Review: Bubba Ho-Tep
Jul. 11th, 2004 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalShort Summary: Bubba Ho-Tep is an independantly produced "Horror-Comedy" starring Bruce Campbell as an aging Elvis Presley, stuck in an east Texas nursing home with a bum hip and a cancerous growth on his manhood after a "Prince and the Pauper" styled switch in the 70's goes very wrong. Unfortunately the only one there who believes he is the One True Elvis is a 200 pound black man (Ossie Davis) who thinks he is JFK. And absolutely no one is going to believe either of them when they find out a 5000 year-old Egyptian mummy is sucking out the souls from the other nursing home residents.
I put the phrase "horror-comedy" in quotes for a reason. Bubba Ho-Tep is an odd duck. The comedy is situational. There are no great pratfall scenes, and the dialog is only mildly bizarre, but if you don't find the idea of Elvis and JFK hunting a cowboy hat wearing mummy in East Texas at least slightly odd then you live a much wierder life than I do. The horror, on the other hand, is only tangently related to the mummy itself. The real horror of the story is the situation the residents find themselves in, basically trapped in a home to die, abandoned and forgotten, and treated as children by their keepers.
In that context, the story actaully works better as a character drama. As portrayed by the almost unrecognisable and unsually low-key Campbell, Elvis is a figure filled with regret for his lost wife and child, and obsessed with the state of his manhood (one of the funnier lines of dialog goes, "This was the first boner I'd had in two presidential elections."). He's also become a bit of philosopher, having realized many of the disasters in his life were entirely his own doing, because he was too full of himself to notice the road he was taking.
Ossie Davis, giving the even more bizarre role of JFK, plays his character as a cheerful, intelligent, straight-up lunatic. It's a credit to Davis' long career that he doesn't indulge in a bit of mugging as he staight-facedly utters line like, "They filled the missing bits of my head with sand and dyed me."
Shot on location at an abandoned hospital complex, writer-director Don "Phantasm" Coscarelli, makes the most out of the miniscule budget he had to work with. We don't see much of Ho-Tep himself until the last act, which is fortunate given the level of effects we see. Overall the directing is solid, enhanced by Campbell and Davis' performances, along with fine support from Ella Joyce as a local Nurse Ratchet.
There are a few bumps along the way. Joyce plays her character with a bit too much warmth, making Elvis' rant at her later in the movie somewhat inexplicable, and there's dropped subplot involving the rest home's director that seemed to hint at the usual Mummy/High Priest dynamic, but those are minor complaints.
The DVD I viewed included the movie in widescreen, subtitles in english, french, and spanish, three mini-documentaries about the making of the film, and commentary tracks with Cascarelli and Campbell (mostly informative and on tangent), and Campbell as Elvis (not as funny as it might have been).
I put the phrase "horror-comedy" in quotes for a reason. Bubba Ho-Tep is an odd duck. The comedy is situational. There are no great pratfall scenes, and the dialog is only mildly bizarre, but if you don't find the idea of Elvis and JFK hunting a cowboy hat wearing mummy in East Texas at least slightly odd then you live a much wierder life than I do. The horror, on the other hand, is only tangently related to the mummy itself. The real horror of the story is the situation the residents find themselves in, basically trapped in a home to die, abandoned and forgotten, and treated as children by their keepers.
In that context, the story actaully works better as a character drama. As portrayed by the almost unrecognisable and unsually low-key Campbell, Elvis is a figure filled with regret for his lost wife and child, and obsessed with the state of his manhood (one of the funnier lines of dialog goes, "This was the first boner I'd had in two presidential elections."). He's also become a bit of philosopher, having realized many of the disasters in his life were entirely his own doing, because he was too full of himself to notice the road he was taking.
Ossie Davis, giving the even more bizarre role of JFK, plays his character as a cheerful, intelligent, straight-up lunatic. It's a credit to Davis' long career that he doesn't indulge in a bit of mugging as he staight-facedly utters line like, "They filled the missing bits of my head with sand and dyed me."
Shot on location at an abandoned hospital complex, writer-director Don "Phantasm" Coscarelli, makes the most out of the miniscule budget he had to work with. We don't see much of Ho-Tep himself until the last act, which is fortunate given the level of effects we see. Overall the directing is solid, enhanced by Campbell and Davis' performances, along with fine support from Ella Joyce as a local Nurse Ratchet.
There are a few bumps along the way. Joyce plays her character with a bit too much warmth, making Elvis' rant at her later in the movie somewhat inexplicable, and there's dropped subplot involving the rest home's director that seemed to hint at the usual Mummy/High Priest dynamic, but those are minor complaints.
The DVD I viewed included the movie in widescreen, subtitles in english, french, and spanish, three mini-documentaries about the making of the film, and commentary tracks with Cascarelli and Campbell (mostly informative and on tangent), and Campbell as Elvis (not as funny as it might have been).
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Date: 2004-07-12 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-12 10:09 am (UTC)