grand tradition of comic book warriors and over, "In the movies I always played heroic types, but when the stagelights went out it was time for drugs and stupidity and the coveting of women. Now it's time, time to be a little of what I always fantasized being-a hero." Long live this King, a painful reminder of mankind's fallibility and ultimate need for forgiveness.
- MICHAEL ROWIN
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
